The Outsiders (孽子, Yu Kan-Ping, 1986)

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Released at the tail end of martial law, Yu Kan-Ping’s adaptation of Pai Hsien-Yung’s seminal novel Crystal Boys seems to anticipate a coming liberation, but also perhaps that even then not all will be free. The film’s Chinese title, Unfilial Sons (孽子, nièzǐ), hints at the way it, in a certain sense, circles back to a kind of conservatism in which the hero must reconcile with his abusive father for cultural rather than personal or psychological reasons. But at the same time, perhaps this reconciliation will be necessary at the time the present regime falls and speaks more of a need for peace as the authoritarian father must learn to accept that he has a gay son and will end his life alone if hex chooses not to do so.

Li Qing’s (Shao Hsin) father is, in many ways, a symbol of the authoritarian regime in that he is a former KMT soldier who came to Taiwan with Chang Kai-Shek after the Chinese civil war. Filled with notions of toxic masculinity, he kicks Qing out when he is expelled from high school after being caught having sex with a male lab assistant. Screaming at him in the street, he calls him a “degenerate” and tells him never to come home. Yet it seems obvious that Qing’s father has no real power and all his abuses stem from just this fact. His son’s homosexuality calls his own manhood into question, while his violence towards his wife also stems from his insecurity that she will leave him for a better man. She eventually does leave him for a trumpet player, abandoning her two sons the youngest of which dies as a direct result of his father’s neglect. 

Though Qing was a wounded, lonely little boy who felt himself rejected by both parents due to his mother’s obvious preference for his brother, he adopts a maternal position that comparable to that shown to him by “Mama Yang” who takes in “homeless birds” or young gay men who’ve been rejected by their birth families and have nowhere else to go. Qing was kicked out not only of his home but the school too, leaving him educationally disadvantaged. He can only earning a living as a sex worker in the Peace Memorial Park which has become a cruising spot for gay men. Pushed out of the mainstream society and left with nowhere to go, they have repurposed this public space as their own but are not safe even in here given the frequency of police raids. Auntie Mann, the former actress who lives with Yang, asks him where these young men are supposed to go if they can no longer go to the park with the consequence that they decide to formalise their situation by selling Yang’s photo studio and the building Mann owns to open a gay nightclub called The Blue Angel.

The club speaks of a need to carve out one’s own space in a hostile society, but also the commodification of gay life that accompanies greater acceptance. The park was free and money could also be earned there, but here the guests will need to pay because this is, after all, a business in addition to being a community hub. It also seems that for whatever reason, policemen are also drinking here, so it is not completely liberated and its existence depends on not offending the authorities. Nevertheless, it otherwise extends the family forged by Yang and Mann to a wider community of queer people by offering them a safer space in which they can be their authentic selves if only for a short time.

This seems to be true for Mann’s former director who seems to make a point of going everywhere with two very young and attractive women hanging on his arms, but abandons them to flirt with men at the club. Closted movie Hua Kuo-Pao similarly seems to have taken a liking to Qing, but must presumably keep his sexuality secret in order to go on working. Dangers are spoken of regarding the potential violence of obsessive love in a repressed community as Yang cautions Qing about entering an affair with Dragon, a man he meets in the park, who killed his lover Phoenix in a crime of passion and has been a wandering soul ever since having convinced himself never to love again because it would only end in death.

Yu frames murder as a moment of gothic madness as fog rises behind the bridge in the park, which was already a space of darkness and depression symbolising the degree to which these men are already isolated within their society. Another of the young men Yang takes in ties to take his own life after his lover kicks him out. Though the others tell him his boyfriend was not worth dying for, the problem seems to be more that being thrown out again convinced him he had nowhere else to go. If it were not for Yang and Auntie Mann, he would be totally alone. There does seem to be, however, a degree of tension in the relationship between Yang and Auntie Mann in which there exists a deep platonic love that cannot be resolved sexually. Just as he saves the boys, Yang also once saved Mann from an addiction to drugs, though he could not save her film career or hope for feminine fulfilment through marriage. The Blue Angel club finally only possible because of Mann’s acceptance that she will never be an actress again nor marry for love. Yang has been a kind of beard for her, helping her save face and avoid the stigma of being an unattached woman by making it look like there was a man in her life, just as she perhaps provided security for him in ways other than allowing him to rent his shop from her cheaply and have a place to live.

