MUMBAI: Hackney Lullabies, a 10-minute Japanese documentary about migrant women raising children in the East London suburb of Hackney, is this year‘s proud winner of the Berlin Today Award, a prize given to the best of five short films selected by the Berlinale Talent Campus.
Lullabies develops this initial idea into a compassionate, intimate account of the difficulties mothers face raising children in a new country. "She has her roots here, which I don‘t," one of the mothers says about her daughter, encapsulating the complexity of the situation. The women, all residents of Hackney who have moved there from various parts of the world, are shown to be sensitive to these difficulties even as they appreciate the opportunities their children will have in their new home.
Director Kyoko Miyake moved from Japan to the UK years ago, and was inspired both by her own experience as a migrant and the making of her previous film, Mrs. Burnes Sunday Roast.