Shoplifters
U/A: Drama
Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda
Actors: Lily Franky, Sakura Ando
Rating:

Honesty and compassion cut through the heart of this film. It is, on the face of it, about a supposedly dysfunctional family, eking out a living in the margins of society. And then it turns out that the folk in the film do not even constitute a family — then, what does?

As in, what is a family? Mere by-product of biology, where constituents essentially get together, through accidents of birth, that none has a choice over anyway? We didn't really choose our parents. Neither did they pick us up from a human zoo; the various permutations in a gene pool being the luck of draw.