Monday, August 08, 2005

Suppressed Footage of Hiroshima After the Bomb to Air on Cable TV

WASHINGTON - Sixty years after the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, a film documenting the aftermath is reminding Americans about the horrors of nuclear war.

ORIGINAL CHILD BOMB
directed by Carey Schonegevel
The human cost of nuclear proliferation is considered in this provocative and unconventional documentary from filmmaker Carey Schonegevel. Mixing archive footage, animation, eye-witness accounts and reflections from present-day American students, the legacy of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are considered in light of the United States’ current arsenal of more than 10,000 nuclear weapons and contemporary political rhetoric about “weapons of mass destruction.” Inspired by Thomas Merton’s 1962 poem with the same title.

Footage from a U.S. government-produced film, which was labeled top secret and kept out of public view for decades, is included in “Original Child Bomb,” a documentary that will air on many cable stations Saturday, the 60th anniversary of the day that Hiroshima became the first city to suffer atomic attack.

Suppressed Hiroshima Footage