Nobody Knows

I recently watched a Japanese movie. The movie was called dare mo shiranai or Nobody Knows. It was a fantastic movie and it was actually quite serendipitous how I got to watch this movie (Thanks Stef!).

Summary I ripped from www.moono.com:

Nobody KnowsFour siblings live happily with their mother in a small apartment in Tokyo. The children all have different fathers. They have never been to school. The very existence of three of them has been hidden from the landlord. One day, the mother leaves behind a little money and a note, asking her 12-year-old boy to look after the others. And so begins the children’s odyssey, a journey nobody knows. Though engulfed by the cruel fate of abandonment, the four children do their best to survive in their own little world, devising and following their own set of rules. When they are forced to engage with the world outside their cocooned universe, the fragile balance that has sustained them collapses. Their innocent longing for their mother, their wary fascination toward the outside world, their anxiety over their increasingly desperate situation, their inarticulate cries, their kindness to each other, their determination to survive on wits and courage...

What was interesting about the show was that it presented the information and allowed the audience to make their own judgement and conclusions. There was no "these kids are parentless and we should help them" type of comments. Rather, the director films the children a rather documentary style of filming and allows us to understand their plight without having blatent commentary. I like that the director respects that I can make my own judgement and that I am intelligent enough to do so.

BUT, what I find incongruous was that the children were so well behaved even though they have no proper role model. An absentee mother cannot provide discipline to the children. Yet, when the children are in a cramp apartment together 24 hours everyday, they do not bicker and fight? I find that difficult to believe.

Also, there were scenes when the lead boy is so scruffy but no one noticed that: there was the landlady, the grocery store owner?

But this is no different from the situations Southeast Asia today. There are many refugees in the Northern Thailand border areas and they are escaping the perseution of the Burmese government. Yet nothing is done for them. They are still in the refugee camps in Northern Thailand waiting for the violence and political persecution to end in the home country. The Southeast Asian countries know about this but choose not to act.

So even though people might have known about the four children in the house, starved and negliected, they might not want to know. It is not that they did not have noticed, but maybe because they don't want to.