BUY TICKETS Thursday, 11 December – 6.00pm – The Australian Cinémathèque at GOMA
BUY TICKETS Saturday, 13 December – 3.00pm – Palace Barracks Cinemas
“[Yamada] has a fine-tuned sense for everything from period decor to social mores … quietly evokes the era’s many tragedies of hopes denied and futures aborted.” – Japan Times
In 1935, in wartime Tokyo, an impressionable 18-year-old maid-in-training named Taki is dispatched to look after the domestic affairs of a wealthy toy company executive. She quickly becomes infatuated with the executive’s wife, the cosmopolitan, assured Tokiko, but when Tokiko embarks upon an affair with a designer at her husband’s firm, Taki is forced to choose where her loyalties lie.
The 81st feature film from indefatigable 83-year-old shomin-geki master Yoji Yamada (The Yellow Handkerchief, The Twilight Samurai, Tokyo Family), The Little House continues his superlative run of Showa-period drawing room dramas. A peerless observer of the social graces and simmering resentments underpinning wartime Japan, Yamada once again delivers a film of quiet assurance and devastating emotional maturity, where the unspoken truths of love and family become a dangerous minefield for the soul.
Haru Kuroki’s stunning portrayal of Taki earned her the Silver Bear for Best Actress at this year’s Berlinale.
