They are all well-known faces on Japanese TV and bring real experience and depth to their characters and to this film. This film stars Masaharu Fukuyama, a musician, singer and actor, and Lily Franky, a popular comedian and actor, as the two fathers of this story and Machiko Ono, film and TV actress, and Yoko Maki, also a film and TV actress, as the two mothers. It was also shown at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival, and the 2013 Vancouver International Film Festival.

It was nominated for the Palme d’Or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, and it won the Jury Prize. Like Father Like Son is again in a similar vein of looking at human lives as we see how two families cope when they discover that their sons were mixed up at birth and that each set of parents had been bringing up the child of different people. In 2008 Koreeda’s film Still Walking focused on a family over 24 hours as they commemorate the death of the oldest son 15 years before. This movie won several awards at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. In 2004 Koreeda began to gain international fame with his movie Nobody Knows which was based on the true story of four children who had been abandoned and who survived for nine months by themselves. They would then experience this memory forever. In the 1998 movie After Life he told the story of souls, people who have just died, who need to choose their happiest memory to serve as their heaven.

Hirokazu Koreeda is a director who has made the move from directing documentaries in the 1990s to now writing and directing films which document human lift.

Currently out on release on DVD from Arrow Films Review by Mike Sullivan

Japanese movie like father like son