Deadline (自殺通告, Kiwi Chow Kwun-Wai, 2025)

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What does it mean to get “an education”? Is the school system only really there to brainwash the young into following accepted the path and prepare them to be receptive to authority, actively destroying both the ability and desire to think for oneself? The fact that Kiwi Chow’s Deadline (自殺通告, zìshā tōnggào) was not approved for release in Hong Kong on the grounds of “national security” may indicate the direction of its perspective on the interplay between the intensity of the education system and entrenched authoritarianism.

The mere fact that En Shan high school is described as “elite” already implies that it exists to perpetuate a kind of social inequality, though in other ways some might say that it also encourages social mobility in that the students come from all backgrounds and are selected for academic excellence rather than simply the ability to pay the fees. Education does seem to be life’s make or break. Students who don’t make it to university are perceived as being relegated to a kind of underclass from which there is no other escape. Yet at the same time, perhaps university isn’t right for everyone and not all of the pupils want to live a life dedicated to achieving conventional success that might otherwise leave them miserable.

Chun Chiu (Jimmy Liu) is one of the few brave ones who’s decided he doesn’t want to go to university and is happy enough pottering around with his plants. He doesn’t care if people look down on him because he knows he’s happy in himself, and they probably aren’t. Consequently, he’s also the only one to really see what’s going on at the school and to want to try to stop it. Despite its elegant name, there’s a kind of bloodthirstiness that underlines the survival of the fittest mentality at En Shan where they wear mildly fascistic uniforms and start the day with a haka-style dance in which they recite the school’s mantras about being the best of the best and that there’s no point coming second. These children are prevented from forming real friendships or developing social skills and empathy because they’ll always be rivals waiting for the ideal time to stab each other in the back.

The school reinforces this sense of judgment and hierarchy through adopting a social credit-style system in which pupils’ “privileges” are linked to their performance and obedience levels. Chun Chiu is at one point locked out of the garden because his scores have fallen so low he’s not allowed outside the prison-like school environment. Everyone at the school, including the teachers, is under constant surveillance with an AI programme responsible for assigning grades and points. Headmaster Kung wants to get rid of Mr Gao (Huang Di-yang) because the system says his performance is poor, while star teacher Mrs Tien tries to defend him. To begin with, Gao seems as if he might be resisting in another way by giving care and attention to struggling pupils like Heng (Bai Run-yin) who is taking medication for ADHD. But it turns out that Gao is so worried about losing his job as he has to pay maintenance for his ex-wife and child that he’s been giving the kids performance enhancing drugs in the hope of boosting his own approval ratings in the app.

Heng is also getting bullied by some of the other pupils, not just because he’s different but because they resent it that they think he’s being given special advantages by taking medicine that helps him concentrate and being given extra time to finish exams. This leads Heng to try and and cancel his accommodations in a bid to avoid being singled out and in a mistaken gesture of solidarity with the other kids to prove he’s not being given any extra privileges. Meanwhile, they’re all taking similar medication that’s designed to aid concentration and reduce the need for sleep for they can study for longer. But the drugs also prevent them from sleeping when they want to and suppress their appetites so they don’t eat. They cause low mood and suicidal ideation, which, coupled with the already high-stress environment, is a recipe for disaster.

To combat this culture, someone drops a series of ominous flyers threatening the school that there will be a suicide if they don’t “stop poisoning us” by ending the practice of holding exams under medication. While headmaster Kung appears oblivious to the monster he himself has created and has no real idea what’s going on in the school, to his credit he does seem keen to find out if there are any pupils in danger of harming themselves rather than solely trying to silence the whistleblower or save the school’s reputation. He has no idea about the drugs and is shocked on realising how prevalent they’ve become in the school. When they start doing drug tests and discover that over half the pupils are taking them, the director of the board of governors, who has the real power, tells him to stop the testing before they find any more.

