Displaying impeccable restraint, Black Rain depicts the bombing of Hiroshima and its tragic aftermath by observing the psychological toll rather than the wholesale carnage. The film begins with the blast; the city is devastated by rolling thunder, and on a ferry nearby, Yasuko, her aunt Shigeko, and her uncle Shigematsu are splattered by radioactive droplets. Five years pass and Yasuko is now of marrying age, but each successive suitor rejects her when rumors surface that she is tainted by “black rain.” Yasuko soon comes to think of herself as a pariah. Imamura touches upon a rarely addressed issue, the onus of survival. Yasuko and her ailing guardians are bound by this pitiful stigma: “Yasuko, my wife, and I are a community based on the bomb,” Shigematsu writes in his diary. Exquisitely photographed, Black Rain is about the descending time bomb of death and discrimination.