Shoplifters

**Shoplifters: a raw portrait of a family that isn't one**

The camera follows Osamu and his adopted son as they shoplift in a supermarket. It's not a heist, but a game: the child hides products under his jacket, the father pretends not to see. But when they find an abandoned girl on a cold balcony, the line between theft and survival blurs. *Shoplifters* (2017), by Hirokazu Kore-eda, is not a film about thieves, but about what makes us feel at home.

Winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes, this Japanese film avoids easy sentimentality. Kore-eda builds a marginal family with the same delicacy that other directors film dynasties: every gesture, every silence, counts. There are no villains, just people trapped in a system that ignores them. The grandmother shoplifts medicine, the mother pretends to be a domestic worker, the father teaches the child to steal without being noticed. Everyone lies, but no one does it out of malice.

What hurts is not the crime, but the tenderness with which it's committed. One scene sums up the tone: the family celebrates a birthday with a stolen cake, and for a moment, poverty seems like a minor detail. Kore-eda doesn't judge; he shows. And in that gesture, the film becomes universal. It's not just about Japan, but about any place where dignity is negotiated in small thefts.

The ending — predictable but necessary — hits hard because there's no going back. *Shoplifters* doesn't seek to move, but to remind us that family is not chosen by blood, but by who's got your back when the world forgets about you. Brutal, without fanfare.

Koreeda signs his masterpiece: a miracle of tenderness and devastation that redefines the concept of blood and family.

" Sometimes it's better to choose your own family. — Nobuyo Shibata

" I only taught you that because I had nothing else to teach you. — Osamu Shibata