So tying into the film’s title, these new support networks play into a heteronormative vision of the family in which Yang becomes a father figure to Qing and teaches him how to live a more fulfilling, safer life as a gay man in contrast to his birth father’s authoritarian attempts at dominance. Another of the boys eventually leaves with a lover to look for their father in Japan, but seemingly struggles to find him reflecting the way in which each of them search for a more positive parental input having been failed or abandoned by their birth families. What they discover is a sense of brotherhood and solidarity that gives them a place to call home within the community. Nevertheless, the film ends with the symbolic gesture of Qing following Yang’s advice and attempting to reconcile with his father though an “unfilial son”, while his father too seems to have pulled himself together and is readier to accept Qing for who he is. This sense of homecoming for the homeless bird may then play into a code of familial obligation which could itself by oppressive, but also signals a new beginning and the opening up of a more liberated era.

The Outsiders screened as part of this year’s Queer East.

Kokkuri (こっくりさん, Takahisa Zeze, 1997)

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The tensions between a trio of young women are brought to the fore by an ill-advised consultation with Kokkuri-san in Takahisa Zeze’s atmospheric horror movie. Some more than others, these girls are all haunted if only by adolescent confusion and suppressed desire. Looking for answers with no one turn to in the absence of parental authority, they rely doubly on a late-night radio show, Midnight Blue Bird,  hosted by a girl their age calling herself “Michiru”.

“Michiru” is the heroine of the Japanese version of Blue Bird fairytale about a brother and sister who leave in search of the blue bird of happiness only to return and realise that it was waiting for them at home all along. While the moral of the fairytale might be that happiness is all around us if only you know how to look, there is precious little surrounding the girls outside of their friendship which is already beginning to fracture under the weight of adolescence, not to mention a series of overlapping love triangles.

What neither of the other girls know, is that Michiru is actually a persona constructed by Mio (Ayumi Yamatsu) who is actually the host of the radio show. As Michiru she claims to be sexually experienced and rebellious, answering the questions that come from other young women though, in reality, a regular high schooler and romantically naive. As we gradually become aware, she is in love with her friend Hiroko (Hiroko Shimada), but Hiroko has a crush on Masami’s fickle boyfriend Akira. It was Mio who suggested the Kokkuri-san game on her radio show, a Ouija board style means of divination, but it quickly turns dark with Masami (Moe Ishikawa) manipulating the board to needle Hiroko after realising she’s after her boyfriend.

The resulting fallout pushes Hiroko and Mio towards a confrontation with their shared traumas as survivors of a drowning. Hiroko is haunted by a little girl in red, ironically named “Midori” which means “green”, and struggles to get over the guilt she feels over a childhood friend who drowned in a public bath. Mio, meanwhile, gives contradictory biographical information on her show, but it seems that Mio’s mother intended to take her own life with Mio in tow after she caught her with her new husband to be following the death of Mio’s father. Echoing the central motivation of the film, Mio’s mother suggests the “go together” to where her father is, but later saves Mio alone.

But while Hiroko becomes preoccupied with the notion of sex, vowing to become more like Michiru, she tells Michiro that thanks losing her virginity will change her though she later laments that it’s changed nothing at all. Mio, meanwhile seems to have a hangup having caught her mother with another man. In disgust, she rubs at her libs in the same way that the older Mio later does after finally finding the courage to kiss Hiroko who lips have, by then, been coated in striking red lipstick. The colour red seems to represent the curse of Kokkuri-san and with it repressed guilt, regret, and forbidden desire. Though it seems that by learning to accept herself, publicly unmasking herself on her radio show and confessing her love for Hiroko live on air, Mio alone is able to overcome the curse. The kiss she gives Hiroko is one of life that seems to break the spell and free them both from Kokkuri-san’s trap, though all may not be as it first seems. 

