Children Untold Opens Toronto Platform With Postwar Orphan Story

Children Untold, the new film from Japanese director Nishikawa Miwa, opened the Platform competition at the Toronto International Film Festival with a story about Japan's war orphans, according to Variety.

Platform is a juried section within Toronto where selected films compete for a prize. Children Untold arrives in Japanese cinemas on Oct. 16, Variety reported.

The film centres on Kotoko. She is 12. She dreamed of a life in music in the aftermath of the Second World War firebombing of Tokyo, then learns to shine shoes to eat and falls in with a band of orphaned boys sheltering under a local yakuza clan. An earlier festival description said she disguises herself as a boy to survive in postwar Tokyo, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Koyae Ami plays Kotoko. Nikaido Fumi co-stars as Sone, Kotoko's former teacher. Sone loses her fiance in the war and her job in its aftermath, is pushed into prostitution and sets out to find her former student.

Yakusho Koji appears as Jinpei. The casting reunites the actor with Nishikawa after Under the Open Sky, her 2021 drama in which he played a man modelled on a real war orphan who grew up on the streets of postwar Japan and drifted into crime and prison.

Nishikawa began developing Children Untold in 2020 and built it from archival testimony about war orphans. That research path explains the link between the two films, one following an older survivor and the other starting with children on the street.

Children Untold was scheduled to have its world premiere on Sept. 10 as the opening title of the Platform competition, according to Asian Movie Pulse. Festival listings also showed a Platform screening on Fri. 11 at 9:25 AM, according to TIFF.

What makes this stand out for festival audiences is the timescale. Six years of development, archival material and a returning lead actor have fed into a competition slot and an October domestic release date.