The biggest winner at this month’s Academy Awards, the film directed by Christopher Nolan about U.S. physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the race to develop the atomic bomb, has grossed nearly $1 billion globally.

But Japan had been left out of worldwide screenings until now, despite being a major market for Hollywood. Nuclear blasts devastated its western city of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the south at the close of World War Two, killing more than 200,000.

“Of course this is an amazing film which deserves to win the Academy Awards,” said Hiroshima resident Kawai, 37, who gave only his family name.

“But the film also depicts the atomic bomb in a way that seems to praise it, and, as a person with roots in Hiroshima, I found it difficult to watch.”

College student Rishu Kanemoto was also in the audience.

“This film was telling the story from the American perspective, from the side that invented the atomic bomb,” he said. “Hiroshima and Nagasaki where the atomic bombs were dropped are certainly the victims. But I think even though the inventor is one of the perpetrators, he’s also a victim caught up in the war.”

Japan is the only nation to have suffered atomic bombings, which claimed more than 200,000 lives in 1945 during World War Two. There were doubts over whether “Oppenheimer” would get shown in Japan when the film premiered globally last year.