An award-winning Japanese feature is the Bermuda International Film Festival?s Film Series selection for October.

?Nobody Knows?, which screened at the Cannes, Toronto and Telluride festivals in addition to many others, will be shown Thursday in the Tradewinds Auditorium at the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute. The film, which starts at 7.30 p.m., will screen in Japanese with English sub-titles.

Director Hirokazu Koreeda?s film won 13 international awards, including a Best Actor nod at Cannes 2004 for lead Yuya Yagira.

Based on the shocking true story of a mother who abandoned her children, leaving them in their home to fend for themselves, the film is a tragic, haunting and beautifully heart-wrenching portrait of child abandonment.

Four siblings live happily with their mother in a small apartment in Tokyo. The children all have different fathers. They have never been to school.

The very existence of three of them has been hidden from the landlord. One day, the mother leaves behind a little money and a note, asking her 12-year-old boy (Yuya Yagira) to look after the others. And so begins the children?s odyssey, a journey nobody knows.

Though engulfed by the cruel fate of abandonment, the four children do their best to survive, in their own little world, devising and following their own set of rules.

When they are forced to engage with the world outside their cocooned universe, the fragile balance that has sustained them collapses. Their innocent longing for their mother, their wary fascination toward the outside world, their anxiety over their increasingly desperate situation, their inarticulate cries, their kindness to each other, their determination to survive on wits and courage ? make for compelling watching.

Ticket can be purchased at www.biff.bm