Interview

What was your motivation for the work of Hiroshima?

Few years ago, I found a book about the testimony of a Hibakusha from Hiroshima. This testimony impressed me deeply because before this reading I didn't know what was really the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the suffering of the people who died and the suffering and the pain of the alive ones. I thought to make a movie about Hiroshima because I needed to build my own memorial for the people of the city and I wanted to make something against the lost of the memory of the bombings, particularly for European young audience.

Why did you choose Image of the Dome?

What I wanted to question with this movie was the memory and the lost of the memory of the disaster of Hiroshima. The Genbaku Dome, linked with the city around it was, for me, a clear metaphor of this question of the memory. This building is the same since the bombing, but all the city around was rebuilt and the area changes all the time around it. The philosophical conflict between a necessity to remember the disasters of the past to construct a peaceful future and a necessity to forget the past to be able to live the present could be find in the opposition of the Dome and the city around it (or against it perhaps). 

Who did write and say the monologue in the movie?

The text was done before I started to work on this movie. It was a song: Lakspur and Lazarus, from the English band Current 93. I known this song before I came to Hiroshima, but there, when I listened it, it appeared to me that it could be written for this place. It is a text about the destruction and about the obligation we have, as survivors, to remember the deaths.

Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art
2008