But it turns out that this problem extends far beyond the school as in some cases it’s the parents who are making their kids take these drugs, and the head of the student council, Mo (Michael Chang), that’s been selling them. After a few deaths have occurred, Tien and Kung want to stop the exams, but are prevented from doing so, in part because the education system is a national machine. The kids can’t just take the exam on another day because they can’t come up with all new papers just for them at short notice. In a truly chilling moment, Mo gets up on his chair begins chanting the nonsensical mantra “exams are a human right” while insisting on being allowed to take them even if it means that more pupils end up dying. After all, that’s just less competition for him. They’re already locked into this system and refuse to be cast out of it, in part because they’ve learned how to manipulate it so perfectly.

Then again, obsessive study doesn’t leave you with much time to think about anything else even if you’re not also sleep deprived and malnourished as a result of long-term drug use. Chun Chiu’s friend Peiching (Tai Ya-chih), the current number one, becomes conflicted in part because she realises that she does not really know who she is and is incapable of determining what she wants out of life. She said she wanted to be a doctor because that’s what her parents were so she thought she was supposed to be too, but doesn’t know if that’s actually what she wants. Peiching seems genuinely worried about rival Ruoyan (Mimi Shao Yi-mei) who self-harms out of frustration and feelings of inadequacy, but equally only perhaps because thanks to the drugs she stands a real chance of knocking her off  the top spot. Mrs Tien may secretly be thinking of moving abroad precisely because her own daughter does not suit this rigid educational system, but remains largely unable to change it while the students have, it seems, already internalised its tenets unable to let go of a world in which everything is defined by numbers and ranking without the intrusion of independent thought or human empathy.

Deadline screened as part of Hong Kong Film Fest UK and opens in UK cinemas 16th October.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Meets the World (ミーツ・ザ・ワールド, Daigo Matsui, 2025)

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Adapted from the novel by Hitomi Kanehara, Daigo Matsui’s Meets the World (ミーツ・ザ・ワールド) takes its name from the heroine’s love of a BL manga in which all the characters are anthropomorphised versions of various cuts of meat that can be ordered at yakiniku restaurants. But it’s also, in a way, an apt description of her experiences as she begins to open herself up to the act of living while considering where it is she belongs and what it is that will actually make her happy.

This comes about largely due to an encounter with the mysterious Rai (Kotona Minami), a beautiful yet melancholy young woman who rescues her one night while she’s drunk and disorientated in the street. Rai offers her a literal sanctuary, but also challenges Yukari’s (Hana Sugisaki) view of the world by constantly questioning and undermining things that she had assumed to be true but without telling her what she should think or do. Rai offers her these little nudges, but at the same time lives in an apartment strewn with rubbish and repeatedly says that she longs for death. Yukari begins by clearing up, reminding her that one’s living arrangements reflect the state of one’s mind, but she finds it much more difficult to clean up Rai’s mental state or relieve her internalised listlessness and lack of enthusiasm for living.

In some senses, it’s true that Yukari becomes more fixated on the idea of saving Rai as a means of saving herself than she does on her personal growth, but at the same time gains greater experience and understanding through interacting with Rai’s social circle at the aptly named Loneliness bar. The irony is that though she becomes frustrated that she can’t seem to truly connect with Rai or reduce her desire for death, she rejects the same kind of interest from her mother (Mariko Tsutsui) whose calls she is forever avoiding. Her mother only really wants the same thing that Yukari wants from Rai and would seemingly be happy enough with a few texts as proof of life, though it’s something that Yukari doesn’t want to give her for whatever reason. She says that she didn’t like living alone with her mother after her father’s death, but there’s the same kind of absence felt in Rai’s apartment which she previously shared with the only person she claims to have loved but is now no longer in her life.

