Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story (2006)
Average Rating: 7.2/10
Reviews Counted: 23
Fresh: 19 | Rotten: 4
No consensus yet.
Average Rating: 7.2/10
Critic Reviews: 13
Fresh: 12 | Rotten: 1
No consensus yet.
liked it
Average Rating: 3.5/5
User Ratings: 623
My Rating
Movie Info
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
Nov 24, 2006 Limited
Safari Media
- Official Site
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All Critics (23) | Top Critics (13) | Fresh (19) | Rotten (4)
This superb, quite moving film combines interviews, news footage and some reality TV-like sequences and works on a number of levels.
Top Critic... as thickets of history and culture are (too) neatly avoided, the viewer is also left in the dark.
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.
This topic deserved better than America's Most Wanted.
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.
This is one of the best docs in quite a while.
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.
A touching but slender piece on the number one news piece in Japan. But what is the rest of the story?
Details a Japanese cause célèbre with ramifications for Pacific Rim Asia and, today, for world politics at the highest levels.
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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