Description:

Who Won the War is a short documentary weaving interview, archive and animation to tell the remarkable story of a Hiroshima survivor. In 1956, orphaned and partially blind, Takashi was invited by the American Government to the United States to “regain his health”. A second grader when the atomic bomb dropped, with six members of his family dead of radiation poisoning, Takashi embarked for the U.S. at 18. As soon as he landed in California, Takashi realized that he had been identified as an eligible subject for experimentation undertaken by the ABCC (Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission) to understand the effects of intense radioactive energy on the human body. Takashi's story is different from many other Hiroshima survivors. It is the journey of an angry young man whose misfortunes begin right after the Hiroshima bombing. It's a story of revenge, and acceptance of the past.

Biography:

Francesca Di Marco debuted as a documentary filmmaker in 2018 with The Woman All Women Were, an award-winning film that appeared in numerous international festivals. She is committed to narrating stories that reconfigure the margins of the dominant discourse. Who Won the War, her current project, is in fact the attempt to deconstruct the official narrative of the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing written by the winners by giving voice to a survivor, and to open up a space to heal his trauma. Francesca is the author of the book "Suicide in Twentieth-Century Japan". She holds a Ph. D in Modern History of Japan from SOAS University of London, and a Postdoc from Yale University. Her research interest is on collective and national narcissism and how it manifested in Japan through interwar totalitarianism and modern suicide. She lectured on the Asia-Pacific Wars and on History of Interwar Japan at Stanford University, the UK, and Italy.