Based on a true story that scandalized Japan in the mid-1980s, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 2004 drama prefigures the familial concerns of his Cannes Palme d’Or–winning Shoplifters by following four children abandoned in a Tokyo apartment. After their flighty mother smuggles the family into a new apartment and eventually disappears, the preteen Akira (Yuya Yagira, Best Actor winner at Cannes) must find a way first to get his siblings out of the house and then to keep them surviving—quietly—in a neighborhood that barely notices their existence. Nobody Knows creates an entire world out of one small apartment, and a life’s range of feelings from its preadolescent cast. A toy piano grown silent, new crayons turned to stubs, the energies of youth quietly stilled: with a photographer’s eye for detail and a poet’s sense of precision, Kore-eda films moments that reveal in miniature all the emotions of childhood and all the tones of loneliness, of living when nobody knows you’re alive.

—Jason Sanders

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