Nobody Knows is the third Koreeda feature to be exhibited at international film festivals and to receive theatrical release on the art cinema circuit. Highly regarded by critics, his cinema is a contemplative cinema, far removed from the action cinema and other popular commercial film genres. His films are concerned with the material and spiritual conditions of ordinary people living in limbo – between life and death, normality and abnormality, isolation and connection. His early films, television documentaries and dramatic features, demonstrated an interest in people unable to produce, face or relinquish memories of the past. His first feature, Maborosi (1996), was a beautifully shot and sensitively directed film about a woman who is emotionally frozen in a state of mourning and melancholia. His more unusual second feature, the teasingly philosophical After Life (known in Japan as Wonderful Life, 1999), focused on a disparate group of people who are located literally in Limbo – the land between death and the after-life - and faced with the difficult task of selecting one outstanding happy memory from their past lives.   

Nobody Knows (2004) tells the story of four siblings (with a common mother but different unknown fathers) who are abandoned by their single mother and have to fend for themselves. The eldest child, 12-year-old Akira, is the only legal child. The other three are not only illegitimate but officially unregistered; they therefore have no public existence. After Akira and his mother publicly take possession of their new apartment, at the beginning of the film, the 10 year old Kyoko sneaks in surreptitiously at night, arriving on foot from the station; the two younger children, Yuki and Shigeru, have been smuggled into the apartment in suitcases. Their mother forbids the younger three to leave the apartment and even Akira is not allowed to attend school. He is obliged to look after the younger children, do the shopping and cooking and pay the bills.  The mother, who is herself child-like, goes to work but also parties at night and is always falling in love with another man and absconding with him. On the rare occasions when she is at home, she supervises Akira’s studies, teaches the other children, tells them about their fathers and cuts their hair. Sometimes she sends them money in the mail, which Akira uses to buy  toys for the children, as well as food.

Although the children are officially non-existent, it is not strictly true that nobody knows about them. They are befriended by Saki, a junior high schoolgirl who is ostracized by her schoolmates and who is lonely and unhappy. Akira also briefly links up with some schoolboys in the street and brings them home to play video games. Later, when his mother has failed to return after a long absence, and he has run out of money to buy food, pay the rent and electricity bill, and they have to wash themselves and their clothes at the tap in the playground because the water has been cut off in the apartment, the neighbours become aware of their existence and plight but prefer not to notice. A former boyfriend of their mother, who may be Yuki’s father, likewise declines to become involved, when approached by Akira for help. On the other hand, the employees of the local supermarket take pity on them and sneak them items of food that are past their use-by date and that Akira collects at the back door of the shop. Thus many people are shown to be indifferent, if not selfish and callous, but not all. The children could not have survived without the help of Saki and their friends at the supermarket.   

Though tempted occasionally to play baseball or video games with other boys his age, Akira is a responsible guardian and loving surrogate parent. When the concerned supermarket employees suggest he contact the child welfare authorities for assistance, he declines, telling them the four of them would be separated and unhappy to be apart. When, finally, following a fatal accident in the house, Yuki dies, Akira and Saki tenderly place Yuki’s body in a suitcase with her favorite pet, and invite the other children to farewell her ceremoniously, before they transport her on the monorail to the airport, where they bury her with full honour. Fittingly, she is transported out of the house in the same suitcase that she arrived in, on the magical monorail that Akira had shown her when he took her out for a special treat on her birthday, and buried by the airport, which is of special significance to Akira, because his mother has told him that his father worked there.  

Though the subject matter of the film readily lends itself to sensationalist and highly emotional treatment, Koreeda refrains not only from melodramatics but also from indulgence in sentimentality. He narrates the children’s story in a cool documentary fashion, concentrating on the everyday life of the children and their activities in the apartment. His background in documentary filmmaking is evident not only in his choice of subject – which is based on an actual case that occurred in 1988, known as the Affair of the Four Abandoned Children of Nishi-Sugamo – but also in his use of non-professional actors, his fly-on-the-wall style of filming, reminiscent of cinema verite, detailing the everyday activities of the children (eating, bathing, dressing, drawing, playing with their toys) in intimate close-up, and his sparing use of mood music. The unhurried pace of the production – the film was shot over a long period, almost one year – and the director’s rapport with and affection for them, enabled the children to behave naturally and normally in their actions and interactions with each other.

The spare cool style, the documenting of repeated daily rituals, the use of non-professional actors, the pronounced interest in the material and spiritual plight of isolates, outsiders and social rejects, are all reminiscent of the cinema of the great French director Robert Bresson. Like Bresson, Koreeda evokes the life of the spirit while seeming to concentrate on the material conditions of existence. Despite their difficult situation at the extreme edge of society, his abandoned and neglected children live full and rich lives. They love and nurture plants as well as each other, they work hard but enjoy their play, they fret and frown but also wriggle and giggle, they have yearnings and dreams of another existence but also make creative use of what they have, they are sometimes acquiescent, sometimes rebellious. In short, they are not portrayed as pathetic victims but as spirited human beings.

The non-professional young actor who plays the role of Akira, Yuya Yagira, won the award for best actor at the Cannes Film Festival last year, beating some of the world’s biggest movie stars. He may well go on to a distinguished career in movies, as did the unknown young woman chosen by Bresson to play the lead role in his film, Une Femme Douce (1969) - Dominique Sanda. But, just as she never again produced such an austerely touching performance in her work with other directors as she did in Une Femme Douce, so too is he unlikely to.  For, like Bresson, Koreeda touches us deeply with that rare combination: austerity of means and generosity of spirit.    

Freda Freiberg