Hiroshima mon amour

Director Alain Resnais did not count himself among the Nouvelle Vague, yet his film Hiroshima mon amour is seen by many as a highlight of this movement. Writer Marguerite Duras penned the screenplay, an anti-war story about the impact of the past, but told without flashbacks. It earned her an Oscar nomination.

A French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) travels to Hiroshima, the city hit by an atomic bomb in WWII, to star in a film about peace. There, she meets an already married Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) with whom she begins an affair that will eventually last 36 hours. Both are traumatised by the war; she because she had had an affair with a German soldier and was shaved bald as a “Kraut whore”, he because he lost his family in the atomic explosion, while he himself was serving elsewhere in the Japanese army at the time. Their view of the world turns out to be very different. "Toi, ton nom est Hiroshima."