Film
Megumi
Cert:(adv12A)
Dir. Mirjam Van Veelen
Netherlands , 63 mins, 2008
Cast: Documentary with: Janica Draisma, Asami Fukaya, Sakie Yokota, Shigeru Yokota
Please note that, in a change to the previously advertised running order, The short film Dream City will be shown after this film.
Megumi Yokota was 13 when she disappeared from near her school in Niigata, Japan, on November 15, 1977. Nearly 25 years later, long-held suspicions were confirmed when the North Korean government in Pyongyang admitted that Megumi was one of around 13 Japanese citizens kidnapped by their agents in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Revealing a husband (a South Korean national and also an abductee) and a daughter as witnesses, Pyongyang claimed that Megumi had committed suicide in 1989, a claim widely disbelieved in Japan. For 32 years the case has been a sad anecdote on North Korea’s status position as isolated, quasi-Stalinist relic in East Asia. Megumi’s story galvanises public comment in Japan, where her family are familiar faces from extensive media coverage.
Megumi is the story of the kidnapping and its aftermath, as told by the extraordinary people she left behind. Megumi’s parents Sakie and Shigeru, her brothers, and her former headmaster have revisited the incident for three decades, yet are resolute as ever to understand what happened. For Sakie and Shigeru life must go on, and yet it can’t. They in particular must live as public figures in a debate that’s at once political and yet so personal. There’s a quietly heartbreaking frisson to a late scene when, as they meet smiling well-wishers, Megumi’s parents nobly bear the weight of their public positions.
As well as telling a truly fearsome story, Megumi a remarkably sensitive film, and captures emotion in ways that set it far apart as a documentary. In early scenes we see a tall western woman travelling alone through Japan. Immediately, the alien-ness of a new land to the visitor hits home. Later, a girl playing Megumi looking out to sea from a boat. Within a true story as potent as this one, these enigmatic inserts are simply devastating.
Tom Vincent
Other films showing that are part of Documentaries are:
