Steven Okazaki. Photo by Hidemi Shinoda

Bay Area filmmaker Steven Okazaki has been nominated for a prime-time Emmy Award for his latest documentary about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “White Light/Black Rain.”

Produced for HBO, the film was nominated in the category of “exceptional merit in non-fiction programming” along with “Oswald’s Ghost” and “Walt Whitman,” both produced for the PBS series “The American Experience.”

The awards ceremony will be held on Sept. 21 at the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles, and will be broadcast on ABC.

A resident of Berkeley, Okazaki was previously nominated for an Emmy for his documentary “Black Tar Heroin” (2000), also produced for HBO. Among three Academy Award nominations, he won for “Days of Waiting” (1991).

His first documentary, “Survivors” (1982), was about hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) living in the U.S. In 2006, he revisited the topic with the Oscar-nominated “The Mushroom Club,” a personal reflection on the 60th anniversary of the bombings.

This in turn led to the more comprehensive “White Light/Black Rain,” which features interviews with several hibakusha as well as some of the American veterans who dropped the bomb.

One survivor, Sakue Shimohira, lost her entire family at the age of 8; another, Kiyoko Imori, was the only student left alive among 620 at her elementary school.

Okazaki has spent a great deal of time in Japan, where he met more than 500 hibakusha and interviewed more than 100 before deciding on 14 to be included in the film.

On July 27, he was in Nagasaki to participate in a symposium held by the Asahi Shimbun.
“I was interviewed by two high school students about my work and my thoughts about Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Okazaki told the Hokubei in an e-mail from Tokyo. “It was a great event.

“I visited with all of the Nagasaki hibakusha from my film, who welcomed me warmly. They are like aunts and uncles to me now.

“I thought ‘The Mushroom Club’ would be the last film I made on the subject. Then I thought for sure that ‘White Light/Black Rain’ would be the last. But now I realize that Hiroshima and Nagasaki will always be part of me and that I will continue to try to work with the hibakusha and try to contribute to that community.”

“White Light/Black Rain” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007, has been shown on HBO as well as NHK in Japan, and is now out on DVD. Most recently, the film won the Grand Prize, the Best History and Biography Program Prize and the NHK Best Asian Program Prize at the Banff World TV Festival’s Rockie Awards held in Alberta, Canada.

Okazaki is already finishing his next film, “The Conscience of Nhem En,” which looks at Cambodia 30 years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. It tells the stories of three survivors of the notorious Tuol Sleng Prison, where 17,000 Cambodians were imprisoned and killed in the late 1970s. Nhem En, 16 years old at the time, took ID photos of the prisoners, in some cases just moments before they were executed.

For more information on Okazaki’s films, visit www.farfilm.com.