Warrior of the Wind (風の武士, Tai Kato, 1964)

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Mysterious forces swirl around a hidden village deep in the mountains said to contain copious amounts of gold in Tai Kato’s adaptation of the Ryotaro Shiba novel, Warrior of the Wind (風の武士, Kaze no Bushi). Though billed as a ninja movie (the film’s poster prominently features jidaigeki star Hashizo Okawa in ninja wraps with a shuriken in his hand), the film is really more of a historical romance in which a feckless young man finds new purpose through a love that is destined to remain unfulfilled.

Shinzo’s (Hashizo Okawa) main problem is that he is a second son and at the tail end of the Edo era, which means he has no real prospects in life. As the film opens, he is still in bed in the afternoon when he has to be woken by his indulgent older sister who nevertheless needles him about his complicated love life. A bit of a Don Juan, Shinzo has been romancing a young woman from a local inn, Osei (Naoko Kubo), but has also fallen for the daughter of a dojo master, Ochino (Hiroko Sakuramachi). In order to woo her, he’s got a part-time job as an instructor and faces rivalry both personal and professional with his colleague, Koriki (Minoru Oki), who is also interested in Ochino though she appears not to like him. 

Later, Osei describes their relationship as being more of a friends with benefits situation, though it’s clear that she is really in love with Shinzo but doubts that he takes it as seriously as she does. The implication is that she feels this romance to be impossible because of the class difference between them. Shinzo’s romantic interest in her may be precisely because he is only a second son, but even so he likely will not marry her because she is not noblewoman. Conversely, Ochino doubts Shinzo’s sincerity when he makes overtures to her knowing that he is technically still in a relationship with Osei and is unsure whether or not she can trust him despite her obvious attraction. This element of romantic confusion adds to the pervasive sense of mistrust that colours the late-Edo society in which it is impossible to tell whose side anyone is really on when even individuals struggle to define their own authentic identity. Rounding out the chaos, Shinzo is also pursued by a woman working with mysterious shogunate agent The Cat, who says she no longer knows who she is anymore and asks Shinzo to make love to her in the aim of finding out.

Shinzo too is given a mission on behalf of the shogun. As his brother says, this ought to be what finally gives his life purpose. The way to serve a lord is to carry one’s orders, as Shinzo is old after asking too many questions. But conversely, it seems to be that he finds purpose more in saving Ochino and the eventual mutual recognition of their feelings than he does in fulfilling his purpose as a samurai lord. It turns out that both the shogunate and the Kishu clan want to take over the village because it was said to have amassed vast amounts of gold, which, aside from the desire to possess it themselves, makes them a threat to the shogunate in the event they are gathering funds for a rebellion. The village is only thought to have 200 residents, though they are believed to be remnants of the once-powerful Heike clan who fled into the mountains.

Ochino’s “true identity” is then that of a Heike princess, but she again sets her authentic identity through love in making the decision to give herself bodily to Shinzo and take no other husband despite knowing she must return alone to the hidden Brigadoon-style village and thereby identifying herself as “Shinzo’s wife”. Koriki had attempted to make her his wife in nature through rape, which she seems to have escaped, despite Koriki’s taunting Shinzo with claims that he has already “made her a woman”. In her resistance, Ochino has asserted her own right to autonomy while otherwise assuming her position as leader of the clan, which has also now defeated the threat of invasion and conquest.

Bloodier and more visceral than some of Kato’s other jidaigeki adventures, the film is surprisingly gory in places with bloodspurts hitting the camera and blood trailing from flying shuriken. The violence of the action scenes is conveyed through frenetic editing and the use of POV-style closeups from the perception of the aggressor that often see the victim reeling from a blow seemingly delivered by the camera itself or else staring in horror. Visions of oddly positioned corpses add the sense of absurdity in this internecine world of intrigue and mystery where, it seems, love is the only truth but even so must itself then be denied in order to preserve the precarious order of the bakumatsu society.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Two Seasons, Two Strangers (旅と日々, Sho Miyake, 2025)

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A young woman in flight from the city asks what if you could go on a journey and never return, start again in another place pretending to be someone else or perhaps truly be reborn? Her suggestion may hint a desire to escape oneself in travel, as if it were possible to leave unpleasant things behind and become an idealised version of oneself somewhere where no one knows you. Inspired by two manga stories by Yoshiharu Tsuge, Sho Miyake’s Two Seasons, Two Strangers (旅と日々, Tabi to Hibi), isn’t really so concerned with whether that is actually possible, but with the idea of travel as a means of liberation as the writer heroine struggles to free herself from “a cage of words” and somehow move beyond language.

