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Hiroshima Mon Amour will screen from a 4K digital restoration.

One of the early triumphs of the French New Wave, Hiroshima Mon Amour is a poetic and devastating piece of European cinema. It was director Alain Resnais' first foray into feature filmmaking, although he had previously explored the horrors of the Second World War in 1956 with his ground-breaking documentary Night and Fog.

Hiroshoma Mon Amour drifts through the enigmatic conversations between a man and a woman over 36 hours in post-war Hiroshima. The woman (Emmanuelle Riva) is an actress who has come to the city to make a film about "peace"; the man (Eiji Okada), is a Japanese architect who served in the Japanese army and whose family were in Hiroshima on the day of its bombing.

The dialogue, beautifully crafted in an Oscar-nominated script by Marguerite Duras, explores the capriciousness of memory and grief, as the characters flit in and out of flashbacks and remembrances. Their time together is gorgeously captured in stark monochrome by Resnais' roaming tracking shots, following the couple and pitting them in deep, sumptuous shadows in the seemingly endless night of the city.

Hiroshima Mon Amour remains one of the key touchstones of French cinema – as evocative and powerful as ever, coloured and shaped by the ongoing trauma of nuclear desolation.