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Research dossier · Arts & Letters

Hiroshima: The Movie

play by Michael Wall

Manuscripts, fine bindings, an engraving plate and preserved performance ephemera
Arts and lettersInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMar 26, 2026
Entity authorityQ5771170 ↗
Source-derived summary

Hiroshima: The Movie is a radio play written by Michael Wall in 1985. It was produced by BBC Radio in that year, and later rebroadcast in 2003. The play won Sony and Giles Cooper Awards.

Plot and characters

In this love story (with a bit of a twist), a Japanese girl helps a film director as he makes a film about Hiroshima.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Hiroshima: The Movie” is play by Michael Wall. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Hiroshima, Movie and play, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewBest approached as a cultural-object dossier: authorship and date matter, but circulation and reception often explain the wider significance. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1985, 2003—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Hiroshima, Movie and play is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “play by Michael Wall” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5771170. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1985 and 2003.

Critical limits

Later fame can flatten the distinction between original context, subsequent adaptation and institutional collecting history. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.

Best used for
  • Identifying works and editions
  • Tracing reception history
  • Finding collection records
Verify next

The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Hiroshima: The Movie”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Hiroshima: The Movie primary sources, Hiroshima: The Movie archive and Hiroshima research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Hiroshima: The Movie”?
  2. Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
  3. Which edition, object, performance or recording is being described?
Subject index

Search terms from this dossier

Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Hiroshima: The Movie” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.