Director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Our Little Sister, selected for the competition section of the 68th Cannes Film Festival, screened on October 24 as part of the Japan Now section of the 28th Tokyo International Film Festival which is now running. Director Kore-eda appeared at Tokyo Shinjuku Piccadilly for a teach-in.
Kore-eda had just been on a tour of England London, Holland Amsterdam, Belgium Ghent, and France Paris ahead of the film’s overseas release, and returned to Japan on the 22nd. Kore-eda gave a bitter smile- “no matter which country I go to, I am always told my works resemble Ozu’s (director Yasujirō Ozu’s). I take it as a compliment, but myself, I don’t think they are that similar, and never been aware of this”, he revealed.
His main source of reference when making the screen version of Akimi Yoshida’s masterful manga was apparently Little Women, while Ozu said his film was a re-evaluation of Early Summer (1951). Furthermore, “usually I don’t use references. However, I do end up thinking, ‘well, what kind of films did Ozu make?’, or ‘how is this different from Naruse (Mikio)?’ I think it’s good for me to consider this kind of stuff”, he said.
This film depicts the story of 3 sisters living in Kamakura, and their half-sister having had living far away, who her father brought, and how they start living together when their father dies. The film draws a picture of how real families and sisters act, along with the changing seasons of Kamakura. Director Kore-eda explained the brilliance in the original manga with an example of the emotion of happiness in the eldest daughter played by Ayase. “In her mind of Sachi, by deciding to take care of Suzu, her interpretation changes from ‘our father who threw us away’, to ‘our father who left us Suzu’. Re-interpreting things in this way is an act of beauty, and I thought that I would like to capture that beauty on film.”
The first cut of the film shows a scene in which the second sister Yoshino played by Masami Nagasawa is greeting the morning in the room of her younger lover (Kentaro Sakaguchi), which is depicted in the same way as the start of the first volume of the original manga. Director Kore-eda thought “why did the first scene of the manga start there? Shouldn’t it start with a scene of the family? Yoshino’s room is barely featured in the manga. This is because the place she feels is home is not in her family house, but rather by the side of a man. Sachi who takes care of their family home is similar to the grandmother, and Yoshino to the mother (Shinobu Otake). There may come a time when Yoshino leaves home, however, for a family drama that is developed in the past, it was drawn very carefully in the original”, said Kore-eda, talking of his new discoveries, to which the room full of fans listening quietly nodded their heads.
The 28th Tokyo International Film Festival runs until October 31.
The news provided by eiga.com 