Nevertheless, the fact that Hiroko does not remember makes this something of a private evolution for Mio even as voices from the past resurface and encourage them “go together” toward whatever fate awaits them in the film’s ambiguous conclusion that echoes that of Zeze’s earlier pink tale of frustrated same-sex desire, Angel of September, which shares many of the same themes. Even so, in finally accepting her sister, who is impressed and supportive of her coming out live on air even if she cynically adds it can be her new gimmick, Mio has undergone a transformation into adulthood and symbolically been reborn, emerging from the cleansing waters with greater clarity and self-assurance if perhaps no more certain of what the future may hold.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Angel in September (本番レズ　恥ずかしい体位, Takahisa Zeze, 1994)

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According to Hitomi, she and Eriko were once lovers in a past life in which they were angels battling a demon army. She claims that she recognised Eriko at once, though never had the courage to talk to her at school and has only connected with her now after witnessing her transgressive act of stealing a lipstick from a convenience store. Aside from bristling slightly that in her past life she was apparently a man, Eriko goes along with Hitomi’s bizarre story until their relationship intensifies and it begins to annoy her. 

It’s not really clear if Hitomi actually believes what she’s saying or is making the whole thing up. It may be a way for her to try and articulate her feelings, framing the love she feels for Eriko as a cosmically fated romance that began with an apparently heterosexual union, though perhaps after all angels have no gender. On the other hand, perhaps these demons that they’re battling represent those who would stand in the way of their love. Though it’s plain that Hitomi looks at her with an obvious longing, she asks Eriko if it’s alright that she’s not a boy. When Eriko replies that it doesn’t matter, Hitomi sadly asks if anyone would do while doubting her own worthiness. Eriko laughs and kisses her again, maintaining dominance by assuring Hitomi that she will teach her as she gently removes her clothes. 

But it’s also clear that Eriko has other things going on and, in some ways, represents the demon to Hitomi’s angel. She messes around with men via the telephone club, essentially a hookup line, getting Hitomi to come with her as they go on a date with a middle-aged man they plan to extort. After she and Hitomi run away together, she sleeps with the truck driver they hitched a lift with in the next room as if deliberately torturing Hitomi who writhes in agony while being subjected to her moans. Unable to bear the torment she calls her mother and asks to be picked up. Which causes a rift between herself and Eriko in what Eriko sees as an act of betrayal. After dropping out of school, Eriko takes up with another girl and rejects Hitomi’s pleas to come back, telling her that she doesn’t want to be railroaded onto a conventional life of marriage and children that believes is all that school leads to. Hitomi may, in that sense, be more conventional. Her innocence is reflected in the fact that she’d never drunk alcohol and disliked it when Eriko made her try. She dresses in a subdued manner and is fearful of Eriko’s reckless behaviour.

Nevertheless, she too tries on Eriko’s persona by going on an awkward arcade date with a boy from the telephone club who takes her to a hotel where she sleeps with him, but evidently loathes the experience and tries to regain control of the situation by becoming violent and demanding money. Resenting Eriko’s assertion that she couldn’t be an angel because she doesn’t have a scar, Hitomi burns herself by heating a metal fork to mimic the Orion’s Belt motif of moles Eriko has on her breast. Despite accusing Hitomi of only caring about herself, it seems that Eriko too is using the fantasy as an excuse to reject emotional intimacy. The other girl she’s with accuses her of thinking of Hitomi while they make they love with which she appears to be unsatisfied and there is something in her that seems fearful of genuine connection.

When they finally reunite, the final time they make love mirrors the first with roles reversed as Hitomi gently removes Eriko’s shirt and Eriko reaches out to touch the brand on Hitomi’s breast in shyness and wonder. The Orion’s Belt motif echoes the cosmic nature of their connection, as if they had finally completed their journey home to each other. But the ominous undertones remain as Hitomi returns to her story in which she romantically sacrificed herself for Eriko by jumping into the water to quell the demons’ storm. In releasing the apparently resurrected goldfish that she flushed away in pettiness and anger, she lets herself go as, like the butterfly lovers, she and Eriko seem to be transformed into fish free to swim in the ocean. Delicately shot with the yellow hues of nostalgia, Zeze’s poetic tale of toxic, frustrated love ends on a melancholy note that suggests the lovers are bound only for a loop of eternal heartbreak in every possible reincarnation.

Warm Water Under a Red Bridge (赤い橋の下のぬるい水, Shohei Imamura, 2001)

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According to the blue-tent philosopher, the real meaning of freedom lies in thinking for oneself and coming to your own conclusions. People today are too educated to admit their desires, he says. That’s certainly true of Sasano (Koji Yakusho), the embodiment of the contemporary salaryman and one who has now been cast adrift in the wake of economic stagnation. He later asks if an officer worker doesn’t have the right to love, and in his present state he might not because it’s made him a stranger to himself who can no longer make his own decisions or identify what he really wants out of life.

