good back-story, and good acting

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

It was my understanding Maiko wanted this career. I did not get the feeling from the documentary that she was forced in any way by her parents to be a ballerina.

This documentary film described a Japanese young woman migrated forcefully by her mother to the European countries to learn the techniques of ballet dancing, then became a prima ballerina, the leading ballet dancer of the Norwegian National Ballet Company. She got married, then reached 30, the final premium age for pregnancy if she wanted a normal kid without the possibilities of getting complicated syndrome. But this decision of becoming a parent and a mother also casted a dark shadow over her dancing career; promising talented young ballet dancers were threatening to grab her leading position; her before and after pregnancy, a period not only not allowing her to dance but also might have changed her body structures. It's a journey, an Odyssey of anxiety, hesitation, wondering, admonition, desire and will power to fulfill her parental craving and in the meantime, to continue her career without losing her leading position in the company.All of these uncertainties would have been answered when you patiently watch this film unraveled in front of your eyes. But there's a dark thought after I have viewed it. I had contributed a review right after I have finished watching but later decided to delete it. Then again, that uneasy thought still bothered me a lot so far. So here I try to release it again: Why we parents always want to pave the way for our kids? Why we parents cannot allow our kids to have their own futures and to have their own choices and decisions to become an independent being instead of a 2nd edition of our own? Do we have the right to decide our children's future by forcing them to get on the road, a one-way, one-direction way of life that we parents consider that's the only way, the only better way for our children? Why we have to force our kids to learn so much things that actually not quite useful to them in their lives, such as dancing, singing, drawing, skating, piano or violin playing? Or we force them to learn more about chemistry, physics, algebra, math..... Why we want to force our children to a religion? Why we want them to have a religious belief, a faith? Why we think we parents have the right to force our children to believe something non-exist but insist them to believe they exist? Why we force our kids to believe in Gods? Why we force our daughters to cover up their heads and faces, just because you were forced to do so when you were a kid? Why we forced ourselves and our kids to grow beard just because you had been forced to become a Muslim when you didn't have the choice to believe or not to believe in anything? Why you force your kids to go to church every Sunday? Just because you were forced to do so when you were young and were led by your parents to the church? Why we have to have religion? Why the mother of Maiko had the right to force her daughter to migrate to a strange foreign nation to learn how to dance? Did we ever give our children any freedom to make their own choices? Why we parents just fail to realize that we only have the obligation to allow our children to grow up in a decent, healthy environment, a pure worry-free, burden-free childhood, but not the decision of what they should be? Every child should be the 1st edition of their own, a patent not controlled by their parents. Yes, we parents are like publishers, but not the authors of our children's lives. We publish kids, and every kid should be his or her own edition, they should not become your 2nd print, your 2nd copy. You have no right to revise its content, not even a word, a sentence or a paragraph, but as a publisher, the parents have the obligations and the duties to print out the books written by your own children without any amendment. But on the contrary, most of we parents just do the opposite, we forced our children into some unnatural, unoriginal and generic modes, we formatted them by our likings, we told them to write their lives and their futures in our way. While doing these unethical wrong-doings, we parents got divorced, remarried, drinking, committing adultery, breaking the law, drunk driving, cheating, lying, gambling, stealing, fighting, committing domestic violence, abusing each other, or even molest our kids.Why this leading character in this documentary film couldn't have a normal and happy childhood? Why her life was so doom-fully decided by her ambitious mother? Maiko, the dancing child, is nothing but a tragic product, and her dancing talent found out by her heartless and cruel mother had become the only one-way street of her life.