Li (Shim Eun-kyung) writes in her native Korean which takes on a poetic quality at odds with the way she expresses herself verbally in Japanese which tends to be plainer, though warm and curious despite her outward shyness. She opens her screenplay with a woman waking up in a car “at a dead end” which is where she may feel herself be, though her isolation is echoed at a scene at a beach in which an Italian photography student tries to get a reserved Japanese man (Mansaku Takada) to pose naturally, taking off his sunglasses as if in an attempt to unmask him. He obviously can’t understand anything she’s saying, though the woman doesn’t seem bothered by it, and soon leaves the beach feeling uncomfortable to have been looked at in this way without much in the way of reciprocity.

A returned gaze might be what he finds in Nagisa (Yumi Kawai), a young woman on an impromptu island holiday trying to get away from something in the city. A professor at a screening of Li’s film describes it as sensual and erotic, which seems to confuse Li and perhaps hints at the ways he sees himself in it rather than what might have been intended. Another student, meanwhile, is moved by its depiction of loneliness and the impossibility of communication. Though set in the summer on a southern island, the scene is shot in blues that express the melancholy of the young couple who share a poignant connection that’s destined to end in sadness as Nagisa will soon return home. The final scene, set amid a typhoon, then becomes desperate and ominous despite its seeming serenity as Nagisa urges Natsuo to swim out further in the hope seeing fish with the suggestion that she is pushing him toward his death.

Benzo (Shinichi Tsutsumi), a gruff old man Li ends up staying with on an impromptu trip of her own only this time to snow country, echoing the famous novel as her train leaves the tunnel into a snowy landscape, says that he measures a piece of art on how well it depicts human sadness, which is something Li perhaps tried to do with her screenplay even if she says that her thoughts on seeing the film were that she has no talent. She tries to come up with something more organic inspired by the surroundings at Benzo’s mountain lodge, only to feel guilty and that perhaps she’s intruded on a private sorrow he may not actually have wanted to share despite suggesting she base her screenplay on her stay in an attempt to drum up business. Nevertheless, she strikes up an odd friendship with him and tagging along on his mission to steal a carp from a pond that turns out to belong to his ex-wife’s family as a kind of petty revenge.

Like Nagisa, she too will soon be moving on, to a new place to discover more of herself. While others make meta comments about the nature of drama, it may be that through the gift of a camera Li learns to look outward and gains an excuse for travel that takes her away from the introspection of her writing. As Natsuo had said, too much time to think can make you depressed, and though the stories she writes are sad rather than scary, as Nagisa had described Natsuo’s grim anecdote, they have an underlying darkness and sense of despair. Nevertheless, while the idyllic beachside setting of the summer segment may seem unusually chilly, Miyake finds warmth in snowy vistas of northern Japan which are, in their own way, a kind of blank canvas or a story waiting to be written by a traveller in search connection with oneself and the world.

Two Seasons, Two Strangers opens at New York’s Metrograph on April 24 with a limited nationwide rollout to follow.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Diamond Diplomacy (Yuriko Gamo Romer, 2025)

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Perhaps it’s strange to think of a sport as a national pastime, given that many transcend borders with global networks and shared histories that span centuries. Yet American-born sports are largely played only in America and perhaps it’s the relatively small scale of their most successful export, baseball, that makes it such a rich source of cultural exchange. There might therefore be a mild contradiction that both the US and Japan think of baseball as a national game as if it could belong only to one, though they don’t so much tussle for the soul of the sport as bounce it back and forth in a continual process of exchange. 

Yuriko Gamo Romer’s documentary Diamond Diplomacy explores the way in which baseball has fostered a relationship between the two nations that has survived severe strain. As a historian points out, baseball predates judo in Japan and became a symbol of its modernisation during the Meiji era. As soon as they began to play, Japan was beating the Americans at their own game as teams of schoolboys triumphed over elite squads from local warships leaving the sailors with a degree of wounded pride to have lost at a game they created. 

A video montage likens the equipment worn by the catcher to that worn by kendo players with its chest armour and grilled visor, while other interviewees wonder if it doesn’t play into a cultural mindset in which the individual sublimates themselves into a collective and commits themselves to a higher goal as a member of a team. Others describe it as Japan’s first purely recreational sport and suggest that it adopted samurai traits and martial arts philosophy which gave it a seriousness and a rigour that was at odds with the way the game was played in the US. American players who later came to play in Japan report consternation with the training regime, explaining that in general they only practised for a couple of hours before hitting the golf course while Japanese players trained 10 hours a day. This intensity may have contributed to the team spirit, but also, according to some, reflects a fundamental difference in cultural philosophies, While American players believe one is born with talent and can sharpen it only to a certain extent, in Japan they believe that it’s hard work that produces results and the more you train the better you can get regardless of innate talent.

