Tokyo International Film Festival: A Girl Named Ann

This gritty documentary-style drama tackles contemporary issues with a genuine social conscience to show a side of Japan not everyone knows. Inspired partly by true events, the film focuses on a young junkie prostitute struggling to turn her life around. A Girl Named Ann is especially engrossing to anyone familiar with the pull of methamphetamines and the distant margins of society.

Yumi Kawai brilliantly plays a vulnerable young woman with a pathetic history of truancy and a nasty ex-con mother who forced her to sell her body from age 12. A gangster boyfriend creates her inevitable meth habit that she also funds by shoplifting.

Step forward hero cop—a burly and unlikely detective who invites her to join his addiction recovery group, Salvage. He also helps find her a job and enrolls her in school again, despite her mother’s best attempts to force her back on the game. A scandal rag hack gets embroiled, too, as does a runaway neighbor who dumps her baby on Ann to thicken the plot. The climax is sad, to say the least.

Shot on location and with English subtitles, it was screened at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan on October 15 as part of its collaboration with the Tokyo International Film Festival from October 28 to November 6.