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Broker is a South Korean film by Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, released in 2022. It deals with the issues of filiation and family affiliation. This theme, dear to Kore-eda, is at the heart of several of his films, including Nobody Knows , Like Father, Like Son and the 2018 Palme d'Or winner, Shoplifters.
Having often dealt with families linked by blood, Kore-eda chooses to tell the story of a group that is not a family at the outset, but evolves and forges a family-like bond. Ultimately, the film asks the essential question: What makes a family?
Everything is established in the film's opening sequence: it's raining, a silhouette makes its way through the downpour and climbs a dizzying flight of stairs. A young woman (So-young) arrives in front of a baby box. In Korea, baby boxes are small, heated, and lit compartments with two openings: one on the street side (for dropping off the baby) and the other on the orphanage side (for picking up the baby). The woman pulls a baby (Woo-sung) out from under her coat, lays it on the ground, and runs off. A team of policewomen witness the scene and one of them (Soo-jin) puts the baby in the baby box. Two orphanage employees retrieve the baby and tamper with the baby box video, erasing the image of the baby. This shot of Woo-sung's erasure foreshadows the film's message like a symbolic equation: “a mother disappears = a baby disappears” (Segal, 1957, p. 688). Abandoned children must not only search for their origins, but also for their identity and own sense of existence. On the other hand, the adults involved express the painful ambivalence of abandonment and the fantasy of abduction inherent in adoption. So-young leaves a note with the baby promising to return. But she leaves no contact details so that she can be found. This contradiction is central to the film. When the young mother finally returns the next day, she tells the employees of the orphanage, “I didn't abandon him, I entrusted him to someone else.” But it is t