Family guy

Celebrated Japanese film-maker Hirokazu Kore-eda talks about taking his deft touch with parenthood dramas to South Korea for his latest.

- RUSSELL BAILLIE

To be a kid in a  film by Hirokazu Kore-eda is to have a seemingly rough start in life. In his previous movies, kids have been swapped at birth (Like Father, Like Son), abandoned in a Tokyo apartment (Nobody Knows), separated from their siblings by divorce (I Wish) or have been orphans who have fallen in with a gang of petty thieves (the Cannes-winning Shoplifters).

The Japanese director's latest feature starts with a newborn abandoned in a church "baby box" in Busan, South Korea. Only the kid is spirited away by a laundry worker (Parasite star Song Kang-ho) and his accomplice (Gang Dong-won), who run a black-market operation in selling babies to desperate would-be parents.

But, like Kore-eda's previous films, it somehow becomes an affecting story of familial bonds and the protective instincts of parenthood qualities that have made his films both critically acclaimed and accessible to festival and arthouse audiences around the world.

Broker is Kore-eda's second film outside Japan after 2019's The Truth, which he made in France with Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche. They played famous actress mother and screenwriter daughter in a clash over the veteran star's newly published memoir.

But he's not abandoned his homeland. Since Broker, he's completed The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House, a gentle, hunger-inducing Netflix series about two 16-year-old girls who leave their hometown to become apprentice geishas in Kyoto, where they find their own surrogate family.

With Broker in New Zealand cinemas now, a Zoom call from the Listener finds Kore-eda in his Tokyo office with a translator on hand.

Your earlier films such as Shoplifters and Like Father, Like Son asked questions about the meaning of family and blood ties. Does Broker ask the same questions, and if so, are you getting the same answers?