Hiroshima Bound

Martin Lucas • 56min. Color, HD video, 2015

“It’s my Bomb. It’s been waiting for me for sixty years…”

Hiroshima Bound is a personal documentary that tracks the construction of America’s collective memory (or lack of one) of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It follows the obscure histories of specific photos and photographers, both Japanese and American, who visited Nagasaki and Hiroshima in the aftermath of the bombings, counterposing this visual legacy with the stories of survivors, whose practice of speaking to small groups of students offers a modest but powerful counter-history to the official record. The film uses its maker’s own legacy as a child of the Atomic Age to look at the complexity of the representation of mass death, and the role of the archive in the digital era, taking viewers to the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley, the International Center of Photography in New York, and to contemporary Hiroshima, in order to explore and ‘unpack’ the trauma and myth surrounding the culture of Hiroshima representation.

56 min

Martin Lucas is a artist, educator and media activist. Since his first film, Tighten Your Belts, Bite the Bullet (with Jon Miller and James Gaffney, NYFF 1980) about the bankrupting of NYC in the 1970s he has used the tools of film, video and still imaging to look at social injustice in the contexts of communications, economics and war. His work has featured at locales in Europe, Asia and North America. His most recent film, Cold Shutdown, looks at citizen scientists dealing with the radiation blanketing the Fukushima region of Japan. Martin teaches documentary production, history and theory at Hunter College, City University of New MFA Program.

Reiko Tahara is an independent documentary filmmaker whose work has been exhibited across the states at festivals and art venues including SXSW, Hawaii Int’l Film Festival, Margaret Mead, Walker Art Center, Japan Society, Pacific Film Archive, and various Asian American film festivals, also internationally in Brazil, Sri Lanka, Japan, Canada, Singapore, etc. She has been a recipient of grants from NEA, NYSCA, Jerome Foundation, and Center for Asian American Media, among others, and a few fellowships including the emerging artists overseas program from the Japanese government. She is Co-founder and Curator of the Uno Port Art Films (est. 2010), an annual summer outdoor film festival in Okayama, Japan. UPAF, with its theme of “Life, Art, Films,” aims to connect unexpected dots by introducing cutting edge independent films mainly from or about underrepresented world communities to underserved rural populations in Japan. She has BA in Humanities from Waseda University in Tokyo, MA in Media Studies from the New School for Social Research, studied journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and mentored under a legendary documentary professor-author Deirdre Boyle. She has taught at the New School, Temple University (PA), and City College in the past, and has been teaching at NYU and the Hunter MFA IMA since 2010. The courses taught include: documentary history and theory; documentary production; world cinema; Japanese cinema; fundraising for independent media; and new currents in documentary.

Jason Fox is a filmmaker and professor based in New York City. He has taught at Vassar College, Cooper Union and at CUNY Hunter College. As well, he has worked as a documentary programmer in conjunction with The American Museum of Natural History, The Flaherty Seminar, and Maysles Cinema, among others. He also serves on the Board of Organization for Visual Progression, an organization that partners with social justice organizations to provide training on using visual media in their advocacy efforts. He holds an MA from New York University and and MFA from CUNY Hunter College.