Giovanni's Island

A touching story of survival and intercultural relations at the end of WWII during the Soviet occupation of the Kuril Islands. A pair of Japanese children befriend a young Russian girl on the remote island of Shikotan at the end of the war, while simultaneously discovering that the horrors of mankind don’t stop when wars end. There is a strong message that friendship and empathy are stronger than linguistic and cultural barriers. I really enjoyed the magical realism infused into the story, in connection with a classic Japanese storybook called Night on the Galactic Railroad. In Giovanni’s Island, we are told that this galactic railway takes us to heaven, where we become stars who shine and watch over our loved ones on earth. Just a little bit too fanciful and bordering on sappy, but this belief shields the characters (and perhaps the audience) from the realities of death and suffering. There is much to unpack and reflect on if this movie sounds like your cup of tea. On another topic that I’ve written on another Japanese war film: I don’t deny the right of the Japanese to confront their own trauma from the Second World War, but I condemn the one-sided victim narrative created by the Japanese media. This is especially deeply rooted in me, as I have a Chinese half of my family, and a grandmother who survived the war and 8 years of Japanese occupation in Shanghai. I really enjoyed the humanity evoked in Giovanni’s Island, but there is always a metaphoric lump in my throat when I watch Japanese depictions of the war, knowing that tens of millions of Asian people were slaughtered in horrific ways to expand their empire. Yet, in Japan they only churn out films about innocence lost on their home islands (along with fierce denial of war crimes). The bigger picture of representing WWII in the Japanese Film Industry is deeply problematic, and as much as I enjoyed this film it was unavoidably tainted for me.