White Light/Black Rain opens with modern Hiroshima teens claiming ignorance about August 6, 1945, their cluelessness about the date of America's atomic bombing providing context for the existence of Steven Okazaki's documentary about the survivors (most of them kids at the time) of WWII's Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks. The film's bedrock is first-hand recollections, all heartrending accounts of human anguish and endurance reinforced by archival photos and film footage. Eschewing any overt discussion of the decision to drop the nukes, the director nonetheless lets slip his own sympathies during a juxtaposition of devastated Hiroshima and celebratory Times Square which spuriously implies that American euphoria was over Japanese suffering rather than their loved ones' escape from combat duty. However, aside from this misstep and cursory interviews with relevant American pilots and scientists, White Light/Black Rain is wrenching in its glimpses of past disaster and present sorrow, its subjects' scars evident on their bodies as well as in their tremulous, morose voices. Okazaki's doc is a project of commemoration, gracefully capturing the diverse sentiments felt about those momentous August days, from anger toward the U.S., to bitterness toward Japan's leaders, to a feeling that death and destruction (even on such a massive scale) are an unavoidable facet of war. While the final, overarching attitude is one of warning, a This Is Your Life clip of a Japanese man uneasily reunited with an atom-bombing American pilot encapsulates the film's more lingering impression: of surviving and healing as an ongoing (and, to some extent, impossible) process.  Nick Schager