Kore-eda – director whose films never lack heart
CANNES: Hirokazu Kore-eda – who won the top prize at the Cannes film festival – is Japan’s answer to Ken Loach, a director whose stories about struggling ordinary people never fail to touch.
His gentle slices of ordinary life have been praised for their humanism, with Shoplifters, about a group of Tokyo misfits and crooks who form a kind of alternative family, called a “modern day Oliver Twist”.
Variety said its “protagonists’ rough-and-ready lifestyle demonstrate that people can find comfort even in the worst economic conditions”.
Critics said that the film also exposes how the “state fails its neediest individuals”.
Kore-eda told reporters that the film was perhaps his most socially conscious to date.
“Still, the point of entry to the story is the family,” he added.
“I kind of ask if people who are not related by blood can build a family by spending time together.”
Kore-eda, 55, scored a big international arthouse hit with his babyswap tale Like Father, Like Son, which won the jury prize at Cannes five years ago.
It tells the story of a workaholic father called Ryota and his neglected wife who pours her energy into their six-year-old boy Keita.
But one day their lives are turned upside-down by a phone call from the hospital where he was born saying that a nurse had switched him with another infant.
Lawyers get involved and Ryota insists that he should raise his bio- logical child instead of the sweetnatured but directionless Keita, who only knows him as a father.
Critics praised it as a beautifully worked take on the nature-versusnurture debate.
Born in Tokyo, Kore-eda set out to be a novelist but then began working in television.
He first made the shortlist for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2001 with Distance, his examination of the devastating effect a cult massacre has on the families of its victims.
But it was not until three years later with Nobody Knows that Koreeda really had his breakthrough outside Japan. Most of his movies since have been shown at Cannes.
Like in his Cannes film Shoplifters, Kore-eda has constructed his own cinematic family of actors who appear in many of his films, including Hiroshi Abe and Kirin Kiki, who often plays nasty grandmother figures.