 |
|||
 |
Empty
|
 |
 |
 |
|||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||
|
|
Nobody Knows
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
Our DVD Price: £9.99 RRP: 
Availability In Stock - should be despatched within 72 hours. This product will be dispatched from Guernsey. Delivery times
Earn 45 Bonus Points when you buy this product. More info |
Film Description
Kore-Eda is quietly building one of the most distinctive and most pleasing bodies of work in cinema today. His treatment of this true story of four children abandoned by their mother and left to fend for themselves in a Tokyo apartment concentrates on the richness of their shared life instead of the misery and so creates an extraordinary atmosphere of their lives over the course of a year. The 12 year-old lead won Best Actor at Cannes in 2004 for his performance. An exceptional film.
Film Information
| Director | Hirokazu Koreeda | ||||
| Starring | Yagira Yuya
|
||||
| Genre | World Cinema
|
||||
| Country | Japan | Language | JAPANESE | Year | 2004 |
Technical Details
| Certificate | 12 | Length | 140 mins | Label | DRAKE | ||
| Cat No | DAP7713 | Format | DVD | Colour | |||
| Region | 2 | Aspect | 1.78:1 Anamorphic widescreen | ||||
| Subtitles | English. | ||||||
4 Stills
 |
 |
1 Trailer
View - Medium (17.60 MB)
Share your thoughts and opinions - write a review
Review by Graeme Hobbs on 29th March 2005
Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s extraordinary film about four young children living together for a year in an apartment after being left to their own devices is a tender and magical piece of work. Inspired by a true story, this is no negative or melodramatic portrayal of the misery of abandonment, even though the film is suffused with longing. As the director explains, “The life of these children couldn’t have only been negative. There must have been a richness other than material, based on those moments of understanding, joy, sadness and hope. So I didn’t want to show the ‘hell’ as seen from the outside, but the ‘richness’ of their life seen from the inside.”
The film certainly is rich in both observation and understanding of the way the children organise their lives. Twelve year-old Akira (a performance of such measured calm by Yagira Yuga that he won best actor at Cannes in 2004) is left in charge of organising shopping and cooking for the other three children who aren’t officially there, having been smuggled into the apartment, two of them in suitcases. Akira refuses to go to the social services, fearing the four of them will be separated. From then on, we are so immersed in the children’s world that when the mother briefly returns a month or so later, her presence is an intrusion. She doesn’t stay long and leaves saying she will be back for Christmas. When she doesn’t come, Akira gets a checkout girl at the local store to fake New Year cards for his siblings.
Made over the course of four seasons as the children grow, the style of filming allows a breakdown between documentary and fiction familiar from Kore-Eda’s previous Afterlife. That film’s unhurried tone is also present here, reinforced by a style of filming that adds poignancy by concentrating on details of a scene that convey absence, loss or wishes – fading paint on a daughter’s fingernails, shoes, a toy piano.
Kore-Eda is quietly building one of the loveliest and most distinctive bodies of work of any director working in cinema today. If you’ve seen Afterlife or Maborosi, you know this already and will need no persuading to watch this.
View more reviews by Graeme Hobbs
Hand-picked recommendations of related films
|
Dir: Shunji Iwai This exploration of growing-up in Japan's cyberculture has attracted high praise wherever it has been shown. Yui... More > |
|
Small Change (aka L'Argent De Poche) Dir: François Truffaut An irresistible, humane and witty exploration of childhood in France. Each story takes the view from a child's e... More > |
|
Dir: Nicolas Philibert The documentary sensation that follows a year in the life of a rural French village school, its children and the... More > |
This film is part of the following Customer Film Lists
Overwhelming by Chloe
These are the films that left me silenced until half way home
Top ten Japanese films by Gillian Holmes
Recommendations from fellow customers
by Jean Vigo
The Beat That My Heart Skipped
More films directed by Hirokazu Koreeda
| Special Offers | ||||||||||||||||
|
More Great Offers
|
| BestSellers | ||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
| Recommended by MovieMail | ||||||||||
|
A curated collection of the best DVDs
Latest Additions
|
||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||
| Just Released |
|
Roberta Cloak and Dagger Garage There Will Be Blood Be Kind Rewind |
| Coming Soon |
|
Love in the Time of Cholera Map of the Human Heart A Year In Provence The Satyajit Ray Collection (Volume 1) La Vie de Jesus (Masters of Cinema) |
|
||
| Home | Film Catalogue | New Releases | Special Offers | Top 30 | ||
|
||
| Film Collections | Film Media | News | Your Account | Help | Become a MovieMail affiliate | ||
|
||
For questions or assistance, call us on (+44) 0844 776 0900 or email on enquiries@moviemail-online.co.uk © 2004-2007 MovieMail, Ltd., All Rights Reserved. Find out more about MovieMail |
||
|
Hidden (Caché)
The Complete Jean Vigo
Uzak
Into Great Silence
