07.11.23, 20:30, Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959)

Hiroshima, Mon Amour recounts the intense 24 hours a French actress and a Japanese architect experience together in the immediate aftermath of the atomic bomb attack on the Japanese city. Director Alain Resnais weaves the tragic-romantic twenty-four hours into a non-linear, inventive web of flashbacks and memories. With his first feature film, Resnais immediately put himself on the map of prestigious French cinema, when the Nouvelle Vague was booming.

However, Resnais would never fully associate himself with that avant-garde film movement; he felt more affinity with the socially engaged and literary-inspired Rive Gauche movement. Not concerned with experimentation and his place in film history, Resnais thus arrives at a result all the more refreshing and exciting. Hiroshima, Mon Amour is a simultaneously ingenious and delicate gem, a high point in post-war French cinema.

Introduction by media scholar Ben De Smet.