Daremo Shiranai

Daremo Shiranai (誰も知らない), or Nobody Knows, is a 2004 Japanese film that's based on a true story of a group of children who were abandoned by their mother. It stars Yagira Yuya, Ayu Kitaura, Hiei Kimura, Momoko Shimizu, Hanae Kan, and You. The summary is as follows [taken from here]:

In Tokyo, the reckless single mother Keiko moves to a small apartment with her twelve years old son Akira Fukushima and hidden in the luggage, his siblings Kyoko, Shigeru and Yuki. The children have different fathers and do not have schooling, but they have a happy life with their mother. When Keiko finds a new boyfriend, she leaves the children alone, giving some money to Akira and assigning him to take care of his siblings. When the money finishes, Akira manages to find means to survive with the youngsters without power supply, gas or water at home, and with the landlord asking for the rental.

Like the synopsis says, the story was about a group of half-siblings who end up getting abandoned and having to get by on their own. I thought it sounded like a good plot, especially since it's based on a true story - but it's not as sad as the true version, odd enough (movies tend to overexaggerate things). When I watched it, I constantly compared things to the real story so the movie didn't seem as sad as what really happened. It went through from the beginning until the end and nothing is truly hard to take in - besides the fact that the oldest child is around 12 years old and he needs to take care of the bills and his siblings. There's a scene where he gives into his own needs but you easily see the growing hardship they go through and though it ends rather ambivalently, it's not as if they're dying from malnutrition.

I say it was a pretty good movie depicting a water-downed version of what could happen if children were left on their own with only limited funds. The kid actors and actresses played their parts well and you could see the struggle between their own child-like needs and what is necessary for life.

You can watch it here.