Director Steven Okazaki with atomic bomb survivor Sakue Shimohira, who appears in the film.

LOS ANGELES — Steven Okazaki’s “White Light/Black Rain” was a winner at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences’ 60th Prime-time Creative Arts Emmy Awards ceremony held on Sept. 13 at the Nokia Theater.

Produced for HBO, the documentary on the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 was recognized for “exceptional merit in non-fiction filmmaking.” Also nominated were “Oswald’s Ghost” and “Walt Whitman,” both produced for the PBS series “The American Experience.”

Producer/director Okazaki, who is based in the Bay Area, interviewed more than 100 atomic bomb survivors before selecting the 14 who give their eyewitness accounts in the film. This is his third documentary on the subject, after “Survivors” (1982) and the Oscar-nominated “The Mushroom Club” (2005).

Accepting the Emmy from actor Masi Oka, one of the stars of NBC’s “Heroes,” Okazaki stated that “White Light/Black Rain” “honors 14 Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors who remind us of the irreversible horror of nuclear weapons.”

He thanked the HBO team behind the film, Executive Producers Sheila Nevins and Robert Richter, and Supervising Producer Sara Bernstein, who also received Emmy statues.

It’s been a great year for “White Light/Black Rain.” It also won three top international television prizes — the Grand Prize, “Best History and Biography Program” and “NHK Best Asian Program” — at the Banff World TV Festival’s Rockie Awards held in Alberta, Canada in June.

The critically acclaimed HBO Documentary Films production was broadcast on HBO in August 2007 (check www.hbo.com for repeats and on-demand availability) and on NHK in Japan last month. It also had a successful theatrical release in Japan.