On the films of Hirokazu Kore-eda that focus on children and what they do differently.

Kore-eda's films that center children — Nobody Knows, I Wish, Like Father Like Son, Shoplifters — share a specific quality of attention to childhood experience that most films about children don't have.

Most films about children are really about adults: the children exist as the occasion for the adults' emotional journey. The children are stakes rather than subjects.

In Kore-eda's films, the children's experience is the subject. Nobody Knows is told from the perspective of children abandoned by their mother, and it never cuts away to the mother's experience or to the social services that might intervene. We are inside the children's world, and the adult world is visible only as it impinges on them.

I Wish follows two brothers separated by their parents' divorce, each living with one parent. The film's formal commitment is to the boys' plan — a superstition about witnessing the collision of two bullet trains — which the adults treat as childish and which the film treats as more serious than what the adults are doing.

What Kore-eda understands about children that most filmmakers don't is that they are not waiting to become adults. They are living their own lives, in their own moral universe, with their own stakes.