Fat Man and Little Boy seem like innocuous pejorative phrases, possibly used to tease other kids on the monkey bars, but when associated with a date, specifically August 6th and 9th, 1945, those words become something else altogether. No longer mere verbal darts, those words evoke images of pillars of fire and shredded skin, of a war certainly ended, but possibly not won. Wednesday night, Academy Award winning director Steven Okazaki will take you on a journey to revisit the places where "the bomb" was dropped, allowing you to hear the stories of the few that survived as the Austin Film Society presents White Light/Black Rain.

There are approximately 200,000 "hibakusha" &ndash people exposed to the bomb &ndash still alive today. However, after the bombs were dropped, images of the destruction and stories of the survivors were not permitted in the U.S. media for 25 years. Furthermore, it is Japanese custom to never speak of anything that may draw attention to an individual or illicit pity, so the 14 survivors that are chronicled in White Light/Black Rain, may have never spoken to anyone besides other survivors about what happened to them. The survivors, in effect, became social lepers, not even receiving health benefits from the Japanese government right away. One of the most heartbreaking aspects of this doc is that some of them are not even physically scarred (although those who were, the damage is almost unbearable to behold), but instead carry emotional and psychological wounds from the horror that they experienced on those days so long ago, which has affected every day of their lives since.

To add a counterpoint, Okazaki also interviewed four crew members of the Enola Gay and Bockscar, the aircrafts that carried and released the deadly cargo, and their impressions of the mission over 60 years later are quite startling. None of them show any regret for what they did, after all, they were just soldiers following orders, but all of them are staunchly opposed to any future use of nuclear weaponry, indicating a layer of remorse just below the surface. Perhaps they have had to emotionally distance themselves from the event so that they could go on living at all, as the weight of a quarter of a million deaths would certainly crush even the strongest human being.

Hindsight is 20/20, as they say, and it would be easy for us to stand on a very tall soapbox and spout condescension to those who took part in such gruesome atrocities against humanity, but we find ourselves conflicted. We believe that this internal struggle is exactly what Okazaki wanted to evoke in every person who sees the film, because only then does the lesson learned from Hiroshima and Nagasaki become internalized, as opposed to something you read in a book or had to know for a history exam, and in today's political climate, ignorance is not an option. Was it the right thing to do? Would the war have ended regardless of whether we dropped the bomb or not? Again, personally, we can't see how the United States of America has fooled itself into thinking it won anything on those terrible days in 1945.

AFS Presents: White Light/Black Rain with Director Steven Okazaki
501 Studios, 501 N IH-35
Wednesday, September 19th
7pm, Free
(tickets are currently "sold out" to this screening, but if you arrive at the theater at least 15 minutes in advance, you will have the chance to claim tickets that have not been picked up. Furthermore, White Light/Black Rain is available on DVD for purchase and on HBO On Demand.)