Inhalt

A young woman trying desperately to escape from an evil spell leaves home. She finds herself in a foreign place, where she is convinced, with the logic of all fairy tales, that by collecting a precise number of stories and arranging them in just the right way, she can be released from bewitchment. This voyage, from New York to Tokyo, begins Shelly Silver’s intimate documentary. What follows is a complex weaving of stories told by a group of Japanese grandmothers, mothers and daughters, ranging in age from 15 to 83. The stories recount each woman’s personal journey from child to adulthood – their own experiences of leaving home. Some funny, others tragic, the stories bear witness to the strength of these women, the difficulty of their choices, and the strong and complicated bonds linking generation to generation, linking grandmothers to mothers to daughters. The images illustrating their stories range from everyday scenes from these women’s lives to more evocative images which capture the haunting quality of childhood. Framing the stories is a traditional Japanese folktale which is recounted throughout the film Called „The Oni Laughs“, it is an unusual and somewhat shocking narrative of a mother’s search for her abducted daughter, kidnapped by a monster on the eve of her wedding. 37 Stories about Leaving Home provides a rare and personal view into the lives of these Japanese women. It points to the enormous societal changes that have occurred in Japan over the last few generations, showing how these women are both influencing and coping with these changes in their own different, individual and creative way.