A haunting examination of the physical and psychological after-effects of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Black Rain confronts the enduring complexity of life as a hibakusha.

Based on Masuji Ibuse’s novel of the same name, this astounding black-and-white film refracts collective tragedy through the intimate story of a middle-class family. Stylistically, it departs from Imamura’s more anarchic, large-ensemble works in favour of a domestic scale, drawing his cinema towards a delicate elegism that bears striking affinities to the work of his once boss Yasujirō Ozu.

While Ibuse’s novel devotes considerable attention to reconstructing the bombing and its aftermath in documentary detail, Imamura brings Yasuko’s story into sharper focus. A young survivor, her prospects of marriage are repeatedly thwarted by suitors’ fears that exposure to the “black rain” has left her irreparably contaminated. Moving back and forth across time, the film shifts between the immediate devastation of the bombing and the survivors’ fragile attempts to resume ordinary life, tracing the enduring aftershocks of having survived the unimaginable.