Nevertheless, according the documentary, Japanese baseball fans continue to look up to the American leagues and it was the process of bringing over top stars such as Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig during the 1930s that fostered a sense of connection between the two nations. These sporting relationships became a way of staving off conflict and brokering peace, though endured even once war had broken out. Internees in America describe finding hope and purpose in self-built diamonds, while the resurgence of baseball also contributed to the post-war recovery and a restored sense of national pride. In America, however, Japanese players were prevented from joining the major leagues and faced discrimination until Mashi Murakami was signed to play in the US in the mid-1960s. No other Japanese players were allowed to go play in America until Hideo Nomo exploited a loophole by retiring to accept a transfer only to be viewed as a traitor in Japan.

Nevertheless, the nation soon came round and Nomo’s games were later broadcast live on television making him a national hero. The film positions Ichiro Suzuki and Shohei Ohtani as the inheritors of this legacy, continuing the cross-cultural interplay between the two nations into the present day. An interviewee charts changing attitudes to the US and finds a correlation between the presence of Japanese players in America, suggesting that they fell to their lowest in the post-war period during the economic conflicts of the 1980s in which the US feared the newly dominant force of Japan in the bubble era, but improving with the arrival of Japanese players in US leagues in the lost decade of the ‘90s. Baseball continues to be a more isolated sport than some with each nation mainly focussed on their domestic game with no formal infrastructure for international competition outside of special organised matches, but perhaps that’s what makes this unique relationship possible in the push and pull of cross-cultural interaction through the shared love of sport.

Diamond Diplomacy screens 25th April as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival Spring Showcase.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Humint (휴민트, Ryoo Seung-wan, 2026)

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There’s something ironically dehumanising about the term “human intelligence”. Even the security services who court them seem to look down on their informants, viewing them more as traitors to their own side than those who’ve come over theirs. We have to ask ourselves if either side is really any better than the other. As Zo’s boss tells him, everyone’s just using each other to survive. There doesn’t seem to be a lot more to this world than that, just desperate struggle and cynicism.

Ryoo Seung-wan’s Humint (휴민트) is, like many similar films, at least as equally critical of the South as it is the North as the idealistic NIS officer finds himself an outlier among his comparatively coldhearted colleagues. In the course of his mission trying to find out who’s selling drugs to teenagers in Korea, Zo (Zo In-sung) uncovers a human trafficking network operated by the Russian mafia targeting North Korean women possibly with the complicity of their government. But his bosses don’t care about that, they just want the drugs, and it’s a bonus that they come from the North. Zo dangles the possibility of salvation in front of a woman trapped in a South East Asian brothel, but when it comes down to it, his boss won’t approve her rescue. They’ve effectively killed her, but all his boss tells him is that you have to get used to this sort of thing and you can’t afford to get hung up on each and every informant.

Still, what they’re asking them to do is necessarily dangerous and any promise they may make about protecting their informants is a lie. On the other side, the North sends young women to Vladivostok as “foreign currency earners” ostensibly working in a restaurant, but actually used as honeytraps drugging their clients and sleeping with them to get them hooked. Seon Hwa (Shin Se-kyung) is, ironically, in this position because the North does not seem to have kept its promises either. Her mother has advanced cancer, but her treatment needs money and so her father started smuggling to get it. When he got caught, her whole family was disgraced. She had to drop out of university and begin working as a foreign currency earner, breaking her engagement with top torturer Geon (Park Jeong-min). Geon is in town because he suspects the locale consular official is complicit with a series of mysterious disappearances of North Koreans near the Russian border, and he’s right. 

Hwang (Park Hae-joon) is certainly a slippery individual, apparently making Vladivostok his own personal fiefdom and, in the end, over playing his hand in trying to use Seon Hwa to take out Geon when he could probably just have let her go to make Geon leave him alone. “Do what you have to do to survive”, most people seem to say and it’s clear that personal relationships cannot reallysurive in this world in which human life is cheap. Seon Hwa and Geon’s romance was broken by the brutality of the North Korean regime, but it seems that the South is unwilling to save them. When Zo realises that Seon Hwa’s cover has been blown, he breaks protocol to try and save her, not wanting another woman’s death on his conscience. But though he unmasks the human trafficking ring, he’s reprimanded by his superiors who still complain that they’ve not made enough progress on the drugs case because Zo got sidetracked by the trafficked women. 

