From its Palme d'Or win to its 4 million Japanese viewers, the triumph of "A Family Affair" took its author by surprise, as he thought he had made, with a close-knit team and a modest budget, a more confidential film than his previous ones. Hirokazu Kore-eda, who still writes, directs and edits the film himself, explains that he was inspired by news stories to imagine this "family of shoplifters" (the original title, in Japanese) to which, from the outset, one wants to belong. He wanted to show through it the richness of the bonds of the heart, the attention to the most fragile, the coexistence of generations; but also to highlight the life of these "invisible" people, more and more numerous, reduced to an extreme precariousness by ultraliberalism.
