Hiroshima Mon Amour

Hiroshima Mon Amour follows a French actress who travels to Hiroshima in 1957 to appear in a film about peace. On the eve of her departure, she begins an intense affair with a Japanese architect. As they talk through the night, their present encounter stirs memories of her youth in Nevers during the Second World War, when she loved a German soldier. The man urges her to confront what she has seen and felt in Hiroshima, and the two of them circle each other's pasts, weighing personal grief against the larger devastation the city carries.

Alain Resnais directed, working from a screenplay by Marguerite Duras; Anatole Dauman and Samy Halfon produced. The film was Resnais's second feature, arriving between his documentary Night and Fog and Last Year at Marienbad. Emmanuelle Riva plays the actress and Eiji Okada the architect, with Stella Dassas, Pierre Barbaud and Bernard Fresson in supporting roles. A French-Japanese co-production shot in black and white across two countries, it runs 92 minutes.

Hiroshima Mon Amour has held up as one of the defining works of the French New Wave, and its reputation rests on unusually broad agreement. On IMDb it scores 7.8 from roughly 39,000 votes, and on TMDB 7.7 from about 957 votes, while the critics' rating stands higher at 8.8 from 46 reviews.