No More Hibakusha!
1983 · 55m · Canada
Directed by Martin Duckworth
Genres: documentary, war
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, provocative
Survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings travel to New York for a 1982 United Nations disarmament session, sharing the lasting psychological trauma they carry as they call for an end to nuclear war.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a nuclear-anxiety doc to be preachy, so Duckworth does something weirder—he lets the survivors' presence *be* the argument, which feels almost seditious in its refusal to editorializing. The real provocation isn't the politics; it's the formal restraint.
Duckworth locates this film in the long lineage of witness testimony as cinema, from Shoah to the best of direct documentary, and the 1982 UN session becomes a frame for something more enduring—a record of how trauma moves through bodies and speech across decades. It's the kind of structurally patient work that rewards retrospective programming.
The decisive move here is letting the survivors speak without montage or scoring underneath—just presence, pauses, the weight of what they're carrying into that room—and it's that commitment to unmediated testimony that transforms what could've been a issue-doc into something that actually *lands* in the chest.