Classics of Our Century: A Film History of the Twenty-First Century in the Making
Listening Guide
1. Shoplifters joins two threads: abandoned people form a community without blood ties.
2. After institutions intervene, a family becomes kidnappers and abductees.
3. Institutions are a net that catches large problems but not each person’s precise circumstances.
4. A warm family story reveals another side only in its final third.
5. Nobuyo comforts Yuri: ‘Someone who loves you doesn’t hit you; they hold you like this.’
6. What do the children call you? Why can Nobuyo answer only with tears?
7. Shoplifters proposes another family without making it a warm utopia.
8. Calculation and mutual use do not make shared happiness false.
9. The family can only hear fireworks: looking through gaps reveals their invisibility.
10. Nagisa Ōshima said a director’s golden period lasts ten years; how has Kore-eda created for thirty?
11. Why is Man’ei, a subject Kore-eda longs to film, so controversial?
12. Why can people who never fully understand one another still become intimate?
13. Why can universal social-media sharing create another condition of nobody knowing?
Selected Quotes
1. Lao Ma: If institutions alone are at fault, reform solves the issue. More deeply, even good institutions address surfaces but cannot resolve every individual problem.
Institutions resemble a grid catching people and large dangers, but small specific problems pass through regardless of system quality.
2026.09.11
Audio in Chinese
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