What are the experiences that shape the long lives of those we live among? In The Unimagined Lives of Our Neighbors, my ninety-two-year-old neighbor recounts the experience of being one of the first US Navy seamen sent into Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two weeks after the atom bombs were dropped. His intimate testimony is paired here with two films exploring two other catastrophic events of World War II—the internment of Japanese Americans and the “death march” of prisoners out of Auschwitz. In each, witnesses struggle to articulate these shattering experiences that were central to their lives. Using interviews, photographs, and archival film, these films explore the process of bringing into the present fragmented and enigmatic memories of personal and collective trauma as they continue to reverberate across generations.

—Jeffrey Skoller