An unexpected, fleeting encounter between a French actress and a Japanese architect gives way to a deeply effecting mediation on love, memory and the dark legacies of World War II in Alain Resnais’ remarkable debut feature. One of the first expressions of the nouvelle vague, Hiroshima Mon Amour remains startling for its bending of time and memory and for the haunting beauty and incantatory rhythm of Marguerite Duras’ extraordinary script. Emmanuelle Riva (of Michael Haneke’s Amour) glows with deep sorrow and incandescent beauty as a young woman gripped by a past that finds a strange new echo in the scarred city of Hiroshima. The film’s avant-garde score, co-authored by Georges Delerue and Giovanni Fusco, and its intermingling of raw documentary imagery with Sachy Vierny lustrous, glidingcinematography helped define Hiroshima Mon Amour as a pioneering and formally daring film like none other seen thus far in the French cinema. – Haden Guest

Hiroshima Mon Amour is presented in a new 4K digital "restoration" by Argos Films, Fondation Groupama Gan, Fondation Technicolor and Cineteca Bologna, with support from the CNC.