The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been weighed, probed and mourned on screen across many generations, from Alain Resnais’ “Hiroshima Mon Amour” to Shohei Imamura’s “Black Rain.”

For Takeshi Shibata, whose acclaimed NHK drama “The Man Who Carries the Voice of August” first aired last year, the challenge lay in depicting not the bombings themselves, but the memories they left behind.

“Television pulls you through a story within time constraints. Cinema is different,” Shibata tells The Japan Times. “In a dark theater, seated properly, there is space (and) a different relationship with time. For this particular theme, where the deepest pain is never spoken aloud, that space allows viewers to feel what isn’t said.”