It speaks to Yukari’s naivety that she thinks she could heal Rai simply by reuniting her with this person, while she comes to realise that romance may not be the answer she was looking for either. Yukari had enthusiastically begun looking for a husband at 27 despite never having dated before because she thought it was what she was supposed to do, yet what makes her happiest is her obsessive interest in her favourite manga. These kinds of hobbies are often looked down by the surrounding society and it’s clear that Yukari has a degree of internalised shame regarding her interest in them. Even at her mother’s house, she hides all anime merch behind a curtain out of sight and keeps it a secret from her colleagues at the bank where she works. When Yukari eventually does mention her love of anime, her colleague begins to smirk a little as if she thinks that explains quite a lot and is internally laughing at Yukari while remaining superficially polite. Yukari’s prim and proper supervisor, meanwhile, gives her a stern look though it isn’t clear if that’s because she thinks Yukari’s hobbies are inappropriate for a woman her age, or because she may have similar hobbies of her own. 

In any case, it’s true that through her friendship with Rai she learns to be open about her interests and be fully herself in all environments, accepting that love and dating may not be right for her or at least that she doesn’t need to force them to satisfy the demands of others. It could be said that what she has with her anime characters is a one-sided relationship, but that’s also true of those around her including the host Asahi (Rihito Itagaki) who sees his marriage founder as his wife grows tired of supporting him as the number one host while he can’t win her back just as himself. Ironically, these kinds of one-sided relationships are a professional hazard that can otherwise lead to toxicity and violence. A gloomy writer, Yuki (Yu Aoi), also recounts the postnatal depression that led to the end of her marriage and subsequent realisation that what she had was the kind of happiness that someone who thought themselves unhappy wanted to find, but did not actually work out for her. 

What they are is in effect a series of bubbles that occasionally float close to each other or perhaps intersect without really connecting. Nevertheless, they offer each other a gentle sense of solidarity just by existing. Matsui films in a 4:3 ratio that seems constrained, but also has a cosy, protective quality while implying that loneliness is a natural fact of life that can’t be entirely cured, yet even if someone is not actually with you physically, or may not even physically exist, one’s love for them can still endure and be a healthy source of comfort and support while everyone has the right to live as they please free from the judgement of others.

Meets the World screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Trailer (no subtitles)

My Name Ain’t Suzie (花街時代, Angie Chen, 1985)

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Angie Chen’s response to The World of Suzie Wong, My Name Ain’t Suzie (花街時代) opens in the present day with its heroine apparently a gothic mystery, a Miss Havisham-style recluse and ghost of old Hong Kong trapped within the apartment of a legendary madam from old Shanghai. This conception of her turns out to be something of a myth in itself, as accidental witness to history Dick recounts to a young man working as a delivery boy (Jacky Yeung Tak-Ngai) for his ever evolving chip shop that she is actually still a wildly successful restauranteur and fixture in the local nightclub scene. 

This small enclave of Wan Chai, however, seems to have become a kind of ghost town having been largely abandoned as the American sailors who were once its main clientele stopped coming after the twin waves of the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Shui Mei (Pat Ha Man-Jik) now owns this block which signals her eventual mastery over the world in which she lives, if also her loneliness and isolation, occasionally staying in Miss Xiao’s (Angela Yu Chien) old apartment as if unable to let go of the irresolvable past. Her story is then, at least in part, a chronicle of the nation’s own post-war history as she successfully adapts to the times, yet retains a sense of melancholy nostalgia for an older Hong Kong which is fast disappearing as the Handover looms closer.

Indeed, Shui Mei’s life begins in an impoverished fishing village which is set a stir by the return of Monroe, a seemingly glamorous woman dressed in the latest fashions and handing out sticks of gum to the awestruck locals. Sex work is seen as a pathway out of poverty and towards the new modern society that Monroe represents. Having been raped by three local boys, it is also in a way Shui Mei’s means of rejecting her victimisation and asserting full ownership over her body even if, in other ways, she is exploited by brothel owner Miss Xiao, herself an exile who fled to Hong Kong from the formerly glamorous and sophisticated international centre that was Shanghai.

