‘Shoplifters’ wins Palme d’Or
CANNES: Director Hirokazu Kore-eda won the Palme d’Or at the annual Cannes International Film Festival for his work Shoplifters, becoming the first Japanese to take the prize in 21 years.
The film depicts a fami ly who, while living on a grandmother’s meagre pension, send their children to steal from stores. A series of media repor ts about people fraudulently claiming the pension in Japan inspired Kore-eda’s film.
Before Kore-eda , the most recent Japanese winner of the Palme D’Or was director Shohei Imamura who won the award for his film The Eel in 1997. Shoplifters became the fifth Japanese work to receive the prestigious prize.
In Shoplifters, as he has done in other works, Kore-eda tried to shed light on a society in which people are struggling to make a living.
American director Spike Lee won the Grand Prix, the runner-up prize, for his film BlacKkKlansman in which a black detective infiltrates and rises through the ranks of a chapter of white supremacist group, the Ku Klux Klan.
At the award ceremony in the southern French coastal resort, Kore-eda, 55, told the audience, “My legs are shaking. I’m really honoured to be here”.
Rejoicing at the prize, he said, “I want to share the courage and hope [that comes with the award] with my staff and the film’s cast as well as with young directors”.
“I am hopeful that films can connect people who are in conflict in a separated world,” he said.
At a press conference after the ceremony, Kore-eda said, “I’m renewing my determination that I must create works that are worthy of a director who has won this award.”
A native of Tokyo, Kore-eda was born in 1962. After graduating from Waseda University, his directorial debut film Maboroshi won the Golden Osella prize at the Venice International Film Festival in 1995.
Kore-eda’s work Distance was his first to be nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2001.
Two years later, his film Like Father, Like Son, a story about a middle-class couple who learn the child they raised for six years is not their biological son but was switched at birth with a child from a family of modest means, received a special award at Cannes.
In his films, including his 2004 work Nobody Knows, which deals with child neglect, Kore-eda questions whether individuals are responsible for their criminal actions, or rather should blame be placed on the society.