That might be the reason that the late Taro (Kazuo Kitamura) decided to send him on a wild goose chase to the Noto Peninsula where he once hid a Buddhist statue he stole from a Kyoto temple in a pot which shoved at the back of a cupboard in the house of a woman he once loved. As we later learn, Taro became a drifter after the war and ended up living with a woman now known only as “Granny” (Mitsuko Baisho) before he unfortunately killed someone and went to prison. After that, he was too ashamed to return, but it seems like Granny spent the rest of her life waiting, sitting by the little red bridge that leads to her home.

The bridge itself comes to represent a path to freedom as Sasano becomes involved with a younger woman who lives there, Saeko (Misa Shimizu) . After witnessing her seemingly wet herself while stealing cheese at the supermarket, Sasano uses an earring she lost as an excuse to enter the house and unexpectedly ends up having sex with her which causes Saeko to gush large amounts of water on orgasm. This is apparently Saeko’s affliction and to her a source of shame that’s ruined relationships and isolated her from society. Every time she has too much water inside her, or in other words, when her libido can no longer be denied, she feels the urge to exorcise it in other transgressive ways such as shoplifting. To that extent, female sexual desire is framed as something seen as taboo, but Saeko’s sexual fulfilment turns out to be good for the world around her. It’s why the trumpet flowers bloom so beautifully outside the house, and when the water flows into the river it beckons the fish in from further out to sea. Saeko doesn’t connect the two things, but it’s also, of course, why she has access to high-quality water that enables her to make delicious traditional-style sweets.

Sasano, meanwhile, begins to discover another side of himself while living in this small town. His wife often calls to nag him to transfer money, and to begin with we might assume that they’re already divorced but the truth is that they’ve been forced to live separately because of Sasano’s economic situation. Though she’s taken their son and moved back in with her parents, Sasano’s wife tells him to hurry up and get another job or else they’ll never get back to Tokyo. Nevertheless, just as he does, she may be discovering a new and happier life outside of the city. When she calls to say she wants a divorce, she tells him that their son has made a lot of new friends and he doesn’t want to move back. It seemed that what she wanted was the salaryman ideal and she resented Sasano for falling from the corporate ladder, but it turns out that there are other ways to be happy. As Taro had put it, corporate culture doesn’t want workers to think. It wants busy drones who complete tasks mindlessly to pay off their mortgages and be accepted as fully-fledged members of society.

By breaking out of the salaryman straightjacket, Sasano begins to find unexpected fulfilment in a simpler life as a fisherman. Through his reconciliation with Saeko and acceptance of the emotional dimension of their relationship rather than the purely sexual, he discovers a kind of serenity as evidenced by the rainbow that emerges above them as Saeko orgasms directly into the sea. Life is about small pleasures, the film seems to say, such as good food and sexual fulfilment, that can also improve the general environment quite literally watering the earth with human warmth.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Ichijo’s Wet Lust (一条さゆり　濡れた欲情, Tatsumi Kumashiro, 1972)

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The opening text at the beginning of Tatsumo Kumashiro’s Ichijo’s Wet Lust (一条さゆり　濡れた欲情, Ichijo Sayuri Nureta Yokujo) informs us that though the film might be inspired by the life of Sayuri Ichijo, queen of the strippers, it is fiction. Truth be told, Sayuri Ichijo isn’t in it all that much, but her presence seems calculated given the fact that Ichijo had also been having frequent troubles with the censors over her erotic cabaret appearances. Her signature set piece involved passing around a magnifying glass so that audience members could inspect her vagina, which got her charged with obscenity. 

Shortly before the film’s release, Nikkatsu had shifted production almost entirely to its Roman Porno line of erotic dramas. In 1972, a charge of obscenity was levelled at them in relation to the film Love Hunter, after which they became embroiled in a lengthy series of legal battles which continued until 1978. Kumashiro was the screenwriter for Love Hunter, though he penned it under a pseudonym. He apparently reached out to Ichijo as a gesture of solidarity and she agreed to be in the film, though she’d previously turned down an offer from Toei, because she thought the script seemed promising and was persuaded by Kumashiro. The dig at Toei appears to be mirrored in the film as Ichijo performs a routine dressed as a samurai noblewoman dancing to the theme from Red Peony Gambler, while her other acts mix a music hall sensibility with transgressive eroticism such as candle play.

In the wake off her legal troubles, Sayuri has quit the business to open a sushi restaurant while struggling to shake off her past. An obnoxious customer seems surprised about the idea of a stripper eating ramen, only for Sayuri to remind him that they’re normal people too and eat normal food like everyone else. She may be the queen of the strippers, but Sayuri still occupies a kind underclass in the regular world in which she’s looked down upon for her erotic art even if she personally regards it empowering. Even so, the slightly younger Harumi (Hiroko Isayama) seems to want to knock her off her perch and alternates between fawning admiration and resentment.

Trying to curry favour, she tells Sayuri that she identifies with her backstory of being an orphan that they may have grown up in the same children’s home in Saitama despite her broad Osaka accent. She also tells her husband, recently released from prison after being convicted of murder, that her father was sentenced to death, though this appears to be another detail pinched from Sayuri’s biography, which may not be true in her case either. Harumi later admits that nothing she’s said about herself is actually true, which could also be a lie, as she otherwise seems intent on stealing Sayuri’s identity and with it the top spot at the club. After getting arrested and fined, she tells her friend that she’s quitting their lesbian floorshow show because, she insensitively says, the lesbian stuff’s just for talentless hacks and she’s apparently turned off by other women’s genitalia.

To try to take down Sayuri, Harumi uses sex to manipulate the men around her including her besotted husband and another man he stabbed in the leg. Scenes of Sayuri’s show are intercut with Harumi having sex on a rollercoaster while a female attendant tries very hard not to laugh and another woman looks up in confusion from the ground. Harumi seems to be making a show of her life in a different way at least to Sayuri who is courting controversy and may have sensationalised aspects of her biography to give herself a sob story but otherwise affects refinement, every inch the queen holding court when questioned by reporters about her legal troubles and retirement. Nevertheless, she too may be threatened by Harumi, point blank telling her not to make trouble at her last show and or steal her candle act when she leaves. Sayuri’s acts become more extreme as a consequence which is what gets her in trouble with the censors, while Harumi tries to perfect a weird gimmick of squirting milk out of her vagina. Even so, she goes about it with reckless abandon and a sense of fun that lends the film a breezy, down to earth sensibility that itself is, in fact, a rebuke to the censor and a defiant depiction of a young woman living a life without constraints. 

Lovers Are Wet (恋人たちは濡れた, Tatsumi Kumashiro, 1973)

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Everyone keeps asking Katsu (Toru Ohe) if he’s Katsu, but he continues to deny it. No matter how insistent those around him are that this is his hometown, Katsu refuses to acknowledge it while claiming no other identity. It is in a way, the ultimate negation of the self and the town to him is a kind of liminal space in which he’s only ever waiting for something or else putting off the act of leaving as if prevented from moving on.

This sense of listless rootlessness may reflect that of a youth generation orphaned after the collapse of the counter-culture movement. Katsu sings bawdy folk songs in the manner of a protest singer with nothing to protest. Yoshie (Moeko Ezawa), the wife of the owner of the cinema where Katsu is working, asks him if he’s a member of the far-left movement on the run from the authorities, but Katsu says he’s not smart enough for something like that, though later admitting that he does seem to be on the run from something. 

Though she’s curious about his past, Yoshie doesn’t seem to question him about being Katsu and rather appears to want him to be an embodiment of her projected desires. She is too is trapped in this place, pinned behind the box office window with only a cat for company. Her husband rarely comes home and spends all his time with a mistress. He knows that Katsu is sleeping with his wife, but couldn’t care less. Or rather, he’s sort of grateful because it’s one less thing for him worry about. Yoshie, meanwhile, clings to him because Katsu is her only means of escape from this moribund existence. She pleads with him to stay and to love her, but Katsu doesn’t seem to be capable of love and is only sticking around for the occasional tryst. 

Catching sight of another couple having sex in the wild, he stops to peep and gets into a fist fight with the man, Mitsuo (Rebun Hori), after which they become awkward friends. Mitsuo sets him up with another girl despite Katsu’s insistence that he’s not hard up for them, but Katsu immediately tries to rape her as if asserting his primal masculinity. Ironically enough, he rides around with the banner for Sex Animal on his bike as a means of advertising and Yoko (Rie Nakagawa), the girl, later remarks that he’s reenacting the poster in his attempt to rape Sachiko (Chizuyu Azami). A sex animal seems to be what he’s become as he purses meaningless and impulsive sex that care little for the woman’s feelings, only about dominance and conquest. Sachiko later brings Katsu’s mother as if to remind him of his true identity but her rejects her, while the girl later gets the upper hand by telling both the men to get lost and no matter how much they might think they’ve won, they really haven’t.

As Katsu rapes Sachiko, Yoko and Mitsuo share ironic banter in voiceover offering a running commentary while doing nothing to help Sachiko. They too seem bored and listless, which might be why Yoko seems drawn to Katsu even if in him she perhaps sees a shadow of death which would be another way of leaving this town. He later tells her that he killed someone for money, offering the money as proof, though it’s a fairly meaningless gesture as is the money itself which doesn’t seem to have increased his possibilities. Probably, he doesn’t know what to do with it. He describes Yoshie’s warmth as like a womb, and is apparently in this town waiting either for death or to be reborn, though Yoshie’s own failed suicide attempt seems to suggest there is no real escape from this purgatorial existence. When he tells her he wants to go somewhere else, Yoshie tells him that it’s the same everywhere anyway, so leaving will make no difference and there is nowhere he can go. 

The increasingly prosperous Japan of the mid-1970s in which the student movement has died seems to have no place for him. Kumashiro kicks back against this sense of ennui partly through his ironic use of censorship which cannot help but suggest what it hides. The large black bars and scratched out pools of white hint at an attempt to erase and oppress sexuality, which is the means by which Katsu and fails to find freedom, just as they oppress freedom of expression. Katsu meanwhile continues to block things out, rejecting his identity and behaving like a character from a film more hollow archetype than man just as Yoko seems to be an embodiment of his projected desires. She too may have only one destination available to her in this inescapable cycle of unfulfilled longing and crushing ennui.

Y Vân: The Lost Sounds of Saigon (Khoa Hà & Victor Velle, 2025)

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How can it be that someone can be universally renowned, famous beyond their wildest dreams, but seemingly forgotten only fifty years later? Filmmaker Khoa Hà moved to the US at 17 and never met the grandfather who passed away before she was born leaving behind a forgotten musical legacy. Other family members have told her various things about him, but the one that fascinated her was that Y Vân had been one of the foremost composers before the war through none of his work apparently survives.

Y Vân: The Lost Sounds of Saigon is partly a mystery as Khoa decides to try retracing her grandfather’s steps, trying to bring his music back into the modern era. But it’s also an exploration of family, legacy, and the brutality of the war during which most of Y Vân’s work was either deliberately or otherwise destroyed. Not only does Khoa struggle to find anything of her grandfather’s music, but is repeatedly told that nothing much survives of music made before 1975 due wartime destruction and/or the new regime who destroyed anything they deemed to be decadent. 

The totality of the destruction seems shocking. That an entire era could just be erased as if it never existed is somehow chilling in its implications. Y Vân was one of a handful of major songwriters whose work was known by all. In those days, publishers sold sheet music for songs on a similar level to records so people could learn the song by following as they listened, and you’d think that something like this would stick in the collective memory as people keep the songs alive by singing them. The problem is, however, that without any of Y Vân’s records, Koha isn’t left with much to go on, not really knowing who any of her father’s collaborators might have been to try asking them for their thoughts and recollections. 

All she really has to rely on is family, though Y Vân himself had said that’s all you really need. Looking for her grandfather’s legacy enables Khoa to reconnect with her family in Vietnam including her great-aunt and uncle as well as Y Vân’s first wife from whom he eventually separated. After a while, he mother joins her on her quest, deepening their own connection as they delve into family history and travel all over Vietnam trying to track down Y Vân’s music.

It’s a family connection that eventually puts them on to a collector who, like Khoa, has been trying to reclaim something of the past. Before the war, his family owned a music cafe, and so he’s been collecting records to recreate his childhood. His desire to restore this lost past is a means of trying to heal the trauma of the war and push past this dividing line to reclaim the lost Vietnam that lies behind it just as Khoa is attempting to reconnect with the cultural roots she felt herself in danger of losing in the US. 

