Tuesday night's television on TV3 was impressive. Non-fiction were very impressive. The first one was not suitable for claustrophobics. Luckily, in Trapped. Three days at the bottom of the Atlantic (Trapped in 102 feet of water), the protagonists themselves tell you their story, and so it was immediately obvious that everything had ended well. But even so, there were times when it became very difficult to bear the account of an unexpected and incredible rescue. The documentary tells the story of a team of divers who, while working on an offshore platform in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, were urgently called to recover the bodies of thirteen sailors who had died in the sinking of a fishing boat. What they didn't imagine was that one of them had survived, trapped inside the ship, at the bottom of the sea. The images of the rescue process are real because the divers recorded the entire operation inside the boat. Recordings of the communications the team of professionals maintained with each other to coordinate their work are also used. The script reconstructs the epic story in parallel from two points of view: that of the castaway and that of the divers. Only those who can endure such distressing images will be rewarded with an outcome far more beautiful and comforting than mere survival.
The second documentary focused on the investigation of one of the most iconic photographs of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. You may have seen this portrait before. It's from August 1945. A boy of eight or nine years old stands at attention, staring into space in front of a crematorium. He's barefoot, his clothes torn, and he's carrying the corpse of a one- or two-year-old baby strapped to his back. We don't know the identity of the children, nor the exact location or date of the photograph, or even what story lies behind the scene. The only information we have is the author of the photo, Joe O'Donell, a US Army photographer who died in 2007. Therefore, the story of Searching for the boy from Nagasaki (Searching for the standing boy of Nagasaki) is the search process to find the subject of the photo, or at least to find out what happened to him. However, the investigation serves to explain the devastation caused by the atomic bomb and to hear the testimonies of many other children who survived. People who now, eighty years later, tell of experiences very similar to those the child must have endured with the dead baby on her back. The script takes refuge in poetry to try to make a deeply traumatic story more digestible. Meanwhile, documentary filmmakers, archivists, historians, designers, doctors, and engineers observe the photograph from different perspectives to discover clues and data to identify the child.
Both documentaries provoke a certain anxiety in the viewer to discover the end of the story, surely due to the unease provoked by seeing how chance determines our lives.
