Events

Japan Prize 2022
Events and Awards Ceremony

November 1 (Tue)

1:30P.M. – 2:45P.M.

In collaboration with Prix Jeunesse
Screening: Why Didn’t You Stay for Me?

The event was a collaboration between Prix Jeunesse International Festival—a Munich-based film festival with almost 60 years of history—and the Japan Prize.

The session began with a screening of the film Why Didn’t You Stay for Me?, the winner of the Prix Jeunesse Heart Prize awarded to the program that most touched the heart by vote of this year’s festival participants.

Following 10 to 13 year-old children who have lost a parent to suicide, this documentary was directed by Milou Gevers, who herself lost her mother to suicide when she was 18 years old. During the session, Milou was asked about the inspiration for the film. She replied: “I realized that there were no documentaries from the perspective of the children left behind, and I wanted to present the stories of children who had experienced the suicide of a parent.”

The moderator Gotoh Lea—an NHK director who has interviewed and covered stories about people experiencing suicidal thoughts—responded: “Watching the documentary, I felt that meeting people suffering from the same circumstances or sharing the same thoughts and emotions can lead to hope.”

An audience member asked: “What do you expect from the documentary being used as a teaching material?” Milou concluded her comments by saying that “In the Netherlands, there is data which shows that on average, there is one child who lost a parent to suicide in every school. For this reason, my hope is the documentary will help prepare the schools to warmly welcome these children back to the classroom.”

* The film introduced in this session has been edited and shortened for our web page.

Gotoh Lea
Moderator

Gotoh Lea

Director, Welfare Programs, NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation)

Japan

Gotoh Lea joined NHK in 2010. In 2016, she began working on the social-welfare program “Heart Net TV”. In 2020, she joined the production team for a project that makes NHK television content more accessible through sign language.
Her standout programs include “Ikiru Tame No Telebi” (TV for the Sake of Living), which reaches out to young people who have expressed suicidal feelings; “#On the Night of August 31st” (awarded the Special Prize in Honour of the President of the Italian Republic at the Prix Italia competition in 2018), which combined TV, a livestream, and social media to create a place where suicidal teenagers could share their feelings without fear; and “Watashi Wa Papageno”(I, Papageno-Our Life Stories with Suicidal Feelings), which tackles suicidal feelings in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic by leveraging the Papageno effect (the influence that mass media can have by responsibly reporting on suicide and presenting non-suicide alternatives to crises).

Milou Gevers
Speaker

Milou Gevers

Director

Netherlands

Graduated from the Dutch Film Academy in 2020 with her documentary Why didn’t you stay for me? Four kids, who all lost a parent to suicide, share their journey from the moment they heard the news. The filmmaker, who experienced the same tragedy, asks them the questions no one dared to ask her at the time. The film has been awarded with a Student Academy Award by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and a Prix Jeunesse among other prizes. Milou is currently working on her first feature documentary.

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