While working as a bar girl in Wan Chai, Shui Mei falls for Miss Xiao’s adopted son, Jimmy, on whom she has a quasi-incestuous fixation. Rather than casting an actor already under contract to Shaw Brothers, Chen cast a then unknown Anthony Wong, billed under the name Anthony Perry, through extensive auditions largely for the similarities he shared with the role. Like Jimmy, Wong was abandoned as a small child by his father, a British colonial official who already had a wife and children in the UK with whom he later emigrated to Australia. Jimmy’s idolisation of Hollywood icon James Dean and desperate search for his biological father, an American seaman, are symbolic of the search for cultural identity in a Hong Kong caught between a series of colonial influences while denied the kind of mastery over itself that Shui Mei eventually achieves.

Shui Mei’s relationship with Jimmy causes a rift with Miss Xiao that leads to her exile from Wan Chai, though Jimmy proves to be a faithless lover. After years of boasting of the revenge he’ll take for his mother’s suicide when he finds his father, Jimmy is seduced by promises of American wealth and comfort and accepts his invitation to return with him to the US, callously abandoning Shui Mei. Years later, when he returns with his two young sons, he has become in some ways very much Americanised. He complains that his first wife lacked a strong work ethic while having adopted an orientalist idea of the submissive hometown wife who will work hard in his business and raise his children. Though still resentful over her abandonment, Shui Mei harbours a lingering desire to rekindle the romance of her youth only to be cruelly disillusioned. Jimmy has forgotten her. He has not come back for Shui Mei, but is clearly in the market for a much younger woman, eventually marrying one of Shui Mei’s proteges at the bar she has opened in another part of the city after saving money made through temporarily working as a streetwalker.

This does, however, reinforce the idea that Shui Mei cannot rely on a man to save her but only on herself and female solidarity. When her new bar is targeted by triads, she enters a partnership with Sister Ying (Deanie Ip Tak-Han), the former wife of a gang boss who has pull in the underworld and a habit of chasing off gangsters with meat cleavers. Though the relationship is heavily implied as both a romantic and business partnership of equals, Shui Mei does not quite accept its validity due its same sex nature and wonders if she can really stay with Ying forever while tempted by the prospect of a more conventional, heterosexual union with Jimmy along with an easy life in America having run herself ragged creating a business empire and suffering the physical affects of a violent triad attack.

Though the end of her story may seem sad, Dick explains to his young delivery boy that Shui Mei refused to be beaten and got back up again each time she was knocked down, which perhaps provides a more positive prognosis in the shadow of the Handover. In one sense, she may have become a ghost of old Hong Kong as her silhouette now appears at Miss Xiao’s window, but may otherwise have avoided her fate. Despite their falling-out, an ageing Shui Mei returned to care for Miss Xiao who unlike her had been left behind by changing times, abandoned by all including her adopted son Jimmy who returns only after her death following many years of estrangement. Though Shui Mei may be consumed by an irresolvable nostalgia, like the nation itself she has progressed from her life in the impoverished fishing village to become an economic powerhouse while achieving total mastery over herself as an independent woman.

My Name Ain’t Suzie screened as part of Hong Kong Film Fest UK.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Hope (호프, Na Hong-jin, 2026)

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A decade on from The Wailing, Na Hong-jin returns with a piece of baffling hokum, Hope (호프), in which a small town close to the DMZ is assaulted by humanoid giants during the 1980s. Playing out like a satire of Hollywood monster movies, by the film’s abrupt cliffhanger ending we begin to get the impression that we’ve been watching from the wrong side of the screen. The “real” movie was a space fantasy revolving around the fall of an alien empire and the fate of a “chosen one”, while we’ve been seeing things from the perspective of an indigenous community witnessing the arrival of strange, new beings.

In any case, the first indication that something is “wrong” is the discovery of a mutilated cow by police chief Bum-seok’s (Hwang Jung-min) cousin Sung-ki (Zo In-sung). Sung-ki’s gang of hunters seem to think a tiger could be responsible, convincing Bum-seok that local wise man Hae-sul (Im Hyun-sik) said he saw one out in the mountains. Hae-sul did indeed see something, but according to his own reports, it was not a tiger. In any case, the hunters split off to investigate the mountains while Bum-seok returns to the town and finds it in a state of chaos. Bodies line the streets while buildings have been destroyed. Occasionally, he hears strange roars and sees cars flying overhead, thrown by some unknown force. 

The town itself has a frontier aesthetic like something out of an American western and unlike the Korea usually seen in the movies. There are signs reminding people to report spies and frustrate infiltration, reminding us that this is a paranoid place that has been on a war footing for around 30 years. Most of the residents are elderly and were, therefore, adults during the Korean War which explains why so many of them are so familiar with military weaponry and why there’s so much of it around including things like grenade launchers which aren’t generally used by the police. This is clearly not an invasion attempt from the North, though it explains why everyone is so keen to shoot first and ask questions later after decades of fearful vigilance.

This is first the hint we have that perhaps the heroes are the bad guys after all. While the first half sees Bum-seok and gung-ho policewoman Seung-ae (Jung Ho-yeon) desperately chasing the monster in their patrol car, Bum-seok begins to feel pity for it after looking into its human-like eyes and noticing that it appears to be crying. The idea that the real monsters maybe the heroes and, by implication, we in the audience isn’t a particularly original idea and is played with such unsubtlety that Na appears to be poking fun at the trope. There’s an unpleasantness to the degree with which the hunters in the particular rejoice in the idea of killing something so unusual. They aren’t so much brave young men of the village going off to kill the monster, as bloodthirsty animals little different from their prey. 

In fact, this whole mess started because one of the village’s more unusual residents killed something he shouldn’t have. Outside of the action sequences, the film is at its best exploring the weirdness of the small-town environment. There seems to be a running gag that where the men are panicked and confused, the women are ready to meet this moment with crazed determination such as Sung-ae turning up announced with machine guns, grenade launchers, and even a missile, or the female pathologist hacking away at the body of a fallen “monster” with a chainsaw. As the film concludes, the humans are on the run and in a panic with Bum-seok admitting he has no idea what to do, while Sung-ae at least as a kind of a plan even if it might not have much chance of success. There is, then, a rather thin line between defence aggression. In some respects, they may already have crossed it in their determination to fend off this “incursion’ and expel the “foreign elements” from the town. Nevertheless, there is a small ray of hope I the residents’ sudden coming together to resolve the unknown threat, even if their initial response to it is motivated by fear and ignorance.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Unchained (四月の余白,  Keisuke Yoshida, 2026)

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Can a person really change, or should we just accept that some people are born bad and can’t be accepted in mainstream society? This seems to be the question at the centre of Keisuke Yoshida’s empathetic drama Unchained (四月の余白, Shigatsu no Yohaku) which suggests, in a way, that violence is a vicious circle as society tends to write off those with behavioural issues pushing them deeper into their isolation and giving them little opportunity for reform or rehabilitation.

“Mister Nishi” (Wataru Ichinose), as he seems to be known, is a former delinquent who committed acts of heinous violence in his youth, spent time in prison, and experienced a personal tragedy that acted as a wake up call and gave him the opportunity to turn his life around. He now works at a kind of tough love bootcamp that attempts to guide wayward teens back towards the mainstream. His methods, however, are not universally approved and especially not by contemporary teachers. Though corporal punishment has long been outlawed in educational facilities, Nishi believes that sometimes there is no other way to reach these children and violence may be the only way to teach them that their actions have consequences. 

