A high heel smashing through rotted wood, and the advice “live with it” uttered on a sinking ship, appropriately begin Junji Sakamoto's not-so-nostalgic look at small-town life and the children's dreams that live and drown in it. Little Nita is a hopelessly cute seven-year-old living in a backwater fishing village where incompetent glue-sniffing gangsters, scrap-gathering old men, and cat-collecting old women are the only role models around. Abandoned by his mother, Nita is cared for by his brother, who's busy working his way up the preteen yakuza ladder, and by his sex-worker elder sister. Sakamoto, whose debut Knock Out and recent films Face and KT mark his wide stylistic range, generates a nostalgia for childhood life as warm as it is crowd-pleasing. But My House's cute characters and sly observational humor also underline a bleaker reality, one that needs to be escaped rather than embraced. Like Nita says, “normal” is “a bowl of warm rice,” but not much else.