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.