A teacher takes him to task and asks him if he isn’t just teaching them to be violent and in fact pushing them towards and anti-social behaviour. Nishi disagrees, but the film doesn’t really explore the alternative any further and more or less sides with Nishi. The children at the facility do seem to be doing better than they presumably were beforehand and do not appear to be unhappy there. It also seems that they are expected to do farm work, and it’s unclear if they’re being compensated for that, though this may be a slight cultural difference that is not raised in the film either by the documentary crew that comes to film the facility nor by a journalist who tries to take Nishi down by accusing him of fabricating details of his backstory which eventually leads to the facility closing down. 

Nishi may, however, have met his match in Kaito (Hayato Kohsaka), a violent young man exhibiting an extreme lack of empathy. Kaito’s teacher first seeks out Nishi because she’s at a loss of what else to do, while the boy’s mother appears to be a good woman who has tried everything she can and is now at the end of her tether. Kaito has become violent towards her too and apparently beat the family dog to death in a fit of rage for which he feels no remorse. The mother is beginning to feel suicidal and willing to try Nishi’s methods as a last-ditch effort to save her family. There is no clear reason why Kaito became this way. We get a hint of generational violence in that Kaito seems to resent his father who is disabled and in his view defeated by life. His father does seem to have become depressed because of his disability and it’s because of the depression and sense of worthlessness that he’s been unable to hold down a job and has taken to drink.

In a twist of fate, it turns out that it was Nishi who crushed his knee and left him permanently disabled. Kaito’s father therefore piles all of his resentment onto him without taking any responsibility for the choices he made himself after that. When Kaito ironically injures another boy in the same way, his father begins to realise his mistakes and cautions the other boy against becoming consumed by resentment or a sense of defeat. It’s this notion of “defeat” that becomes central to the interrogation of a cultural notion of toxic masculinity in which the reason some of these young men are thought to act out is that they don’t want to be seen as losers and harm others to prove their superiority. This is in part true of Kaito who declares himself happy to hurt other people as long as he himself does not get hurt. It’s not that he is incapable of understanding that others experience pain in the same way that he does, but that he simply does not really care. 

Some argue that Nishi doesn’t either and that, as he was a delinquent himself, he is incapable of fully sympathising with victims and only has empathy for those commit acts of violence. Nevertheless, that does give him a unique perspective that allows him to help some of these teens both by supporting them and being a positive role model as someone who has been able to reform and live a more mainstream, settled life. Then again, some seem dubious of the way he seems to change after the media takes interest which leaves him with less time for the children while chasing the spotlight. Ms. Kusano (Kaho), meanwhile, wonders if she did the right thing or perhaps just did what was easiest for her in abandoning Kaito into Nishi’s care. She chastises herself for having forgotten a model student who spoke to her at a reunion while uncertain if it’s right to devote so much of her time to kids like Kaito rather than supporting those he victimised such as student who withdrew from the school due to his bullying.

While a fellow teacher’s characterisation of Kaito as a”bad apple” who should be “discarded” before he causes any more trouble may seem callous, it’s also true that without his influence the other kids who’d been in his gang begin to straighten out and give more thought to their futures. Though he struggles at the facility, Kaito does seem to benefit in a way from a less stimulating environment and shows signs of change, if also of self-sabotage and an inability to walk away from his delinquent life for fear of being seen as a loser. It’s only after he’s cajoled into another act of violence and receiving kindness in return that he begins to see the error of his ways. The film seems to suggest, then, that person can change but that equally society has to let them, rather than try to tear them down as they did to Nishi in denying him his fresh start by reminding him that no apology is enough to change what he did in the past. While perhaps controversial in some of its implications, the film is at least empathetic and even handed, filmed in an unostentatious style that tries to sympathise both with the dealers and the receivers of violence in the conviction that there is no one who cannot change.

Unchainedscreened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Flames of a Flower (火の華, Oudai Kojima, 2024)

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A former soldier finds it difficult to adjust to civilian life after becoming involved in a fire fight in which a close friend died while on a peace-keeping mission in South Sudan in Oudai Kojima’s politically-inflected drama, Flames of a Flower (火の華, Hi no Hana). The film takes its title from the literal meaning of the Japanese word for fireworks, but its hero is also in some senses closely aligned with a flower, both as a kind of sacrificial object burned after outliving its usefulness, and in also slowly growing in the nurturing environment of a family-run fireworks factory until finally coming into bloom.

