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 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.