Nobody Knows

Programme Notes

The Story

Four siblings live happily with their mother in a small apartment in Tokyo. The children all have different fathers. They 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, asking her 12-year-old boy to look after the others. And so begins the children's odyssey, a journey nobody knows.

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. . .

The Production

Production began in Autumn 2002 and continued through Summer 2003, charting the course of the four seasons. Kore-eda edited the film as he went along, devising the structure for the next season as he worked with recently shot scenes. His challenge was to foster an atmosphere of trust and communication with his young amateur actors, cast through open auditions. He had to adapt his directorial approach to film their slight forms. By filming chronologically, the young actors' real-life physical and emotional growth develops in parallel with the fictional story. Although Kore-eda has incorporated documentary techniques into his previous features, the premise and structure of Nobody Knows allowed him a fusion to further dissolve the respective boundaries of each discipline like never before.

Working in a cramped Tokyo apartment, Kore-eda chronicles the range of his young characters' emotions through meticulously highlighting the details of the children's lives, whether the nuances of a manicure, a toy piano, squeaking sandals, a cup of instant noodles or a box of chocolates. Kore-eda's goal was not only to evoke the distinctive world of these particular abandoned children, but the gentleness and beauty of every childhood.

For the children's carefree mother, Kore-eda cast a newcomer to film, the television personality YOU. For the film's core, pop duo Gontiti composed simple guitar and ukelele music to accentuate the children's world. Singer Tate Takako, who appears briefly as a convenience store clerk, performs the haunting closing song "Jewel."

Directors Notes

"Real Events"
This film was inspired by a real event known as the "Affair of the Four Abandoned Children of Nishi-Sugamo." This affair happened 16 years ago, 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 into 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 lives as seen from the inside.

"Over 15 Years"
I had a lot of trouble getting this project off the ground. Fifteen years passed since the first draft of the screenplay. Would this affair still be an actuality 15 years later? Before making a film about it, I had to ask myself that question. According to statistics of Japan's Minister of Education, the number of homeless children between 7 and 14 passed from 533 in 1987 to 302 in 2000. But these statistics only refer to children whose births have been declared. If we take into consideration that the birth rate has dropped, we could suppose that today there are more children who are living illegally as in the case of Akira and his brothers and sisters. I estimate this headline was not an isolated case in Tokyo. It is more of a social problem, which concerns us all. The protagonist of the film doesn't represent only the young boy of the 1988 headlines. He is one child among thousands today, which we are not even aware of.

"The Apartment"
Seventy per cent of the film takes place in an apartment. To allow the showing of the inside of the apartment in a different way, I thought it would be a good idea to find one with a balcony. An elevator wasn't necessary. It was better to see the protagonist walk up and down the stairs at the beginning and end of the film. The selected apartment met all the requirements. Plus, it was located on the 2nd Floor, at the end of a dark hallway. So it was isolated compared to others, which was ideal for this woman who wanted to live hidden away with her children. The window of the staircase also caught my attention. I wanted to use it to give a touch of suspense to the daily life of the children.
The apartment was made up: the mother's bedroom covered in tatami, the balcony, the children's room, the kitchen and the living room. The total surface area was 41.3 square meters. Everything took place in this universe.

"A Second Director"
YOU is someone who lives in the present. I understand that she had the positive happy-go-lucky quality I was looking for to play the role of the mother. She arrived at the shoot without any preparation. She had not read the screenplay I had given her. That could be interpreted as being relaxed and self-confident. During the shoot, her powers of concentration and her lively spirit often impressed me. She was enormously spontaneous. At the same time, she knew how to bring the children back into the story of the film when they wandered off. So I implicated her into the direction of actors by giving instructions like "You have to make Akira laugh." We can really say that she was like a second director on the set.

"Apollo Chocolates"
We shot with a voluntarily detailed script, which the children spontaneously brought in numerous modifications. These were notably linked to the fact the Yuya, who plays the role of Akira, grew up a lot during the one-year shoot. But not only that. For example, I never imagined little Yuki loved Strawberry Pocky, even though she tells me she prefers Apollo chocolates.
Kimura Hiei, who plays Shigeru, ate very little during the shoot because he is a very finicky eater. We imagined him liking instant ramen noodles and chance had it that he adored them. In the scene where he finishes his rice soup, I let him improvise. During the casting, a little girl came with noisy sandals. I liked this detail. When Yuki goes out in search of her mother, she wears sandals like those.

Reviews

"Kore-eda sketches the inner, spiritual and emotional lives of the children with subtlety and sensitivity . . .Pic's magic . . .and the thing that accounts for much of its almost transcendental fell in its latter stages-lies in its offhand approach to details, in the hands of many other filmmakers, would have assumed centre stage. There are no large emotions on display here, no major confrontations or crises, no revelling in grunge: The kids are sustained by the hope that their mother will eventually return . . .Yagira, who carries much of the film, is immensely impressive as Akira . .

Nobody Knows sticks in the mind for the intense intimacy of its depiction of four chiren living on their own after being abandoned by their mother. .

A sometimes funny but heartbreaking story of loss and fortitude in a modern and unforgiving urban jungle . . .Using prompted improvisatory and shooting over a period of a year to allow the young performers to grow, Kore-eda establishes a warm and confident family atmosphere with only the mother's skittishness providing ominous foreboding . . . Kore-eda works wonders with the young players . . . Yagira shows all the signs of becoming an established actors with naturalness on camera that comes complete with total stillness as well as pleasing animation. . .

Who cares that this long, quiet film, one of the saddest ever made, takes time to get going, time to re-create the terrible truth of its cha4raters' predicament . . .What makes the film riveting is the lack of drama, the director's distance . . .

Back