The Japanese film industry loves medical melodramas, but not much ones with intellectually disabled characters. Director/scriptwriter Yoji Yamada's enduringly popular Tora-san series (1969-96) featured one such character in its seventh installment, 1971's "Otoko wa Tsurai yo: Funtohen (Tora-san, the Good Samaritan)," a spinning-mill worker (Rumi Sakakibara) who dislikes her job and becomes enamored of the feckless hero. Yamada later included an intellectually disabled student to the class taught by his night-school-teacher hero in his 1996 drama "Gakko II (A Class to Remember 2)," which he both scripted and directed.
Based on Takayuki Takuma's hit play for the Tokyo Seleccion Deluxe theater troupe that is in turn based on a true story, Yukihiko Tsutsumi's drama "Kuchizuke (Angel Home)" focuses on the intellectually disabled residents of the Himawariso (Sunflower House) group home and their caregivers and families.
Though best known as a commercial hit maker — he directed the money-spinning 2008-09 trilogy "20-Seiki Shonen (20th Century Boys)," among many others — Tsutsumi is also a veteran stage director (though he did not direct the stage version of "Angel Home") and his film version of the play is frankly stagey, taking place almost entirely with the confines of the group home, which is quite roomy for a Japanese dwelling, with actors projecting to the third balcony (of the theater, not the house).