Director

Hirokazu Kore-eda

Japan | 2018 | 121 min | Japanese

• Producer Matsuzaki  Kaoru, Yose Akihiko, Taguchi Hijiri
• Production Company AOI Promotion, Fuji Television Network, GAGA
• Screenplay Hirokazu Kore-eda
• Cinematography Ryoto Kondo
• Editing Hirokazu Kore-eda
• Sound Kazohito Tomita
• Cast Franky Lily , Sakura Ando , Mayu Matsuka , Kilin Kiki , Kairi Jyo , Miyo Sasaki
• Contacts

  Teleview International

  mireillef@teleview-int.tv

About the Film

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters took the Cannes Film Festival’s top honors last May. This was the first time that a Japanese-language movie was walking away with the Palme d’Or after 1997, when Shohei Imamura’s The Eel won the top prize.

Throughout his career, Kore-eda has talked about family and relationships (Nobody Knows, After the Storm), and Shoplifters zooms in on a group of people that pretend to be a family. In a country that takes enormous pride in honesty (people leaving their bicycles unlocked, men and women picking up newspapers from an unattended roadside shop and dropping the correct change in the box kept there), this ‹family’, which lives on an elderly woman’s pension, adds to its income by shoplifting. Everybody is happy, and everything looks fine until one night the ‹family’ finds a little girl out on the street, shivering in Tokyo’s biting cold; and she is brought home, given hot soup and gradually pushed into the nefarious business. She turns out to be an ace shoplifter, but she has to be given a physical makeover and a new name to avoid detection as the police begin a probe when the girl, accepted into the shoplifting ‘family’, is reported missing by her own family.

Shoplifters is a marvelous work about how relationships are created and sustained in this fragile world of economic deprivation, hunger and uncertainty. In many ways, the film runs like a thriller, and it is only in the end that we are let into the truth.

Gautaman Bhaskaran