Y Vân himself seems to have been a casualty of these changing times. He was temporarily sent for re-education and prevented from using his stage him with the consequence that he gave up writing music while many of his songs were banned. He passed away at a comparatively young age with his musical legacy all but forgotten. The singers who performed his music went to the US where they were unable to continue their singing careers and had to focus on making new lives for themselves. Through uncovering and archiving her grandfather’s music with the help of the collector who agrees to help her digitise his tapes and LPs so that everyone can hear them, Khoa is helping to preserve this history for future generations. As she says, art has the ability to heal old wounds and bring people together, enabling her to reconnect with her family and restore something of what was lost. Told with true visual flair, the film’s soundtrack mainly uses 60s covers of American songs, while animated sequences help to recreate the pre-war society in which Y Vân became famous, though ironically his actual dream was to study maths rather than becoming a musical superstar. Chapter markers see Khoa walking through a desert searching for Y Vân’s music and eventually finding her way toward accepting herself and culture through the preservation of her grandfather’s legacy.

Y Vân: The Lost Sounds of Saigon screened as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival Spring Showcase.

The Road to Sydney (Benito Bautista, 2025)

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As a young person in Palawan, Sydney Loyola found herself the victim of toxic masculinity and a fiercely patriarchal culture. She recalls that her father once made her fight a neighbour’s son and threw her into a lake in what she then felt to be a rejection of her femininity. This feeling of being unloved by her father and responsible for the breakdown of her parents’ marriage has left a permanent scar on her life that continues to haunt her even as she begins the steps towards embracing her authentic self.

Shot over several years, Benito Bautista’s documentary follows Sydney through her transition having moved to the United States where she encounters a different kind of rejection and discrimination. A dancer and choreographer well versed in the traditional dance of Palawan, Sydney nevertheless had a survival job in San Francisco working for a property management company. When she told her boss that she needed medical leave to recover from surgery and that, on her return, she would be known as Sydney, he was apparently supportive. When she returned to work, however, the situation was quite different and her employers seemed to seize on any chance to dismiss her. Despite having sought advice from former fire fighter Mia who had undergone a successful transition in the fire service and assured Sydney that transgender people already enjoyed workplace protections in San Francisco she is eventually let from her job, forcing her to move out of her apartment, too.

But in another way, being forced out of her apartment is only another migration that acts as a fresh start at the beginning of her new life as Sydney. On reconnecting with her dance background, Sydney returns to the Philippines to choreograph a new routine inspired by a local folksong about a man who swore he would return for a woman. Sydney has done something quite similar, returning to reclaim not only her authentic self but her culture as rooted in the history of Palawan by choreographing a routine that incorporates traditional elements and western-inspired dance. Performed on the shores of a local beach, hers is a dance of migration inspired by the nomadic Batak people that reflects her journey toward becoming Sydney, embracing her authentic self, and eventually coming home.

Even in the US, Sydney had said that dance was the only place she felt truly safe while those who remember her from her youth in Palawan state that she was already able to express her authentic self even if she was too afraid of her parents’ reaction to do so openly. She recalls that she repressed herself and did everything she could not to stand out and be noticed, though the other children at school called her effeminate and bullied her. Even as an adult, she breaks down in tears wondering why people look down on others. Several of the other interviewees, some of whom are also from the Philippines, recall similar stories of being rejected by their families for not conforming to rigid gender roles.

Sydney says that she never felt loved by her father and suspects that his rejection of her was born of a feeling of inadequacy, that her femininity brought his own manhood into question. On reuniting with him, it seems as if her feelings toward her father may have been due to a lifelong misunderstanding, or at least, he doesn’t seem to remember her childhood in the same way she does and though the meeting is more of a positive experience than she feared it might be, she’s left feeling shortchanged for a lack of acknowledgment for all she suffered. Though she describes her mother as more supportive, Sydney also waited until after she died to pursue her transition fearing that it should be too difficult or her understand and cause further strain near the end of her life. Despite having gone to America to be free of this patriarchal culture, coming back to Palawan allows Sydney to come full circle by reclaiming her authentic identity and overcoming a past sense of rejection. Resolving her situation in the US and rediscovering old friends in Palawan, she finally arrives at herself and a moment of serenity having become the person she always knew herself to be.

The Road to Sydney screenedas part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival Spring Showcase.

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)