Not Kokura - anti-war film - experimental short

This was the first film I made back in '95-'96. It's an experimental, human rights piece critiquing the bombing of Nagasaki, Japan at the end of WWII, along with the dehumanizing propaganda & documentary films that continue to justify the use of WMDs by wealthy nations on primarily civilian populations. The first 95 seconds are a little slow, but hang in there! The film played in the Toronto International Film Festival before the festival became a celebrity gong show. Here's an old review. Take One magazine, Spring 1997 Review by Tom McSorely NOT KOKURA Written and directed by Gwen (Steven) Haworth. Cinematography by Byron Lamarque. Edited by Catherine (Beilhartz) Kirbyson. 1996. 9 min. 16mm. On August 10, 1945, the skies were cloudy over the Japanese city of Kokura, the second city targeted for nuclear attack after Hiroshima. As as result of this cloud cover, the alternate target, Nagasaki, was chosen instead and annihilated. Although atomic bomb imagery never ceases to be viscerally terrifying, its overuse as a metaphor has rendered it rather banal. Not here, not in this film. Vancouver-based Steven Haworth's Not Kokura is an intelligent and harrowing re-visitation to the appalling dawn of the nuclear age. Framing his multi-layered evocation of post-atomic consciousness of the mid-20th century with the haunted voice over of Manhattan Project leader, Robert Oppenheimer, Haworth reconstructs famous sequences from aftermath footage of Nagasaki using actors who adopt the same positions as victims in the original footage. The scars are unseen now, suggests this bold section of the film, and are carried around in all of us. Haworth displays a visual authority and inventive approach to a subject too often trivialized by earnest seriousness or, more often, by the fetishization of apocalypse.