The Little House (2014)

Japanese melodrama nominated for the Golden Bear at Berlin 2014, the 80th film from veteran director Yôji Yamada. A country girl comes to Tokyo in the 1930s to find domestic work, observing the bourgeois goings-on and indiscretions of her employers.

"Told mostly in flashback, the film cuts to 1935 when a naïve 18-year-old Taki (Haru Kuroki, Best Actress winner at Berlin 2014) travels to Tokyo from the rural Yamagata prefecture and finds a job as a maid for a middle-class family: Masaki Hirai, a toy-company executive, and his wife, Tokiko. Taki gets along well with the family, especially after she cares attentively to the couple’s 5-year-old son, Kyoichi, who contracts polio. But trouble soon appears in the form of art-school graduate Shoji, one of Masaki’s work colleagues. As Masaki is increasingly called away from home on business, a lonely Tokiko begins an affair with Shoji that only Taki knows about. While World War II rages around them, most of the drama takes place inside the modest red-tile-roofed house of the film’s title, ratcheting up the tension." (Seattle International Film Festival)

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