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Shoplifters (2018)
a.k.a 万引き家族/Manbiki Kazoku
Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda
Plot Synopsis[]
A family of small-time crooks (Lily Frankie and Sakura Ando) take in a child (Miyu Sasaki) they find outside in the cold.
Male Deaths[]
- None
Female Deaths[]
- Kirin Kiki [Hatsue Shubata]
Trivia[]
- The original title of the film, Manbiki Kazoku, literally translates as Shoplifting Family.
- First Japanese movie to win the Palme d'Or since The Eel (1997) in 1997.
- Director Hirokazu Koreeda said that he developed the story for Shoplifters when considering his earlier film Like Father, Like Son (2013), with the question "what makes a family"? He had been considering a film exploring this question for years before making Shoplifters. Koreeda described it as his "socially conscious" film. With this story, Koreeda said he did not want the perspective to be from only a few individual characters, but to capture "the family within the society", a "wide point of view" in the vein of his 2004 film Nobody Knows (2004). He set his story in Tokyo and was also influenced by the Japanese Recession, including media reports of how people lived in poverty and of shoplifting.
- To research the project, Hirokazu Koreeda toured an orphanage and wrote a scene inspired by a girl there who read from Swimmy by Leo Lionni.
- Nobuyo wears a shirt with a Martin Luther King Jr. quotation: "Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. "
- After winning the Jury Prize on the Croisette in 2013 for Like Father, Like Son (2013), Koreeda left with the supreme award, the Palme d'Or, for "Shoplifters", five years later.
- The film premiered on 13 May 2018 at the Cannes Film Festival, where it went on to win the Palme d'Or. Shoplifters won the Asia Pacific Screen Award for Best Feature Film, and is nominated for both the Golden Globe and the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
- Official submission of Japan for the 'Best Foreign Language Film' category of the 91st Academy Awards in 2019.
- This film is in the Official Top 250 Narrative Feature Films on Letterboxd.
- Koreeda embarked on this project because he had heard of families illegally receiving retirement pensions from their long-dead parents.