When Hirokazu Koreeda¡¯s gently offbeat family drama ¡°Umimachi Diary¡± (¡°Our Little Sister¡°) was screened in competition at this year¡¯s Cannes Film Festival, both audiences and the media were enthusiastic ¡ª a story for the Reuters news agency described it as ¡°Palme d¡¯Or material.¡± But instead of being awarded the festival¡¯s top prize, the film walked away with nothing.
In Japan, however, ¡°Our Little Sister¡± is getting a wide release, with distributors Toho and Gaga hoping to replicate the success of ¡°Soshite Chichi ni Naru¡± (¡°Like Father, Like Son¡°), Koreeda¡¯s 2013 film about two boys who switched families at birth, which earned ?3.2 billion at the local box office and won Koreeda a jury prize at Cannes.
His new film is based on Akimi Yoshida¡¯s long-running manga of the same name about teenage Suzu (played by Suzu Hirose), who comes to live with her three adult half-sisters in their big, rambling house in Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture. While the film borrows liberally from the manga, beginning with the funeral of the four sisters¡¯ philandering father, Koreeda also departed significantly from it, with Yoshida¡¯s blessing. As a fan of the comic, Koreeda first tried writing a script that was little more than a digest of the manga¡¯s episodic plot, but then decided that ¡°it didn¡¯t make a film,¡± he says.
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