Nobody Knows

Dare mo shiranai
a film by Kore-eda Hirokazu

Four siblings live happily with their mother in a small apartment in Tokyo. The children all have different fathers and have never been to school. The very existence of three of them has been hidden from the landlord. One day, the mother leaves behind a little money and a note, charging her oldest boy to look after the others. So begins the children's odyssey, a journey nobody knows, following the daily lives of 12-year-old Akira Fukushima, his sister Kyoko, brother Shigeru, the youngest sister, 4-year-old Yuki, and then Saki, a schoolgirl drop-out who befriends Akira and does what she can to help him support the family.

Though engulfed by the cruel fate of abandonment, the four children do their best to survive in their own little world, devising and following their own set of rules. When they are forced to engage with the world outside their cocooned universe, the fragile balance that has sustained them collapses. Their innocent longing for their mother, their wary fascination towards the outside world, their anxiety over their increasingly desperate situation, their inarticulate cries, their kindness to each other, their determination to survive on wits and courage.

Director Hirokazu Kore-eda on the making of the film: "This film was inspired by a real event known as the "Affair of the Four Abandoned Children of Nishi-Sugamo" which took place in 1988. Born of different fathers, these children never went to school and didn't legally exist because their births were never declared. Abandoned by their mother, they lived on their own for six months. The death of the youngest girl put a tragic end to this adventure. Curiously, not one inhabitant of the building was aware of the existence of three of the children. This headline brought up various questions to my mind. The life of these children couldn't have been only 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 as seen from the inside."

Progressing gently, the film is absorbing and beautiful in its simplicity, yet intense and powerful in the emotions it evokes. Acutely observed from the perspective of the children, it highlights unsentimentally and non-judgmentally, the different ways in which they cope with their situation, isolated from the world around them.

At the Height of Summer

Mùa hè chiều thẳng đứng
a film by Tràn Anh Hung

On the anniversary of their mother's death, three sisters in contemporary Vietnam meet to prepare a memorial banquet. Intensely close, they tell each other everything and seek each other's advice on every subject, and yet each has a secret. By the end of a turbulent period of temptations, disappointments, suspicions, separations and misunderstandings, each of them will have revealed what the tact and discretion of familial relationship has always kept hidden. The story, spatially framed by anniversaries, is set within a single month starting with the family preparing the anniversary meal in honour of their departed mother and concluding just before a similar event is about to take place in memory of their father.

It is high summer and the atmosphere is languid. The three sisters run the Café Thùy Dương, situated in a luxuriant and elegant district of old Hanoi, populated by artists and intellectuals. Youngest sister Liên slowly awakens in the apartment she shares with her brother Hai. She enjoys an emotional and physical closeness with him, allowing other people to think they are a couple. Hai is uncomfortable with this and gently discourages his little sister's display of affection. However, each morning he awakes to find Liên sleeping in his bed. At their mother's memorial gathering the sisters discuss their parents' marriage and the possibility of their mother's infidelity with a fellow student but are unwilling to admit that their parents' relationship could have been less than ideal. During the month that follows each sister's hidden relationship problems and fears are gradually revealed.

Suong, the eldest sister, is married to Quôc, a botanical photographer and they have a child, Little Mouse. Since her miscarriage four years before, Quôc has led a double life, supposedly in secret, with another woman and their young son in the remote Ha Long Bay. When he is away from her with his second family, Suong seeks refuge in an affair with Tuân. Each suffers the guilt and remorse that comes from their need to feel loved and wanted. Middle sister Khanh's husband, Kiên, is a writer struggling to finish his first novel through which he expresses his fantasies about having an affair. When Khanh tells him that she is pregnant he almost betrays her in a Saigon hotel but she believes that he has been unfaithful. Liên, also with relationship problems, is naive about sexuality and biology and whilst embracing the idea that she is pregnant after sleeping with a boyfriend just once, she continues to flirt with her brother Hai.

The film tells the stories of three women in different stages of life. The young, emotionally immature girl, who lives in a fantasy world and is beginning to explore her sexuality. Her older sister, who is married and trying to have a child, whilst worrying about her husband and the larger family. And the eldest sister, who has faced much more and looks for solutions in life that work. As the three women struggle with life on different levels, they share their problems, offering help and support to each other as an opportunity for forgiveness and growth rather than confrontation. During what becomes a pivotal month in their lives, the three sisters and their brother are forced to face the nature of their relationships.

