Christopher Nolan’s 2023 blockbuster Oppenheimer—which garnered thirteen Academy Award nominations and ultimately won seven, including Best Picture—clocked in at three hours long. But while the epic biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer and his struggle to invent the atomic bomb made use of its run time to depict the physicist’s extramarital affair, Nolan’s screenplay somehow couldn’t spare a single moment for a graphic depiction of what nuclear weapons—the three-hour film’s entire raison d’être—actually did to the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
Atomic People, a new film from British filmmakers Megumi Inman and Benedict Sanderson, tells the story of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the perspective of those who Oppenheimer overlooked: the hibakusha, or survivors of the atom bomb.
Atomic People includes interviews of many hibakusha, mostly identified by their first names, as well as both black and white and color photos, film footage, and paintings by survivors. The film renders a grim, harrowing picture of the devastation wrought on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the atomic bombs.
Courtesy of Hideo Takemoto
Hideo Takemoto as a young baby. He was three years old when the bomb fell on Hiroshima. His brother saved his life by digging him out of the rubble.
What eyewitness Hiromu describes as a “flash bang” instantly killed more than 70,000 people out of Hiroshima’s population of 350,000. (Three days later, an additional 40,000 people, out of Nagasaki’s population of 240,000, would also be immediately killed). “I was thrown into a blast furnace,” recalls Hiromu, who was fifteen years old when his home city was turned into a nuclear wasteland. But he remembers everything: “It left an impression like nothing else.”
Remarkably, an image of a person’s shadow, transfixed onto steps, is shown, as are horrific photos of the corpses of infants. A woman named Michiko relates “eyeballs were dangling from faces.” Other witnesses recount how one bomb victim’s “flesh is dripping like candle wax.” Chieko tells about seeing people with what looked like seaweed attached to their legs, but in fact was “their skin peeled off.” Another woman walked while holding her internal organs in front of her. One man recounts hearing the hair on his head sizzle.
Accompanied by images of Hiroshima then and now, after the bombing Hiromu climbed a mountain to survey the scene and laments in the film, “The city had gone. Nothing was there . . . . It was almost total annihilation. The sadness was endless.” In a word, he calls it “hell.”
The bodies of those who died had to be cremated because burial was not possible, and many hibakusha comment on the horrid smell that ensued. Chieko participated in the burning and recalls how the human remains “were pink like cherry blossoms. At the age of fifteen, I learned how cold-hearted the world could be,” he remembers.
As horrific as the atomic blasts were—and there’s footage in the film of the mushroom clouds taken by Americans in their B-29s as Nagasaki is reduced to dust, as well as other images of subsequent U.S. nuclear tests—the aftermath was also hair-raising. As one interviewee puts it, “we really lived like cavemen.” But then the effects of radiation poisoning mushroomed, and by the end of 1945 at least an additional 90,000 people who had been exposed to the atomic bombs died.
Following the Japanese surrender, the U.S. occupiers established an Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, but the hibakusha came to realize that the Yankees were not providing them with treatment, merely studying them like, as one puts it, “guinea pigs,” in order to learn about the effects of radiation and nuclear fallout on human beings.
Survivors were often treated as second-class citizens, as other Japanese people feared being impacted by the leukemia, stillbirths, and various birth defects in their offspring that plagued many hibakusha. In one gruesome shot, a fetus with only one eye in its forehead is shown in a jar in a laboratory.
But the film is also a testament to the human spirit. The hibakusha organize and rise up, fighting for equal rights, medical care, compensation, and to abolish nuclear weapons and war around the world, eventually being awarded the Nobel Prize. These hibakusha note that in August 1945, there were only three atomic weapons in the world, all in the United States, while today, due to nuclear proliferation, nine countries have a combined total of 12,700 nukes. In a rousing grand finale that goes full circle from the Manhattan Project to Manhattan, some atomic bomb survivors make the trek to New York City to address the United Nations, where their speech receives an ovation. In addition to calling for nuclear disarmament, the hibakusha also denounce the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
All this raises a question: How might the inclusion in the film Oppenheimer of this chilling imagery depicted in Atomic People have affected the box office profits of Nolan’s big budget studio production? In addition to neglecting the atomic Armageddon inflicted on the Japanese, Oppenheimer also completely ignores how the so-called gadget that Oppenheimer and his team of “Promethean” scientists concocted at Los Alamos negatively impacted Indigenous and other residents of the state of New Mexico due to the detonation of the first atomic bomb there on July 16, 1945 at the Trinity Site.
Viewing nonfiction films like Atomic People that dare to tell the truth that both Hollywood and the U.S. government have long tried to hide is guaranteed to spur awareness and trigger outrage—not only with the ongoing whitewashing of history, but with the entire arms race and its threat to human survival.
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Atomic People premieres Monday, August 4, 2025, 10:00-11:30 p.m. ET (check local listings) on PBS, PBS.org and the PBS app. The film is in Japanese with English subtitles and titles.