Broker

Sometimes we do get to choose our family. Sang-hyeon (Parasite’s Song Kang-ho), runs a humble laundry business but also a more lucrative sideline: he and business partner Dong-soo find adoptive parents for abandoned babies, for a fee. When mother So-young returns to the church where she left her son, she discovers that he’s been swiped by the pair and joins them to help screen for his new parents. A typically affecting tale of an irregular family from director Hirokazu Kore-eda (Shoplifters, LIFF 2018), and winner of the Cannes 2022 Best Actor for Song.

During my scriptwriting and research in Korea, I was able to hear the stories of the children who had been left in a ‘baby box’. Watching the children desperately questioning themselves, ‘Was it really a good thing for me to be born?’, I was filled with the urge to make a film that could answer that question. …With this topic, I did not want to come to an ending where the abandoned children regret being born, or the mother regretting having the child. I wanted the film to be able to directly deliver the message, ‘It was good to be born.’ In that sense, Broker is a film about ’life’.

Director Hirokazu Kore-eda