Writer and director Tràn Anh Hung comments on the imagery of his film: "The images in the film have no documentary substance, nor do they depict the present as experienced by the characters. Rather, they are incessantly repeated images, burnished into the characters' consciousnesses. Images that the characters will keep, like secrets or recall like memories of harmony. The harmony they convey has a particular beauty, a beauty tainted by bitterness and melancholy."

Exquisitely acted and photographed, this sensuous and visually rich film is an elegant and resonant combination of mood, ravishing visuals and music, detailing and reflecting upon the everyday moments in life as pure cinematic poetry.

Confessions

Kokuhaku
a film by Tetsuya Nakashima

Yuko Moriguchi is a middle school teacher whose four-year-old daughter is found dead. Her life shattered, she finally returns to her classroom only to become convinced that two of her students were responsible for her daughter's murder. With the police having dismissed the child's death as an accident, Yuko puts into motion an intricate plan of revenge and psychological warfare designed to utterly destroy the lives of the two killers and to force them to realise the impact of their actions.

In the classroom an unruly mob of teenage students are having their milk break. As their teacher speaks they pay little attention, focusing more on throwing the cartons around, bullying one another, gossiping, or sending text messages. She announces that she is to quit teaching at the end of the month. She then speaks of how she became pregnant by her fiancé, Dr Sakuramiya, a dedicated and respected teacher who was diagnosed with AIDS. They had then chosen not to marry as it would be better for the child to have no father, than to have to live with the stigma. While he had later died, both she and their daughter, Manami, were lucky since neither of them had contracted the disease.

As a single mother, when Manami turned one year old, Yuko returned to teaching and would bring her daughter to the school crèche. At the age of four Manami was found drowned in the school pool and although it was considered an accident, Yuko knows that two of the students in her present class had murdered the child. Without naming them, she makes their identities clear to the other pupils and tells the class that under the juvenile penal code minors are not criminally responsible and therefore cannot be punished for their crime. So she has decided to take matters into her own hands and has injected her former lover's HIV-positive blood into the milk that the guilty pair have just been drinking. The classroom erupts into chaos. One of the two boys, Shuya Watanabe, is an intelligent child but has a sociopathic reputation among the students who say that he devises experiments to cruelly torture animals. The other student, Naoki Shimomura, is a weak-willed loner who has fallen under Shuya's manipulative spell. As Yuko finishes her confession each boy responds to the news in a very different way.

Following further confessions and perspectives of students and parents which fill in events before and after Yuko's testimonial, we later see that conscience-free Shuya continues his attendance at school where he is taunted, beaten and abused by his classmates. Naoki however, believing he is lethally infected, locks himself away in isolation, refusing to speak, eat or wash, watched over by his over-protective mother who will not accept that her child could have done anything wrong. Equally in the dark is the young and naive, new class teacher Yoshiteru Terada, who believes in befriending the students and trying to be one of them, but he too is manipulated by Yuko. Also drawn into the revenge tragedy is the schoolgirl Mizuki Kitahara, who has her own obsession with death and murder, and is also bullied for taking the side of Shuya. Increasingly, the dark, obsessive nature of the children is revealed and as the hysteria mounts, Yuko's revenge plan twists and turns to bring about the ultimate destruction of the lives of her daughter's murderers. The sound of something important disappearing forever. Her plan is made all the more awful by the fact that it relies so coldly upon the latent callousness and sadism of her class to unwittingly carry it out.

This unique, brilliantly crafted and devastating film is based upon the award-winning debut novel by Kanae Minato. Director Tetsuya Nakashima draws superb and utterly convincing performances from the young cast. His masterly use of dramatic camera angles, focus shifts and slow motion, innovative cinematography and the dynamic inclusion of hypnotic soundtrack music, creates a sense of cold bleakness and emotional distance, but with a stunning visual beauty. Focusing on the different characters and their own mini-confessions, the film unflinchingly explores the arrogance and cruelty inherent in the human psyche and its propensity to prey upon the weak and defenceless.