Tag: unfit mother

Hoard

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 6 March 2024
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Sticky post

Director – Luna Carmoon – 2023 – UK – Cert. – 126m

****

A young girl’s strange relationship with her rubbish-hoarding mother, cut short in childhood, leads to an equally bizarre bond in adult life – plays Glasgow Film Festival which runs from Wednesday, February 28th to Sunday, March 10th, and is out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 17th

When I first stumbled across the title of this film, and the image used to promote it of a young couple staring into what I took to be a circular hole, which, I realised after seeing the film, was in fact the outline of a communal bin of the type commonly found on an English housing estate, I guessed it was a thriller – two people stumble upon a hoard: a bag of money or otherwise valuable contents. A noun. However, after viewing, I now realise the title could equally well suggest an activity, a verb. To hoard. The act of hoarding. The state of being which is hoarding. The film isn’t really a thriller. To describe it as a drama might be closer to the mark, but that doesn’t prepare the viewer for how utterly strange and alien the experience of watching this is.… Read the rest

Features Live Action Movies

Nobody Knows
(Dare Mo Shiranai,
誰も知らない)

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 23 February 2023
No Comments on Nobody Knows
(Dare Mo Shiranai,
誰も知らない)

Director – Hirokazu Kore-eda – 2004 – Japan – Cert. 12a – 141m

*****

Four pre-teenage children are abandoned by their mother and left to fend for themselves in their Tokyo apartment. This work of fiction is based on 1988’s real-life Sugamo child abandonment case. Koreeda’s first film with kids is also his first family drama. Twelve-year-old lead Yagira Yuya won Best Actor at Cannes and would go on to a career including Destruction Babies (2016)…

Read the rest at All The Anime where I covered this title as part of the BFI’s Flesh And Blood Blu-ray box set which includes Maborosi (1995), After Life (1998), Nobody Knows (2004) and Still Walking (2008). Also available on BFI Player subscription and to rent on Amazon UK and Curzon Home Cinema.

Trailer (Nobody Knows):

Tags abandon, child abandonment, children, children alone, close-ups, combini, corner shop, family, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan, Japanese corner shop, Kenta McGrath, significant objects, Sugamo, Sugamo child abandonment case, unfit mother, Yagira Yuya

Features Live Action Movies

A Far Shore
(Tooi Tokoro,
遠いところ)

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 6 July 2022
No Comments on A Far Shore
(Tooi Tokoro,
遠いところ)
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Director – Masaaki Kudo – 2022 – Japan – 128m

****

An underage Okinawa bar hostess attempts to raise her small son while worsening circumstances conspire against her – world premiere in the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) 2022 which runs from Friday, July 1st to Saturday, July 9th

A man in Okinawa club Night Babylon asks her age of a hostess: “you don’t seem very old”. It turns out the girls in question are under 18 (the legal age limit for working there; in Japan, it’s also illegal to consume alcohol under the age of 20). In fact, these girls are 17 and proud of the fact that in “wild Okinawa”, the hostesses in bars are so young. The hostesses in question are Aoi (Kotono Hanase) and her friend Mio (Yumemi Ishida), and when not working, they like to party hard, for instance to celebrate a friend’s birthday, which involves much drinking and dancing in a club. There don’t appear to be any men in their immediate peer group: they’re all women.

Once she returns home from her club night shift, Aoi calls in on her grandmother to pick up her two-year-old son Kengo (Tsuki Hasegawa).… Read the rest

Tags age limit, alcohol, assault, bar hostess, bathroom, chase, child-rearing, compensation settlement, drinking, drinking club, employment, financial hardship, financial pressures, gambling, grandmother, hiding money, hospital bill, hostess, hostess work, hostessing, hourly rate, illegal, illegal alcohol consumption, Japan, job, Karlovy Vary, Karlovy Vary 2022, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival 2022, Kotono Hanase, KVIFF, legal drinking age, make ends meet, Masaaki Kudo, Okinawa, parents and children, partying, police raid, prostitution, pursued by cops, rent, shirking responsibility, single mother, small child, small son, social services, social services snoopers, Tsuki Hasegawa, underage, unfit mother, unfit parent, violence, wife-beating, work, Yoshiro Sakuma, Yumemi Ishida

Documentary Features Movies Music

Poly Styrene:
I Am A Cliché

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 2 March 2021
No Comments on Poly Styrene:
I Am A Cliché

Punk biopic

Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché
Directed by Celeste Bell and Paul Sng
Certificate 12a, 96 minutes
Released 5 March at www.modernfilms.com
Viewers can select a participating local cinema to share the revenue of the virtual box office

This documentary about the late Poly Styrene (real name Marion Elliot), the iconic front woman of the 1970s punk band X-Ray Spex, paints a compelling picture of a creative and innovative young woman going against the grain to break new ground in pop music. The band was very much her baby which she put together by advertising for musicians in the music press. She wrote all their material.

Her literal baby is the film’s co-director and co-writer Celeste Bell, who as a young child escaped from her well-intentioned but unfit mother during their time living on the Hare Krishna estate in Hertfordshire. On her mum’s death, Celeste found herself the guardian of Poly’s vast archive. It was five years before she could bring herself to look inside and see what was there… Read more

Full review in Reform magazine.

Trailer: