THE HOUSE HOLD

This screening is part of a monthly film series presented by Soctalk and hosted and co-curated by WORM, exploring cinema through the lens of social reproduction feminism (for example, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uur-pMk7XjY). In the words of Cindi Katz (2001), social reproduction is the fleshy and messy stuff of everyday life. The program invites audiences to look at film as a way of understanding the structures of regular practices that make life possible, while questioning whose labour remains unseen. Across four screenings, we explore how capitalist relations profit from the status quo and depend on keeping much of this work hidden.

The third screening centers on the household as a primary site of social reproductive labour. Often imagined as a stable, heteronormative unit, the household is here approached as something fragile, improvised, and shaped by precarity. The program questions dominant ideas of family, showing how care, responsibility, and intimacy are negotiated through necessity rather than idealized roles.

Shoplifters
by Hirokazu Kore-eda
2018, Japan, 121 min, Japanese with English subtitles
Following a marginalised family surviving through petty theft and shared labour, Shoplifters portrays the household as an improvised space of care and survival. The film complicates conventional ideas of family, legality, and belonging, revealing how intimacy and responsibility emerge in unexpected and precarious conditions.

Soctalk is a junior staff initiative within the Department of Public Administration and Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam. The collective organizes workshops and courses both inside and outside the university. Soctalk aims to foster a culture of care that critically engages with institutional structures, while redistributing and collectivizing resources to support communities and initiatives in the city of Rotterdam.

Cineville valid at the door and online on the day itself!

Still image from the film Shoplifters