A married French actress and a Japanese architect meet during film shoots in Hiroshima and spend two nights together. In increasingly intense images, the actress tells the stranger about her youth in Nevers and her first great love for a German occupation soldier, which ended tragically and forced her to flee to Paris. Her current passionate affair also seems doomed to fail; her memories haunt her, and the time for the two lovers is limited. Hiroshima mon amour is a parable about love and its fragility against the backdrop of an unspeakable human catastrophe. Moments of intimacy contrast with the processing of war experiences. It is not the events of the war itself that are examined, but how they are reflected in people's consciousness and the act of forgetting.