The women are, obviously, the ones who suffer because of these too regimes and perhaps by extension the division of Korea. Seon Hwa does her best to fight back, saving the other women so they can escape together, but is finally left with nothing. She has no country, and only asks to be sent somewhere where nobody knows her to start again. Expressing a new cold war anxiety born of geopolitical fluctuations as the South contends with the uncertainties of the North’s interplay with Russia and China, Ryoo’s espionage thriller has a retro quality, but also hints at contemporary unease, suggesting finally that there are really no good guys left and even idealists like Zo are compromised by their allegiance to an inhuman regime. Zo and Geon may become temporary allies in their quest to save Seon Hwa, but just as often point their guns a each other in Ryoo’s impressively staged action scenes amid a constant atmosphere of mistrust and betrayal.

Trailer (English subtitles)

BAKA’s Identity (愚か者の身分, Koto Nagata, 2025)

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What does a name really mean? Can you really start over just by swapping your current identity for a new one, and what would that actually mean for the rest of your new life? Two young men who’ve been failed by adults and authority figures become involved with yahoo boy-style cyber crime, only in this case the aim of their romance fraud is to trap men they already know are poor and desperate and convince them they can turn their lives around by lending their identities to “someone in trouble”. 

It’ll only be for two years, they say. Just lie low, try not attract attention from the authorities. Though the targets also get a new identity in the form of a driving license with another name, they’re told not to use it for driving because the police will run checks on it if they have an accident. But the truth is that despite the widespread believe that it’s easy to disappear in Japan, it’s actually quite hard to live without a formal proof of identity through the family register system. You can’t rent an apartment or get a regular job, because on paper you don’t exist. The fake ID they’ve been given is only good enough to pass as proof of age. It’s not going to stand up if someone actually does more than glance at it.

But even if the idea of being able to wipe everything clean and start again might be attractive, the reality it not quite so easy. You can’t just wipe away your existing fears and traumas, and they’ll follow you even into your new life. Takuya (Takumi Kitamura), who’s been doing this sort of thing longer, is conflicted on realising their latest mark, Egawa (Yuma Yamoto), is a broken man who can’t get over the death of his daughter at the hands of his wife. Though Takuya, and the young woman they have assisting them with the scam, don’t want to do something like this to someone who’s already suffered so much, this world is pretty brutal and in reality they no longer have much choice.

Kisara (Mizuki Yamashita) is only involved in the scam because her mother stole her scholarship fund and she needed money for university, but she’s since dropped out and seems to be doing this kind of thing full-time. Takuya too seemingly had no parental support and sold his own identity to pay for medical treatment he hoped would save his brother, but he died anyway. That might be why he feels so protective of Mamoru (Yuta Hayashi), a young man he met in a homeless shelter run by the yakuza for the purpose of getting them to apply for benefits and then stealing them all. Mamoru was also abandoned by his mother and suffered physical abuse in his familial environment. Takuya brings Mamoru in on the scam and his life in the criminal underworld thinking it would help him, only to later feel guilty when events spiral out of control.

Takuya may look to his boss, Sato (Goichi Mine), as a kind of big brother figure, but also knows that he most likely plans to throw him under the bus while plotting to rob gangland kingpin Joji (Kazuya Tanabe) of a windfall gained through gold smuggling. Various people warn Takuya that it’s best to get out now, because if you go too deep you never will, but Takuya knows his bid for escape is likely to fail even when he turns to former mentor Kajitani who convinced him to sell his identity in the first place. The irony is that Takuya sold his name without a second thought and doesn’t really think his identity’s worth anything, which might be why he thought it was worth rolling the dice just to see if he could change his situation. The film’s Japanese title might ask us who we thought was being “fooled,” the men whom Takuya scammed who convinced to give up their identities for what seemed to them at the time a lot of money, or Takuya and Mamoru deluded both by the opportunities of a life of crime and by the allure of escape. In the all end, all any of them really have is each other and the unexpectedly genuine connections that arise between them in opposition to a society that has already discarded them and a hellish underworld in which an identity is just another commodity to be bought, sold, or sacrificed at will.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Bunny!! (Thỏ Ơi!!, Trấn Thành, 2026)

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The host of a TV show offering love advice begins to reassess her marriage when probed by a guest who turns out to have an unexpected connection to her personal life in Trấn Thành’s outlandish drama, Bunny!! (Thỏ Ơi!!) Though it may originally seem as if the film intends to sympathise with female oppression in a male dominated society, it soon swings back with a more conservative conclusion in which the heroine seems to blame herself for the issues she uncovers in a marriage she assumed to be perfect.

Linh (Lyly) hosts a show in the guise of the “Shoulder Sister” in which she gives relationship advice to mainly female guests who wear animal masks to disguise their identity and are hidden from her in an adjacent room. She and her husband Phong (Vĩnh Đam) are currently living with her sister, Lan (Văn Mai Hương), who has her own business empire and is married to a younger man, Son (Quốc Anh). Lan is intensely jealous and henpecks her husband, becoming incredibly angry and upset when she goes through his phone and finds a picture from a party he was at that an ex-girlfriend apparently also attended. Linh is scandalised that her sister’s friends think setting your partner’s pin and trawling through their message is normal behaviour, insisting that she has no need for that and is completely confident in her relationship with Phong. 

But the film opens with her filming footage for YouTube of a “romantic date” during which she snaps at Phong and later rejects his attempts to initiate intimacy. The film characterises the two sisters as bossy and finds humour in the way they manipulate their husbands, but at the same time locates the source of marital breakdown in their career success and independence, even suggesting that all their problems are down to not listening to the their husbands. Of course, it’s not sexist to suggest that communication issues can derail a marriage, but the conversation needs to flow both ways. Linh confronts Phong when she she begins to suspect him of having an affair, but he turns it back on her and says he feels lonely in their marriage because she doesn’t have time for him any more while showing few signs of being willing to take time out of his career as an executive at her sister’s company. It’s difficult for her to tell whether he has a point that she’s essentially self-involved and afraid of confrontation, refusing his requests to talk by placing a time limit on arguments and unilaterally making decisions rather than trying to reach a compromise or give Phong a chance to understand, or is just trying to gaslight her by making her think this is all her fault so she doesn’t look too closely at his behaviour.

The advice she’d give another woman would be to leave at the first sign of trouble, which is what she tells Bunny (Pháo) when she comes on the show looking for advice about how to leave an abusive partner. Though she’s tried to break up with him several times, Bunny’s ex, Kim (Trấn Thành), has been stalking and threatening her. Asked why she didn’t leave earlier, she replies that it’s hard to leave someone who really loves you, which is an odd characterisation of this obsessive connection. Nevertheless, when she comes back later saying she was able to break things off with Kim but has drifted into an affair with a married man, it becomes difficult for Linh to assess whether she got her nickname for being a bunny boiler and is stalking a man who isn’t interested, or has been tricked by the false promises of a cheating louse who told her he was “separated” and just waiting for the paperwork to come through on his divorce.

Nevertheless, Bunny too is made to feel guilty and responsible for Kim’s behaviour because he lost his leg in a traffic accident while working hard to contribute to their future. Uncomfortably, the film makes Kim’s disability the butt of a joke while also using it to undercut his masculinity by suggesting that no other women will want him nor will he be able to find steady employment. All of which is presented as justification for his controlling behaviour which grows steadily more concerning just as Bunny’s own pursuit of her married lover is depicted by some as that of a crazed and lovelorn woman no better than Kim. 

In the end, however, the solution is found in female solidarity with Linh listening to Bunny’s story and protecting her while Lan’s friends provide essential emotional support as she tries to sort things out with Son to make their marriage a little less volatile. But the revelations of the finale would seem to undercut all of that as Linh asks herself once again if she really was at fault for neglecting her husband and is therefore responsible for the way that he behaved rather than condemning his emotional cowardice and the way it led him to treat Linh and others. As such it reinforces some conservative ideas about a wife’s role and female subservience rather than allowing Linh to reassess her view of a “perfect” marriage and ask herself if she’s really happy or merely in love with an idealised image of marital success.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Hole, 309 Days to the Bloodiest Tragedy (Bolong, 309 Hari Sebelum Tragedi Berdarah, Hanung Bramantyo, 2026)

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There’s something about a hole in the ground that invites mystery. Who put it there and why, where does it lead, and should we be worried about people falling in or what might crawl out of there that someone or something might have wished stayed buried. Hanung Bramantyo’s The Hole (Bolong, 309 Hari Sebelum Tragedi Berdarah) digs back to the Indonesia of the mid-1960s in which one kind of authoritarian rule is dying while the new had not yet been born. His hero finds himself torn between conflicting loyalties while straddling class boundaries as he searches for a potentially inconvenient truth behind the murders of several local officials.

The opening title cards tell us that this story takes place before a “national tragedy” in which seven army officers were murdered and their bodies thrown into a well during the 30 September Movement’s failed coup attempt. The killings are blamed both on “the communists” and perhaps on the army engaging in some questionable manoeuvres of its own. Sugeng (Baskara Mahendra) is charged with finding out the truth in order to rehabilitate the army’s image. He’s also made aware, however, that the village lies in a convenient spot for anyone who might be looking to launch a coup against Sukarno, which presumably includes Suharto. 

But what he quickly finds is that each of the dead men arguably deserved it and that the list of people who might have wanted them gone is quite long even before you start adding in ghosts. Each of them is someone with legitimate political power that they have enthusiastically misused. The village head Sumanto said he’d fix local infrastructure but embezzled the money for himself while bribing the police chief to turn a blind eye. The village secretary scammed the local farmers and trapped them in debt. Dependent on these authority figures, the locals were powerless to oppose them and those who attempted to speak out were quickly silenced. 

Some attribute these killings to the communists for that reason in that taking out corrupt officials is in line with their ideology, though it could just as likely be a person or group of people fed up with living under this system as Sukarno’s “guided democracy” began to fall apart due to its increasing dependence on China and Russia which further inflamed the nationalists and military. Sukarno had indeed based his system of government on a traditional village, but this one is rotten to the core as the corrupt officials all protect each other. Others argue that the killings are the revenge of a “hollow ghost,” and even if some are as dismissive of the supernatural as educated policeman Sugeneng, the term could perhaps stand in for many who have been hollowed out by governmental betrayal and pushed beyond breaking point. 

Sugeng may not believe in ghosts, but he stands in an awkward position. He was a adopted as a child by a wealthy man from just that village who is now on his deathbed. Sugeng’s adoptive father badgers him into marrying his adopted sister, Arum (Carissa Perusset), though he feels uncomfortable with it and even if assured by his imam that there’s nothing untoward about the arrangement still thinks of Arum as a sister. It’s tempting then to think that his present predicament is caused by the breaking of a taboo, or that, as an adopted son, he’s inherited a dark legacy stemming from his father’s wealth and privilege while doing his best to forget his roots and inhabit this new upper-class world. Back in the village, one of the guards on duty at the time of the murder pranked a friend with a black magic book made to look like the Quran, and perhaps it’s not so far-fetched to consider that dark sorcery is a possible cause for the strange events.

Sugeng, however, has no idea what he’s up against. He can’t see the political context nor his family’s fading fortunes nor is he really prepared for the truth behind the murders. It doesn’t quite occur to him that there might be a dark truth within his own household and callously ignores his new’s complaints about being chased by ghosts, focussing on his case and rarely coming home as she tries to care for her dying father alone. The holes here are the one’s in Sugeng’s, and the nation’s, buried histories, but it’s all still there and waiting to be unearthed. “The nation is not in a good state,” Sugeng’s imam friend warns him, and it seems that you can’t really blame anyone for turning to one dark side or another when things are as bad and confusing as they currently seem to be.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Desperate Chase (필사의 추격, Kim Jae-hoon, 2024)

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The peaceful life of Jeju Islanders is disrupted by the threat of crime and drugs in Kim Jae-hoon’s zany comedy, The Desperate Pursuit (필사의 추격, Pilsaui Chugyeok). Though nobody is really being desperately pursed, time moves quite slowly on Jeju, the film plays into a generalised anxiety in recent Korean film in which the local community is fearful of “foreign” incursion, not only from meddling mainlanders but from Chinese investors who are currently buying up land and thereby pushing locals out.

The main drama revolves around an old-fashioned market that Taiwan-based gangster Zhu (Yoon Kyung-ho) wants to use as a medical centre that will act as a drug hub. Everyone who works there uses Jeju dialect and is keen to protect this disappearing slice of their local culture. According to some, they’ve already seen off the yakuza and aren’t planning on giving in to Triads either, though Zhu has already proved himself more ruthless by murdering his mole at the market when he asked the gangsters to avoid using violence because it was making his job of convincing people to take the settlement money and leave more difficult. Meanwhile, detective Su-gwang (Kwak Si-yang) who has been transferred to the island temporarily due to excessive use of force in Seoul remarks on how the landscape has changed since he last visited with all the new Chinese-owned skyscrapers.

To that extent, the contrast between the area around the airport and the location Su-gwang eventually finds himself in couldn’t be more stark. Though he encounters difficulty finding accommodation ironically because he’s from the mainland and all the landlords assume he’ll end up doing a moonlight flit, echoing the issues faced by international residents in the city, he’s eventually billeted in a pleasant country cottage owned by Ms. Yoo (Ye Soo-jung), leader of the market resistance, despite the objections of the crotchety old man who rents the other room. He’s not anticipating having to do a lot of policing, but is put straight on the case of a known conman they think may be in the area despite having previously fled abroad to evade all the warrants out against him. 

The conman is one thing, but the other disruptive force is the beauty clinic run by Dr. Yang (Park Hyo-joo) with the very ominous name of “Omerta”. Yang is cahoots with Zhu after having spent some time in China after losing her medical license due to providing illegal pain killers to her VIP patients in a damning indictment of amoral and exploitative status-driven culture. Their aim is to start dealing fentanyl in Korea through Jeju, though Yang warns him it’s a risky prospect with no infrastructure in place and in consideration of Korea’s tight drug laws, but Zhu is insistent. One of the chief weapons they have against Yang is that she only treats “VIPs” of which there aren’t any in the local community. In order to create a diversion, the local women eventually storm the place demanding treatment and accusing Yang of discrimination in their proud Jeju accents. 

