Our Little Sister
Umimachi Diary, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2015, Japan, Colour, 127 mins, Certificate: PG
What happens when the family you were born into conjuncts with and eventually becomes the family you choose?
This happens.
A warm, honest, quietly generous embrace of a film, uplifting yet deep like the sea, luminous and revealing like the sun, refreshing and comforting like the summer wind, nurturing, full of delicate tones and flavours like the food prepared and shared by the extraordinary family on screen.
It tells the story of three sisters, abandoned by both their parents, who live together in their grandmother’s house. After no weddings and one funeral, they meet their teenage half sister and they choose to invite her to live with them, becoming both her sisters and her parents.
Adapted from a pop, award winning manga series and directed by the acclaimed, Japanese zen master Hikokazu Kore-eda (whose Shoplifters won the Palm d’ Or at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival), it is probably his most heartwarming and full of joy work, as it explores and challenges the concept of family through sisterhood – a state of being that so rarely graces the big screen so effectively.
This happens.
Our last film before the Summer break that you may very well choose to live with for quiet some time, as it invites you in and makes you feel part of the family.
Reviews:
“Kore-Eda’s film is more than the beautifully luminous faces of his actresses, the particular way they move and speak, or the lovely landscapes of Kamakura, even though all of these should be admired. So much more lies buried in-between the lines.” Dan Fainaru, Screen Daily
“A melodrama of negative spaces, the film is just as much about characters who are not there… [And about] [w]hat is not shown… Any of these could have too easily made for more suspenseful and grim dramatic material, but their absence only intensifies the preciousness and richness of each passing moment in Our Little Sister.” Aliza Ma, Film Comment
“Rarely has a film more eloquently captured the universality of human experience.” Calvin Wilson, St. Louis Post Dispatch
“Janet Malcolm once wrote of Chekhov’s stories that we swallow “as if it were an ice, and we cannot account for our feeling of repletion.” Something similar can be said about this film, which goes down as easily as a sip of the plum wine the sisters brew and yet leaves the viewer both sated and intoxicated.” A.O. Scott, The New York Times