Beautiful Children — Michael Kenyon

A man wakes up in a hospital with one word in his head: Sapporo. He dimly recalls this as the place where he was raised, and it becomes his name and identity. Like an immigrant without language or memory, he relies on his young son as guide and interpreter, but soon drifts away into what some might see as madness. His son, meanwhile, has escaped to the citys underworld. His laconic account of the anarchic, callous, tender tribe of street kids that is compelling as a documentary and is fiercely poetic. Parallel to these worlds, and destined to reconnect them, is a young womans journey through the Third World as surreal in its poverty and shifting realities. The Beautiful Children is a triumph of language and structure; it is also a haunting, and haunted, elegy upon innocence.