Stir Cheat Sheet: 6 fine films beyond Shoplifters by Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda
With Family Matters, The Cinematheque fetes the filmmaker who finds the poetic in the everyday
Like Father, Like Son
The Cinematheque presents Family Matters: The Films of Kore-eda Hirokazu from October 16 through November
CHANCES ARE you’ve seen, and been quietly devastated by, Kore-eda Hirokazu’s 2018 feature Shoplifters—the story of a makeshift family on the margins of Japanese society that won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. But that film was far from a one-off—a fact The Cinematheque will prove in a retrospective of the filmmaker’s nuanced explorations of the bonds of blood and love, called Family Matters: The Films of Kore-eda Hirokazu all month.
Here’s a primer on the six films you need to see:
After Life
October 17 at 4 pm and October 22 at 6 pm
It was the new restoration of this 1998 film, the director’s international breakthrough, that prompted the entire retrospective at The Cinematheque. Kore-eda shoots it in a documentary style to offset the high-concept fantasy of the plot: counsellors in a limbo realm help the recently deceased to select a single cherished memory from their life; it’s then recreated on film for them to take into eternity. To create the script, the director interviewed more than 500 people from different backgrounds, asking them which single memory they would choose to keep with them forever.
Nobody Knows
October 16 at 6 pm and October 17 at 7 pm
Four young siblings, each from a different father, have to go it alone when their mother abandons them in a Tokyo apartment. The film was inspired by the real Sugamo child-abandonment incident of 1988, when four underage children were left without supervision for months without detection. It’s heartbreaking, with the director telling the story from the point of view of the children, who still manage to find time to be playful despite the hardships they face.
Nobody Knows
Still Walking
October 16 at 9 pm and Octobet 20 at 6 pm
Kore-eda’s 2008 feature, centred on a more traditional “family”, unfolds over one day and night at a house in a small seaside town. Here, the Yokoyama clan reunites every year to mark the anniversary of the death of its eldest son, Junpei, who drowned in the sea. The filmmaker made Still Walking in the wake of losing his own mother, and it’s imbued with a deep and complex understanding of grief. Indiewire’s Joshua Rothkopf has called it the best Japanese film of all time.
Maborosi
October 20 at 8:35 pm and October 25 at 6:15 pm
Kore-eda took the Venice Film Festival’s Best Director prize and VIFF’s Dragons and Tigers Award for this stunning tone poem on what it’s like to go on living in the wake of a loved one’s suicide. The story follows a widow and her young son as they move to a remote seaside town after her husband’s apparent death by his own hand. Kore-eda conjures a bleak emotional landscape rife with shadows; the Japanese title means something akin to “ghostly light”. It’s based on a novel by Teru Miyamoto.
I Wish
November 4 and 6 at 6 pm
Koichi and Ryu, played by real-life brothers Koki and Ohshirô Maeda, are two brothers who have been separated because of their parents’ divorce—one living with the father, the other with the mother. Set against their hopes and fears is a volcano on the verge of erupting, and two new bullet trains that might hold some cosmic key to the boys’ dream of their family reuniting. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw has called it his favourite Kore-eda film ever. Listen for Japanese alt-rockers Quruli on the soundtrack.
Like Father, Like Son
November 4 and 6 at 8:45 pm and November 7 at 4 pm
A workaholic architect and his wife get news that their six-year-old son was accidentally swapped at birth and may not be their own. Here we see Kore-eda, in his signature low-key way, dig into themes of separation and parental responsibility that go back to Nobody Knows and I Wish. The film also returns to his questions around whether familial bonds go beyond blood. This work focuses specifically on fatherhood—a resonant theme for Kore-eda, who grew up without a father, and is a father himself. DreamWorks Studios reportedly acquired remake rights to Like Father, Like Son after the film caught the eye of Steven Spielberg at Cannes.
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