Nessuno lo sa

This film is beautiful in its simplicity...it is at times sweet, warm, funny and always heartbreaking...it is essentially about four children surviving on their own after their mother leaves them in search of her own happiness....

The show seemingly lacks any action or any exciting moments, but i was totally absorbed during the two plus hours of the film...this is largely because of the superb performances of the adorable children, who were all really natural and likable. You just feel for them and wonder at the callousness of their mother and respective fathers. The dialogue is simple yet meaningful and through the day-to-day unraveling of the plot, one sees the contrast between the courage, maturity and innocence of children, and the selfishness and childishness of adults. The realist, documentary style of filming allows viewers to see things from the eye of the children...

a great film that will make u feel rather depressed at the end of it...not for those who do not like slowly-paced films with not much action.

This film was very well received at the latest Telluride Film Festival where I saw it. Based on a true incident it is the story of 4 children,each a child by a different father, abandoned by their mother, and trying to survive in modern Japan on their own. The film is paced wonderfully slow, allowing the viewer to focus on small details that overlay other details. It does not drag at all and has moments of humor mixed with pathos.

The oldest, a son of about 13 or 14, incredibly acted, becomes the parent. He is in transition from becoming the responsible one of the family and a typical kid, but one with real values.

There are moments where a box of tissues are in order. The film ends in a moment of hope mixed with a real desire to know what ultimately happened to them all.

There are very few films I have seen that had the power to affect me as deeply as Nobody Knows. As highly as I recommend it, I must also forewarn, that this film has power, some very serious power. To call Hirokazu Koreeda's Nobody Knows anything less than a masterpiece would be an insult to the story it tells. The craftsmanship we witness here, from the masterful direction to the outstanding performances that the children were able to commit to, are all something of incredible proportions.

Nobody Knows, which is a true story, tells of four siblings, ages 5-12, from different fathers, who live in a small apartment in Tokyo. At first, they live in the apartment with their childish Mother who is hardly ever home. With the exception of the oldest, Akira, the mother snuck the children in to keep the rent lower and prohibits them from ever leaving the apartment, even the veranda, for fear of them being seen. The children do not go to school. As they look after each other, all they do is patiently and affectionately wait for their mother to come home.

As the story progresses, the children wake up one morning to some money on the kitchen table with a note from their mother saying that she'll be home in a month. As Akira steps up and takes charge of the apartment, the bills, and his siblings, the children still hold hope that mother will be home soon. And then, Nobody Knows hits you like a truck and goes right through you. Complete Abandonment. The smiles diminish and the childish affection for a mother that will never return is gone. Gone to play mother to another family, it is now entirely up to Akira, with money running out.

Koreeda's direction of the children is exceptional, as if the film was shot entirely candid. The camera-work is sincere, as if we were one of the children stuck in that apartment. There are no gimmicks here, no slide of hand, or post-production miracles. Nobody Knows is raw, and thrives in Koreeda's ability to capture the distinct personalities of all four siblings, their hopes, and those secretive moments where Koreeda directs the children not for the stories sake, but for the sake of the children being children.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Nobody Knows is the performances of the four children. All four children, who conjured phenomenal performances, were played by Japanese youths with no film backgrounds. After you see the film, it is likely that Koreeda preferred it this way, tapping into the honesty and energy that such youth had to offer. Their performances are so sincere and beautiful that on several occasions the tears will start to fall, the goose bumps will rise, and your heart will undoubtedly cry out to rescue these children, to grab them in your arms and set them free.

Without giving too much away, one of the most touching scenes to me, is on Yuki's birthday, the only thing she wants is to be able to go outside for a walk with her big brother Akira. So when the night comes, she puts on her little bear slippers, an ear to ear smile on her face, and with her hand in her brothers hand, they set her heart free for if not only a night.

Nobody Knows is a film that I will never let go of. This film impacted me so much and I found it so absolutely remarkable, that it hasn't left my mind since it's viewing. I almost feel that recommending this film just isn't enough, and all I can say is that I hope everyone gets the chance to enjoy this film for all that it is worth. As sure as it is to invoke emotion, it is as sure to please as a piece of cinema.

"Children can not choose their parents" This was what came into my mind after I saw this movie.

This movie is based on actual incident happened in 1988. It was much more miserable than the movie. A woman was living with a man. She thought he had filed the marriage notification. When their son was born, the man said he had filed the birth notification. One day he left her to live with another woman. When the boy reached the primary school age, she knew neither the marriage notification nor the birth notification were filed. Facing this situation, she decided to hide her children from the society. (According to another source, the mother told the police that she thought the birth notification of a bastard child would not be accepted.)

She had met several men and had 5 children, two boys and three girls, who were not registered and hidden from other people. When the second boy died of sick, she hid the corps in the closet. While she works in a department store, the eldest son took care of three sisters. When the eldest son was 14, she went out to live with her new man, who was 16 years older than her. She gave the eldest son her address. When the children were protected by the police half a year later, a girl was dead, and the two were debilitated, as they were confined in a room and poorly fed. The girls were 3 and 2 y/o and still used diapers, but they were changed only once every day. It is reported that the eldest boy blamed himself for not being able to take good care of his sisters, instead of blaming his mother...

