Children Untold

Toronto International Film Festival: CHILDREN UNTOLD 🎌 わたしの知らない子どもたち (2026)

“Children don't start wars and they have no power to end wars, but they are the ones who suffer the most.”

— Catherine Russell

There were a recorded 120,000 orphans in Japan after the Second World War. CHILDREN UNTOLD is for them—for the children without a voice, without a home, and without anyone left to protect them. Children who survived by holding onto the hope that, somehow, someway, better days were ahead.


CHILDREN UNTOLD is an adaptation of director Miwa Nishikawa’s unpublished post-World War II drama novel, which had its world premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

The story follows a young girl left orphaned after Japan’s defeat, struggling to survive in the underground streets surrounding Tokyo’s train stations.


To escape the fate being forced upon women around her, she disguises herself as a boy and joins a crew of young Yakuza lackeys. Together, they navigate a country trying to piece itself back together from the wreckage of war, searching for whatever scraps of hope they can find along the way.


As someone who visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum last year, this film echoes that exhibits sentiment: war stories must be told or we run the risk of reliving a painful history.
And war is difficult to process no matter how it’s presented. The death, destruction, and atrocities that come with it are almost impossible to comprehend, but there is something uniquely devastating about seeing children inherit the consequences of decisions they had absolutely no part in making.


Normally, post-war stories are told through the perspective of an adult reminiscing on a lived experience or recounting what it was like to live through that period. This is a rare case where the story is told from the perspective of children who had to endure a cutthroat world that’s grounded in a historically accurate reality that makes what happens that much more disheartening to watch. They lose their parents, they are exploited, they are underfed, neglected, and pushed into working conditions no child should ever have to endure, and yet, they keep going.

That perspective gives the film some of its most affecting moments. This war isn’t presented through military strategy or political decisions, it is presented through the children left behind when those decisions are made.

CHILDREN UNTOLD feels more compelling as an anecdotal portrait of post-war Japan than as a fully functioning narrative. There are great performances throughout, including a who’s who of Japanese cinema, but the strength of those performances sometimes feels at odds with how loosely the story itself is constructed.

A big part of that comes down to focus. Every child in this crew feels like they have a story worth telling. There are layers to these boys beyond simply being young survivors trying to get by, but the film keeps shifting its attention, and by choosing to focus on one child over another, it ultimately dilutes the collective story it is trying to tell.

The way the film plays out is true to its design. Its story is pulled from an unpublished novel, and you can feel that in the way the scenes unfold. The film unfolds through formative moments, each one introducing another layer of hardship, another worsening circumstance, another reminder of how little control these children have over their own lives.

CHILDREN UNTOLD is less interested in giving us a conventional objective and more interested in confronting us with the consequences of war for the people who have the least power to stop it, and I for one appreciated that. Especially when it comes to the expectation that this next generation will end up being responsible for rebuilding and uplifting a country whose adults never had their best interests in mind. That idea reminded me of GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES (1988), which captures the emotional devastation of this period in Japanese history through the eyes of the youth. But where that film devastates you through intimacy and tragedy, CHILDREN UNTOLD takes a broader approach. 

It works well as a piece of historical context, highlighting other key pieces of history that often get overlooked. Korean factions still held grievances against the Japanese, the war in China (which is often brushed aside) is at least acknowledged, and the United States was essentially given free rein in a country that had to live alongside those who brought an end to so many of their families. None of these elements are fully fleshed-out plot points, but they have enough presence to make you understand the full reality of that time. They remind you that the aftermath of war isn't as simple as a country losing and another country winning. There are layers of resentment, displacement, occupation, poverty, and trauma that continue long after the fighting has stopped.

That makes CHILDREN UNTOLD a difficult film to fully embrace as a conventional narrative, but an easy one to appreciate for what it is trying to preserve. It feels less like a story being told and more like a piece of history being pulled out of the ground and placed directly in front of you.

At times, I wanted more from the characters and a stronger narrative throughline to tie everything together. But I also couldn't shake the feeling that the film's fragmented structure reflects the world it is depicting. These children aren't living through a carefully constructed story. They are living through one terrible moment after another, never knowing where the next one will take them.

CHILDREN UNTOLD is ultimately a story about hope, resilience, and, above all else, being a victim of the age you were born into 

Enjoy!

7.1/10 🍿 🎥

Runtime: 2hrs30mins

Where: World Premiere at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival

The Richmond Reviewer Children Untold Review - September 13th, 2026.