The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been weighed, probed and mourned on screen across many generations, from Alain Resnais¡¯ ¡°Hiroshima Mon Amour¡± to Shohei Imamura¡¯s ¡°Black Rain.¡±

For Takeshi Shibata, whose acclaimed NHK drama ¡°The Man Who Carries the Voice of August¡± first aired last year, the challenge lay in depicting not the bombings themselves, but the memories they left behind.

¡°Television pulls you through a story within time constraints. Cinema is different,¡± Shibata tells The Japan Times. ¡°In a dark theater, seated properly, there is space (and) a different relationship with time. For this particular theme, where the deepest pain is never spoken aloud, that space allows viewers to feel what isn¡¯t said.¡±