Julian Ross is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Leeds and a commissioning editor of Vertigo Magazine.

(E o kaku kodomotachi). Originally a stills photographer, Susumu Hani began his cinema career at the innovative Japanese publishing company Iwanami, home of a documentary-film division surprisingly receptive to new talent. He then created several innovative documentaries about children, including this observational portrait of children who draw, and one boy in particular, who doesn't draw well at all. The film observes the minutiae of a child's daily world, where every moment, and every task, encompasses a lifetime of emotion. “Movies have samurai and beautiful girls, and lots of equipment,” the children told Hani and his crew, who sat among them in class for months. “We cannot believe you are making a movie, so we think the only possibility is that you are very stupid people.”