The inexplicable disappearance of a 13-year-old Japanese girl prompts a 20-year international investigation that eventually leads to North Korea in directors Chris Sheridan and Patty Kim's harrowing tale of a most unusual abduction. It was a typical day in 1977 when adolescent student Megumi Yokota vanished from the Japanese coastline without a trace. Abducted by North Korean spies and spirited away to an unfamiliar land, Yokota would spend two decades on the Korean Peninsula as her parents
embarked on a frantic and desperate search for their missing daughter. Award-winning filmmaker Jane Campion (The Piano) produces this remarkable tale of one girl's incredible intercontinental ordeal, and her parent's staunch refusal to give up hope even in their darkest hour. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi
The events that unfold in the new documentary Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story could have been told as fiction, but they would have seemed too much -- too unbelievable, too merciless.
There's no denying the fascinating nature of the story, about a 13-year-old Japanese girl whose mysterious 1977 disappearance was ultimately credited to nothing less than a kidnapping by North Korean spies.
Abduction uses interviews, vintage photos and re-creations to tell the sad story of love and hope in riveting, suspenseful style. So powerful is this film, it brought tears to my eyes.
Canadians Chris Sheridan and Patty Kim's spellbinding documentary focuses on the relentless search for the truth by Megumi's parents and families of other abductees.
Abduction is a skillful interweaving of emotional, personal stories with the thicker strands of history, and a reminder that in reality such tales rarely have a tidy end.
Incredibly powerful -- and never more so than when the filmmakers turn their cameras on the Yokotas and other victims' families, many of whom channel their pain and anger into political activism.
At heart, it remains a wrenching human-interest story about a group of family members who refuse to allow their loved ones to become casualties of international diplomacy by simply disappearing.
This is a fascinating, underreported piece of recent world history, but Patty Kim and Chris Sheridan's documentary Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story doesn't do it full justice.
Abduction pushes its poignant buttons while casting Megumi's kidnapping as a heinous crime, yet to its credit, it consistently does so with a deftly understated, devastating touch.
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