Probably one of the most prominent ethnic groups without a country to call its own, the Kurds and their plight at home have been documented by many an award-winning festival film, ranging from Bahman Ghobadi’s Turtles Can Fly to Eva Husson’s Girls of the Sun. Not much has been said, however, about the experience of the Kurdish diaspora – or, specifically, the 2,000 Kurds living in Japan, a country notorious for its stringent policies towards those seeking refugee status.
A handful of documentaries, such as Masaru Nomoto’s Backdrop Kurdistan (2008) and Hyuga Fumiari’s Tokyo Kurds (2021), have broached the issue, but Emma Kawawada’s fictional feature My Small Land offers something different. Rather than focusing on an outcast trying to fit in, the first-time filmmaker – who is of mixed heritage herself – zeroes in on a Kurdish schoolgirl being forced to detach herself from her joys and loves in the society she’s lived in for most of her life.
Revolving around this teenager’s struggle to keep her footing in a small Japanese town when she and her family face expulsion from the country, My Small Land is at once political and personal. While very much a damning critique of the Japanese authorities’ inhuman policies towards asylum seekers, the film also provides a moving depiction of a young woman grappling with her own emotions and the responsibilities brought about by her multiple identities.
Having served her apprenticeship with Hirokazu Kore-eda, Kawawada has delivered a warm and humane work that bears all the hallmarks of her mentor. While taking visual and narrative cues from Kore-eda’s work – there are certainly hints of Nobody Knows, After the Storm and even the legal thriller The Third Murder – Kawawada has integrated these ideas into a subtle and nuanced screenplay based on extensive research with the Kurdish community in Japan.
Bolstered by engaging performances from her cast – especially that of the radiant model-turned-actor Lina Arashi, making her debut here alongside her real-life family – My Small Land offers delicate drama with a big heart. With fine technical work coming from the cinematographer and production designer of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Oscar-nominated Drive My Car, the film actually deserves much more attention than that bequeathed by its berth in Berlin’s youth-oriented Generation Kplus section.
My Small Land belongs to a recent string of movies exploring Japan’s increasingly multicultural social fabric. For festival programmers, it’s a film that could sit well thematically alongside, say, Juichiro Yamasaki’s Yamabuki, which premiered in competition at Rotterdam last month.
Set in Saitama, a city on the northern commuter belt of Tokyo, My Small Land revolves around Sarya (Arashi), a well-adjusted high-school student who flourishes in her studies and is poised to snag a place at a prestigious university in Tokyo. She gets along with her classmates well, and works shifts at a local convenience store to save up for her family and her future.
Having fled Turkey to escape persecution from the authorities, Sarya’s father Mazlum (Arash Kahafi Zadeh) is now a mild-mannered widower earning a stable living as a construction worker alongside several fellow Kurdish exiles. Neither of Sarya’s young siblings speak Turkish or Kurdish; Alin (Lilly Kahafi Zadeh) mocks Sarya for spending time helping “them Kurds” with their Japanese documents, while Robin (Lion Kahafi Zadeh) begins to ponder his roots.
All this tranquility is shattered when the authorities rejected Mazlum’s application for political asylum. When an official cuts up their interim identity cards, the family’s life is instantly upended. So begins the slow and gradual unravelling of Sarya’s life, as she gets fired from her part-time job and is refused a place in college. When Mazlum is arrested for working on the sly, Sarya’s burden reaches breaking point as she ponders the compromises she could make so her family can survive.
Sarya’s downward spiral is indeed ceaselessly brutal, but Kawawada never resorts to sentimental melodrama or sensationalist twists to highlight her travails. Instead, the director teases frustration and fury from her teenage protagonist in the slowest and gentlest of ways, with Arashi’s layered performance matching all this subtlety every step of the way.
Meanwhile, Sarya’s budding relationship with her fellow part-time worker Sota (Daiken Okudaira) is one of Kawawada’s masterstrokes. More than just a clichéd romantic subplot, Sarya’s conversations with Sota – and, by extension, with Sota’s divorced mother (Chizuru Ikewaki) – allow the girl to explain her own background, her hopes and her fears without the exposition becoming too forced and artificial.
True to Kawawada’s low-key approach, Hideotoshi Shinomiya’s camerawork and Seo Hyeonsun’s production design create a world that’s as normal and everyday as it could be, something which would serve to emphasise how much Sarya’s family has integrated themselves into the provincial life around them.
Shinichi Fushima’s editing heightens the tension in the storytelling, keeping things compact and dynamic throughout, and harnessing all the film’s bittersweet qualities into a winning mix of youthful angst and bliss.
Director-screenwriter: Emma Kawawada
Cast: Lina Arashi, Daiken Okudaira, Arash Kahafi Zadeh, Lilly Kahafi Zadeh, Lion Kahafi Zadeh
Producers: Hiromi Morishige, Megumi Banse
Executive producers: Satoshi Kono, Eitaro Kobayashi, Hajime Ushioda, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Tom Yoda, Satoru Matsumoto
Director of photography: Hidetoshi Shinomiya
Editor: Shinichi Fushima
Production designer: Seo Hyeonsun
Music composer: Roth Bart Barton
Sound designer: Yuki Yaei
Production companies: Bandai Namco Arts, AOI Pro.
World sales: GAGA Corporation
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Generation Kplus)
In Japanese, Turkish and Kurdish
114 minutes
