Few films released in Japan this year have made life and death feel as palpable as they do in Tsuyoshi Kumeta’s “Underdogs.” This scruffy, lo-fi documentary, shot over the course of seven years and 20 trips to the Philippines, follows the lives of four Japanese men in late middle age who have left their native country for a precarious existence in the slums of Manila.
They are the flip side of the usual migration narrative: citizens of an affluent post-industrial nation, reduced to poverty and homelessness in the Global South. Going back to the land of their birth doesn’t seem to be an option.
One of them is a former cop, left partially paralyzed by a stroke and living in a cell-like room without any windows, where he’s entirely reliant on the kindness of strangers. Another is an ex-yakuza who fled Japan due to an incident he won’t discuss, and now lives in the alley behind a bike shop, which floods whenever it rains.