Guy Ben-Ner
Monday, 16 February 2009
A boy comes home from school with a note indicating he was caught stealing money from his peer at school.
His family is put to the challenge to educate him about the meaning and border lines separating private property from its “other”.
The movie starts as a TV “family sit-com”, shot in IKEA “show rooms” in 3 different countries, without permission, and explores the ideas of private property, stealing and the family as a piggy bank (a social structure built in order to “keep property from leaking out”).
The sitcom family is played out by a real family.
The apartment looks like a TV set.
But if in the classical American sitcom the economy is separated from the show (the commercial brake) as the great repressed of that genre- here the price tags, in view everywhere,make the two spheres collapse into a single one.
Since we do not ask for permission to shoot the movie there, we need to find a different store-branch every time we get caught, and asked to leave, or stop the shootings.
“Being caught”, than, disturbs the movie’s smooth continuity, but engenders more and more kitchens or living-rooms, to take part in one scene, as a visual catalog of ideal living spaces.
Since we do not ask for permission everything is shot in secrecy, like an act of theft.