by SARAH ROWLAND

"His eyes. The strong power of his eyes." Director Hirokazu Kore-eda is recalling the deciding factor to cast Yûya Yagira as the lead in Nobody Knows.

The boy with the ethereal peepers went on to win best actor at the 2004 Cannes for his role as Akira, a 12-year-old boy saddled with the responsibility of raising his two younger sisters and semi-retarded brother. After their mother Keiko (You) ditches them to shack up with her new boyfriend in Osaka, the kids are left home alone to fend for themselves in a tiny Tokyo apartment with mounting bills and no source of income. Since Akira is the only child registered on the lease, the other siblings have to be smuggled in and out. So the onus is on Akira to track down and beg for money from the various deadbeats who fathered the orphaned brood.

Yagira imbues his portrayal of a beautiful soul torn between parental duties and the desire to hang out with kids his own age with a genuine tenderness that, according to Kore-eda, required some patience.

"He was so honest that special care was necessary for all of his scenes," says Kore-eda. "For example, I would finish filming the other three children's parts first, since Yûya needed more time to reach his satisfactory level of acting."

The harrowing story is based on the "affair of the four abandoned children of Nishi-Sugamo," the real-life tragedy that dominated Japanese headlines and Kore-eda's conscience throughout 1988.

"The town where the case took place was close to where I lived, and I felt strong sympathy for the boy's mentality," says Kore-eda. "The media tried to describe the children as victims and strongly blamed their mother. But the only thing I was interested in was to picture the deep, dense and enclosed time the children might have shared between them in the small universe of the apartment."

That's exactly what he does in his intimately rendered retelling. Shot over 12 months, Kore-eda recreates the kids' slow deterioration as their self-contained bubble, consisting of video games and Pocky, transforms into a pigsty without any running water or hope. Instead of succumbing to sentimentality or melodrama, Kore-eda hypnotizes viewers with beautifully tight cinematography, zooming in on the children's fragile little world and natural beauty.

He also refrains from depicting the mother as a villainous bitch. You, a well-known TV personality in Japan, is brilliant as the emotionally stunted ditz. Her juvenile charm is epitomized in the scene where Akira pesters her to let them go to school. Like a spoiled teenager whining for a later curfew, Keiko responds by accusing him of being a total "drag." We also get a better understanding as to why the kids are so easy to forgive and forget when mom comes home a few weeks late with sake on her breath: she's a blast. The ageing party girl can even make stuffing the two youngest in sweltering hot suitcases, so she can sneak them into the new pad, seem like a really fun game. Consequently, when she finally books it for good, leaving no more than a note and a few thousand yen, we don't resent her; we miss her.

Nobody Knows opens Friday, April 8

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