【Takeshi Kitano Special】 Kids Return (Japan, 1996, PG)

Rating: PG – Parental guidance recommended for younger viewers; contains coarse language.

Chosen by your votes, Kids Return is our third Kitano Takeshi film of the year.

Rather than chasing the soaring highs of a typical coming-of-age story, Kitano pares everything back to the silences, the detours, and the sting of sudden disappointment. His camera is measured, the dialogue stripped to the bone, the humor razor-dry. In that restraint lies the film’s power: a portrait of youth marked less by triumph than by a lingering sense of loss and fragile dignity.

The film follows two drifting high-school friends whose lives split apart—one enters the boxing ring, the other drifts into the yakuza underworld. Their flashes of success prove fleeting, soon eclipsed by failure and disillusionment. Yet Kitano’s minimalist touch, paired with Joe Hisaishi’s haunting score, elevates these fragments into something lyrical, almost musical in their rhythm.

Their parallel arcs rise and collapse like orbiting circles, returning always to the same point. Beneath its simplicity, Kids Return reflects the inertia of 1990s Japan—a society caught between ambition and resignation—and captures, with quiet poignancy, the endless cycle of trying, failing, and beginning again.

Location: Ellen Melville Centre, 2 Freyberg Place, Auckland CBD, Auckland 1000
Date and Time: Thursday, September 11, 2025, at 6:30 PM
Fee: Free entry!

Note: We’re hosting the event on the second floor of the Ellen Melville Center. Please use the entrance on the right side of the building on the ground floor. Once you go up to the second floor, you’ll see our venue right there.