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Chinook Films presents Shoplifters

Chinook Film Group is kicking off its Winter Series with the screening of Shoplifters on Feb. 20 at the Cochrane Movie House. Shoplifters is a 2018 Japanese drama film directed, written and edited by Hirokazu Kore-eda.
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Chinook Films Group will present Shoplifters on Feb. 20.

Chinook Film Group is kicking off its Winter Series with the screening of Shoplifters on Feb. 20 at the Cochrane Movie House.

Shoplifters is a 2018 Japanese drama film directed, written and edited by Hirokazu Kore-eda. The film stars Lily Franky as Osamu Shibata and Sakura Ando as Nobuyo Shibata which tells the story of a family that relies on shoplifting to cope with a life of poverty.

Middle-aged and marginally employed, the Shibata couple is crammed into a ramshackle apartment on the outskirts of Tokyo, along with a pre-teen son named Shota played by Jyo Kairi, Nobuyo’s younger sister, Aki, played by Mayu Matsuoka, and the frail grandmother whose monthly pension keeps everything from falling apart. The musty hovel can hardly fit all of the life that’s stuffed inside of it; random boxes and old toys are scattered in every direction, as if everyone would rather live in the mess they’ve made than dare to remember all the things they’ve lost.

Osamu and Shota routinely shoplift goods, using a system of hand signals to communicate. Osamu tells Shota it is fine to steal things that have not been sold, as they do not belong to anyone. One especially cold night, they see Yuri, a neighborhood girl they regularly observe locked out on an apartment balcony. They bring her to their home, intending to only have her stay for dinner, but choose not to return her after finding symptoms of abuse.

Director Hirokazu Kore-eda said that he developed the story for Shoplifters when considering his earlier film Like Father, like Son, with the question "what makes a family?" He had been considering a film exploring this question for 10 years before making Shoplifters. Kore-eda described it as his "socially conscious" film. With this story, Kore-eda 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. 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, Kore-eda toured an orphanage and wrote a scene inspired by a girl there who read from Swimmy by Leo Lionni.

As of 27 January 2019, Shoplifters has grossed $2.3 million in the United States and Canada, and $62.5 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $64.8 million.

The film earned $37.8 million US in Japan, making it one of the highest-grossing domestic films of the year. In China, it grossed $15 million US in what The Hollywood Reporter called "an unprecedentedly strong performance for an imported pure art house drama." In its 10th weekend of release, following its Oscar nomination, the film made $190,000 from 114 theaters, for a running total of $2.5 million.

On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 99 per cent based on 165 reviews.

Tickets for the 7 p.m. show are available at the Gentry Espresso and Wine Bar for $10 a ticket.


Troy Durrell

About the Author: Troy Durrell

Troy is the Sports and Entertainment Reporter for the Cochrane Eagle.
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