Meanwhile, Su-gwang and his colleagues battle police corruption while trying to attack the real source of disorder in the form of Zhu and his men who have already struck deals with the local authorities. Zhu speaks fluent standard Korean and claims to have had a Korean father, though he abandoned him when he was five, but is also irritated by the constraints placed on him in this new territory. It really does turn out that everything about personal connections in Jeju, though in a more positive sense than it first sounded as the islanders band together to protect the market and expel the corruption of Zhu’s gang who want to ruin the beautiful local landscape and corrupt the populace by dealing drugs.

It has to be said, however, that there’s something a little sinister in the justification of Su-gwang’s violent policing which is treated as a bit of joke while coming from a place of righteous fury at the contemporary society in which the rich and powerful are free to get away with their crimes thanks to their connections. Jeju, however, does seem to mellow him a little with its laid-back atmosphere and cast of quirky characters where everyone really does know everyone even if outsiders are still viewed with a degree of suspicion. Partly a kind of tourist ad for the local community, the film paints the island as a place of warmth both in terms of its climate and the kindness of the locals, at least once you get to know them.

Trailer (Korean subtitles only)

Disobedience (親不孝通り, Yasuzo Masumura, 1958)

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After finding out his older sister has had an abortion after her lover tells her he has no interest in marriage, a college student vows revenge in Yasuzo Masumura’s Disobedience (親不孝通り, Oyafuko Dori). The film’s Japanese title translates as something like “lack of filial piety street” and refers to an area where youth congregates to misbehave, bringing shame on their families with their debauched behaviour. It’s into this world that the cynical hero attempts to drag the sheltered heroine as part of his revenge plot while she apparently decides to stick with him even after he raped her during a college camping trip.

It is though notable that neither of them have much parental input to begin with. Kaneko’s (Hitomi Nozoe) mother has died and we’re told that their father spends all his time with a mistress and never comes home leaving her in the care of older brother Shuichi (Eiji Funakoshi), a salaryman. It’s not exactly clear where Katsuya’s (Hiroshi Kawaguchi) mother is, only that she lives somewhere else and occasionally writes while he is technically in the care of his older sister Akie (Yoko Katsuragi) who works as a tailor in a boutique store selling western fashions. Akie had been carrying on an affair with Shuichi she assumed would lead to marriage and was initially happy about the pregnancy only to be blindsided by Shuichi’s reaction. When he tells her that he has no intention to marry, she realises that the relationship is at a dead end and that an abortion is her only real option given the situation.

The irony is that Katsuya resents Shuichi for failing to take responsibility as a man and vows to take revenge by doing the same thing to his sister and seeing how he likes that. Though Akie points out that it’s nothing to do with Kaneko and tries to stop him, Katsuya is hellbent on playing the cad to make a point. Of course, he may also resent Shuichi, an executive salaryman, precisely because of the position he is in. There has been an economic downturn and he’s having trouble securing a job for after his university graduation. Some companies have halted recruitment entirely and another of Katsuya’s friends has already been through 11 unsuccessful interviews. Other young men have taken to politics, protesting new authoritarian legislation and investing in socialism. Katsuya and friends find this to be disingenuous, assuming it’s just another shrewd move to get on the ladder by finding employment in government or unions. The salaryman dream is a fairly new post-war invention, but it seems to be dying already and Katsuya can’t even really see what his education was for. He tells Kaneko that he only studies well enough to pass so that he can get a good job and the point of life is to figure out how to make money. If he can’t do that, then his life is meaningless and futile. That might be why he spends his time scamming entitled Americans (the only people with money), beating them at bowling, and hanging out in jazz bars. Though the Occupation is long over, the film has a strong but subtle sense of anti-Americanism as symbolised by the aeroplane flying above as Katsuya rapes Kaneko out in the mountains. 

But for Kaneko the situation is not much different. The young women complain it’s even harder for them to secure employment. Katsuya dismisses Kaneko’s university education by calling it a bridal academy, though most of the women lament that marriage is the ultimate job and perhaps the point of university for them is meeting a husband, just as it’s securing employment for Katsuya. Later, when he confronts Shuichi, Katsuya describes Kaneko as damaged goods now that she’s no longer a virgin and is currently carrying a child for which he accepts no responsibility. That may be one reason that she decides to stick with her rapist, realising that her situation is now impossible given it may be difficult for her to marry someone else while supporting herself financially as a single woman is not yet a viable option. By pursuing a relationship with Katsuya, she reasserts control over the situation along with the narrative of what happened between them on the mountains. 

