Just watched this film based on a true story about a mother that leaves her four children for weeks at a time while she goes off to party and meet men until she finally abandons them altogether. The movie is definitely worth watching. For the good acting (the boy who plays Akira won the 2004 Cannes Film Festival best actor award), beautiful cinematography and imagery. Actually, Ella Taylor of the LA Weekly sums it up perfectly, "Nobody Knows unfolds with such leisurely, terrible beauty, it takes a while to realize that what we are witnessing is the children’s long slide into beggary, exacerbated by the slow torture of faint hope."The horrifying thing is, the real life story is much more horrible than the movie version. I'm trying to find out more about the story, but all I keep finding is this Wikipedia article which indicates there were five children, one of them died of malnutrition so the mom wrapped her up in plastic and hid her in the closet and another was killed by one of the kids' friend. All other sites basically refer to the same Wiki article, or offer the exact same information. Apparently it was big news in the 80's in Japan, but none of my Japanese friends seem to know any specifics about this story. I want to know what ended up happening to the four children, and what happened to the mother. Apparently she only went to jail for two years.
2 comments:
all the children had different fathers. the mom was sentenced to 3 or 4 years in jail plus 3 years of probabtion. the children were abandoned in a cramped apartment for 9 months.the youngest child died 1 year after his birth from a disease. the 1 girl (yuki) died from being beat to death by akiras so called "friends" she ate their ramen on accident and his friends got mad and beat her to death. the other girl( Kyoko) died from malnutriton as 1 other child(im pretty sure)the eldest (Akira) died from unkown causes. hope i could help!
Thanks for the info. Talk about tragic.
Three or four years in jail is not enough..
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