Word: koreeda
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Friday, February 18. Koreeda's "Distance" (Japan, 2001). 7 P.M. Harvard Film Archive. Tickets $8; students and seniors $6. Tickets at the Harvard Film Archive...
...winner of the Cannes Film Festival's Best Actor award couldn't be at the ceremony last May. He was back home, in Tokyo, taking exams at his junior high school. Yuuya Yagira is 14, and the best reason to search out Hirokazu Koreeda's fact-based fable Nobody Knows...
...Koreeda, a worldwide art-house guru for his spectral memory film After Life, doesn't judge anyone, including the mother. His calm camera observes the four kids quickly falling into the roles of harried parents (the two eldest) or dutiful children (the two youngest). Akira (Yagira) is the dad, treating his sibs with a wondrously gentle authority...
When an arty director has an international hit, it's usually because audiences have been allowed to mistake it for something conventional. Viewers can see Koreeda's rigorously unsentimental film as a Spielberg lost-kids plot rendered in Japanese and in slow motion. And they can feast on the child actors, all of them unaffected and adorable. Yagira, with the smooth androgyny of an anime hero, is a real eye magnet; the camera, puppylike, practically licks his face. Yet this precocious thespian is a real kid. When he was finally handed his Best Actor trophy, he asked, "Can I take...
...Cheung, at least, was there to receive her prize. The Best Actor was not. He was back home, in Tokyo, taking exams at his junior high school. At 14, Yuuya Yagira, star of Hirokazu Koreeda's poignant real-life fable Nobody Knows, is the youngest recipient of the award, and he deserved it. He plays the eldest of four children abandoned by their mother and left to survive without a social safety net. They do so with a calm, desperate resourcefulness that implicitly condemns Japan's welfare system and makes it clear that, in this family, the younger generation...