"Sham is based on a real-life case from 2003 that convulsed Japanese media and public opinion. In the city of Fukuoka in south-west Japan, primary school teacher Seiichi Yabushita was accused of racially abusing and beating a pupil and driving him close to suicide on the grounds of the child supposedly having an American grandfather, his pure Japanese blood tainted by foreigners. But was the child lying on the instructions of his mother, the real abuser?"
"Mirroring the prosecution and defence cases in court, Miike gives us both sides of the story in quasi-Rashomon style: first, that of the boy's mother Mrs Himuro (Ko Shibasaki) and in this version, the behaviour of the teacher (Go Ayano) is truly sinister. Afterwards the prosecution version having taken up very little of the film we get the teacher's own account, and it soon dawns on us that this is in fact the objective reality."
The film Sham dramatizes a 2003 Fukuoka case in which teacher Seiichi Yabushita was accused of racially abusing and beating a pupil believed to have an American grandfather. The narrative alternates prosecution and defence perspectives in a quasi-Rashomon structure, first presenting the mother's account that casts the teacher as sinister, then revealing the teacher's own account as the objective reality. The teacher is portrayed as gentle, beloved by pupils, and unfairly pressured into apologizing and confessing to corporal punishment by the headteacher. The film adopts Miike's penchant for shocks and J-horror aesthetics while clearly siding with the teacher's innocence.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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