For Hirokazu Kore-eda, Nobody Knows wasn't just an artistic endeavour. For the soft-spoken Japanese filmmaker, it was also a way to reconnect with his childhood, to try to unearth some of the emotional complexities children face and to shed some light on the plight of abandoned youngsters in his country.
The film, released last year but only this month making its way to North American screens, also brought the director international recognition. It was shown at Cannes last year, where its 15-year-old star Yuya Yagira won the best actor award, before making its way around Asian cinemas. It has taken the US release, though, to bring the normally reluctant director out into the open.
In Nobody Knows, Kore-eda - whose background is in documentaries - fictionalised the story of four children who were abandoned by their mother in Tokyo in 1988. At the time, their story was called 'The affair of the four abandoned children of Nishi-Sugamo'. Four siblings with the same mother but different fathers were left to fend for themselves after their mother ran off with a man. Her only contact with them was the occasional envelope of money.
It's a moving tale, yet one shot without unnecessary histrionics or dramatics. Instead, Kore-eda has endowed his film with a soft, gauzy feel, allowing the nuances of everyday life as experienced by these forgotten children to convey the tragedy of their circumstances.
'I found that with professional child actors, they were forcing emotion into their words,' says Kore-eda through an interpreter in Los Angeles. 'They were talking as if there was an audience in front of them. That wasn't natural. I thought it would be better to use kids who had no acting experience, because I realised there's something wrong with the way a child actor is taught to act - that there's something forced about it. The children's acting experience wasn't as important as me knowing how I wanted to portray them. For that, I used the characters in the true story, and what I could vaguely remember of my own childhood.'
The film runs for more than two hours, and was shot largely within the confines of a small apartment, with glimpses of the world outside. Nonetheless, it's compelling because the children's lives are chronicled through the seasons.
'We filmed each season, then edited it, then based the following season on what we'd already shot,' Kore-eda says. 'We didn't necessarily change what was made, but we adapted what was to come, and built on that.'