Compared to the real story, the movie is less miserable. In the movie, even the little boy and girl look normal and pretty, but in the real story they were very poorly developed. But it was still more than enough to surprise me. What a mother! In a conversation with the eldest boy, she says "May I not become happy?" She acts on this thought, without thinking of the same right about her children. Her childish lisping talk describes her immaturity. And of course, men were more guilty. Sadly, children can not choose their parents.

Every child acted amazingly well, very natural. Particularly, the eyes of the eldest boy, Akira, are very impressive. The eyes tell many things from their miserable life.

"Nobody Knows" is painful to watch. It's a story you won't shake off, depicting the most defenseless of humans -- four young children, the oldest only twelve -- trapped in growing poverty and abandonment. It's a process-narrative of devolution that makes you feel helpless and angry and sad. It's saved from mawkishness by the natural energy of the children playing the roles of the four kids. And if it survives, its not because of its treatment of a social issue so much as for its evocation of the precise details of childhood.

There are two main subjects here. One is criminal neglect: the story is loosely based on events that happened in Tokyo in 1988. The other is the private, often secret, lives of children. Koreeda began as a documentary filmmaker and this seems to have given him exceptional skill in working with people and capturing their natural reactions. The winning, tragic children in "Nobody Knows," four half-siblings with different fathers and the same childish, selfish mother, never seem to be acting and often no doubt aren't. Nonetheless the subtlety of expression in the delicate, mobile, beautiful face of the older boy, young Yûya Yagira, was such that it won him the Best Actor award at Cannes last year.

Also important is Koreeda's gift for detail, his meditative examinations of fingernails, feet, a toy piano, video games, pieces of paper, objects strewn around a room, the hundreds of little soft drink bottles that are everywhere in Japan, plants, dirt, all the small things children see because they're closer to the ground. And the things they accept because they're defenseless and innocent, but also incredibly adaptable.

Akira, who's only ten and whose voice changed during year spent making the movie, is in charge. As their mother's absences become lengthier and the children finally seem to be abandoned for good, money runs out. Akira is captain of a sinking ship, a somber duty, but he and his little sisters and brother keep finding time to laugh and play.

Koreeda's a passionately serious filmmaker: the two better known of his earlier fiction films deal with death and loss and here he considers as a given the worst of human carelessness and indifference both by society and the individual. "Maborosi" (1995) was a homage to Ozu but without Ozu's sense of social connectedness; it begins with an isolated couple in the city and chronicles a young widow's second marriage in the country through a slow pastiche of observed daily scenes where event and even dialogue are minimal concerns. The content of "Maborosi" is too thin, but the images and color are exquisite and the sequences of natural, unrehearsed-looking scenes achieve an impressively rich, beautiful, zen-like calm. "After Life" (1998) uses actual recollections of older people talking to the camera to build up a fantasy about dead souls held temporarily in a bureaucratic pre-Heaven limbo being asked to choose a single favorite memory to take with them into eternity: the effect is perplexing, thought-provoking, charming, and with great economy of means, cinematic.

"Nobody Knows" isn't as brilliant or resolved as "After Life" or as exquisitely visual as "Maborosi," but for all its rambling excessive length it delivers a quantity of undigested patient misery and joy that will evoke such noble antecedents from the classic world of cinematic humanism as Clément's "Forbidden Games," De Sica's "Bicycle Thief," and the homeless father and son living on garbage in Kurosawa's Do-des-ka-den.

What's new here though is a sense of the encompassing otherness of big modern cities and the stoicism and resiliency of childhood (and perhaps also of the Japanese personality). Keiko, the childish, weak, spoiled mother (played effectively -- we instantly hate her -- by You, who's some sort of pop star in Japan), sneaks three of her four children into the new apartment and tells them they can't go out, can't show themselves even on the balcony. (In the real event, this was largely because they were illegitimate and had no papers, but here the explanation is that their noise may get them evicted.) Only Akira can leave, and she won't let him or the others go to school. They're prisoners of their urban anonymity and of an impersonal contemporary society.

As in Andrew Berkin's "Cement Garden," the children also pretend everything's okay to escape the cruelty of the social welfare system. We watch agonizingly -- and many writers say the movie's somewhat too long; it does feel thus especially during the first hour -- but this time Koreeda's world is more direct and specific than before and there's plenty of talk. The children chatter among themselves. Eventually they go out and mix a bit by day with other children. Akira even talks to himself; he has to, because there's no adult coaching him so he must impersonate an elder adviser.

Whatever its roughness and excess, "Nobody Knows" is intense and powerful film-making. Koreeda has put his whole heart and soul into this movie and with it achieves an experience you can't shrug off. Nor will you forget the kids, especially the beautiful boy, Yûya Yagira, who may be growing inch by inch into a star even as we speak.