On learning the truth, however, she makes a different decision from Akie in declaring that she will drop out of university and move to Osaka to live with an aunt and raise the baby alone there, declaring that she has decided to go on loving Katsuya no matter what he might think about it. Kaneko’s decision prompts a reversal of Akie’s thinking too. Though she had decided to be independent, starting her own business rather than planning for marriage, she returns to Shuichi and suggests they should get back together. To her the idea of running her own business and being married seem incompatible. Chastened by this whole affair, Shuichi’s thinking seems to have reversed too, to the extent that he decides to marry Akie after all, while Katsuya also decides to accept responsibility and go to Osaka with Kaneko where they will marry and stay together forever. It’s a strange “happy” ending, though it’s difficult to see how these marriages could ever really be happy given the circumstances that led to them and the discordant music that strikes over an ironic Merry Christmas sign as the film comes to an end suggests they probably won’t be. Nevertheless, the ending reverses a lack of filial piety in the shift toward conservatism through heteronormative marriages and the formation of new families as Katsuya, at least, takes responsibility for his paternity and exits the nihilistic world of clubs, bars, and bowling alleys in which his friends remain trapped.

I, the Song (མོ་གི་གསང་བའི་ཞབས་ཁྲ, Dechen Roder, 2024)

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Nima’s (Tandin Bidha) boyfriend Penjor tells the tourists who come into his restaurant to experience the local culture that Bhutan is one big happy family where everyone knows everyone. This will turn out not to be the case, as Nima finds herself mistaken for someone else and struggling to affirm her own identity when everyone begins to tell she is someone she knows she is not. Dechen Roder’s I, the Song (མོ་གི་གསང་བའི་ཞབས་ཁྲ) paints a slightly less rosy vision of the so-called happiest nation of earth in which women like Nima are oppressed by patriarchal standards that are so deeply ingrained she had barely noticed them before.

Nima’s outrage runs slightly deeper than the frustration of being accused of something she hasn’t done partly because of the shame and embarrassment involved with being associated with an erotic video, but also because of its inevitable consequences. She’s let go from her job as a schoolteacher when parents complain after identifying her as the subject as a viral “blue video,” one clearly shot and uploaded to the internet without the woman’s consent. No matter how much Nima protests that it isn’t her, nobody believes her. Not only is she fired from her job, even her boyfriend distances himself from her. He scoffs a little resentfully that she’s always so proper, yet has apparently done something like this with another man. Nima is indeed quite “proper”, a little stiff and repressed. She lives her life in a conservative way, always demure and polite. It is difficult to believe that she would have had a one night stand with a man who filmed their encounter, but despite the incongruity, everyone assumes she must be lying to protect her reputation. Nima determines that the only thing to do is find the woman in question and get her to confess so she can prove to them that it really isn’t her.

But that proves a little more difficult than she first assumed it would, because every lead she turns up turns cold. Meto has disappeared into the ether like a ghost. Some say she went to America, as Nima herself apparently once did, though she doesn’t seem particularly worldly. In any case, many remark that people change after they go abroad, almost as if they were equating it as a kind of death or transition to another world. One of Meto’s old friends even suggests Nima actually is Meto having returned from America with a new identity and changed personality. The more she investigates Meto, the less certain Nima becomes of herself. What was so wonderful about your life, Meto’s former boyfriend Tandin (Jimmy Wangyal Tshering) asks her when she explains why she’s looking for Meto and Nima has to admit that maybe she doesn’t have an answer.

In looking for Meto, is she of course really looking for herself but Meto has been a lot of people too. Nima discovers that Meto came from a small village to reclaim a song that stolen by the city. Meto’s grandmother says that bad things will happen in the village if they don’t get it back, but how exactly can you return a song? In the end, Meto has become a song to Tandin who struggles to accept her sudden absence assuming she must have just left him and decided to move on without a word as she apparently had from other lives before this. In a way, Nima is returning the song of Meto in learning to sing it, bringing it home to her grandmother as if closing a loop.

What she eventually realises is that it shouldn’t matter if it was her in the video or not. The shame wasn’t Meto’s to bear, and investigating her fate she uncovers a dark history of sexual harassment and exploitation. Using her newfound identity, Nima tries to get justice for Meto by reporting the man who did this to her as a means of standing up for herself and the other women of Bhutan held to unfair double standards while men like Meto’s abuser are free to continue abusing their authority. She has in a way learned to become herself while sort of becoming someone else and reclaiming an identity that should have been hers all along in the discovery of a newfound freedom.

I, the Song screened as part of this year’s CinemAsia Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)