Shimada’s (Ikken Yamamoto) growth is only, however, one side of the story as the film draws inspiration from a real-life incident of a Japanese soldier dying in a combat situation in Sudan which was covered up by the authorities as, under the pacifist constitution, Self Defence Force troops are not supposed to be deployed in combat areas while on peace-keeping missions. While serving in South Sudan, Shimada’s troop is ambushed and he is forced to shoot a child soldier when his comrade and close friend is killed after having put his gun down in an attempt to defuse the situation. While he and fellow soldier Tanaka (Ippei Tanaka) attempt to get Furukawa to a hospital, Captain Ito (Yohei Matsukado) is left behind and thereafter presumed to have been killed. On his return, Shimada is forced to sign confidentiality documents that prevent him from talking about what really happened on the grounds of national security, while the authorities report that Furukawa and Ito died as a result of a traffic accident.

It’s this inability to speak the truth that informs Shimada’s trauma as much as it is the physical stressors of the battlefield or his guilt over having to kill the child soldier. Two years after the incident, he’s working as a welder in a small factory but experiences a flashback which causes him to assault a colleague. Though his boss is sympathetic, he has no other option than to let Shimada go, but introduces him to a friend, Fujii (Masato Ibu), who runs a fireworks factory and seems to have a track record with rehabilitating those with difficult backgrounds. Working in a fireworks factory might not seem the best option given Shimada’s condition, but at the same time it gives him the opportunity to do something more constructive with the same material that caused so much destruction while he was a soldier. The film plays on this dichotomy, Shimada later visiting Sudan again to teach the children about fireworks as a means of explaining to them that they have a choice between using gunpowder for fear and killing or making something beautiful, but at the same time it ignores the third option which is obviously just not to have anything to do with gunpowder in the first place. 

Showing the children the fireworks plays into the idea that children are cruelly robbed of their dreams by egotistical adults, hinting both at the children who are forced to become soldiers, and Fujii’s own regret that he would not let his daughter Akiko (Yurina Yanagi) become a fireworks technician. She has since become a florist working with a literal kind of flowers and also helping Shimada with his recovery. His former comrades, however, have largely become consumed with anger and rage against the government for its lack of transparency. Ito, having survived, has formed a militia after meeting a former member of the Japanese Red Army and is planning some kind of revolutionary action to change the society.

Exactly how they mean to change it isn’t altogether clear aside from a clear desire for transparency and also an end to Japan’s dependence on the US for defence which they argue drags them into situations they don’t belong in because of American foreign policy they might not necessarily agree with. They don’t quite state if that means having a standing army that could go to war if necessary, or if they still believe in pacfism but want the Americans out. In any case, they plan to expose the fact that the government prioritises its diplomatic arrangements over the lives of ordinary citizens while keeping from them that this puts Japanese troops in danger overseas. 

A subsequent plot by a government official working with a Chinese gangster (Kim Chang-bak) who Shimada meets after ironically becoming involved with trading illegal weapons, further muddies the waters, though the film is at its best in exploring the ways in which Shimada is able to come to accommodation with himself while being supported by those at the fireworks factory who become a kind of surrogate family. This sense of community is, the film suggests, what prevents him from jumping off the deep end like his former comrades who have become dangerously fixated on revenge. Though at times its politics may seem muddled or obscure, the film is at least at pains to stress that war and violence are choices that are often made by those who won’t have to suffer the consequences, when it is much easier to channel those same resources into something beautiful that can bring hope and enrich lives rather than destroying them.

Flames of a Flower screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Ranshima Bound (蘭島行, Yoshitaka Kamada, 2025)

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A middle-aged man dejectedly sitting on the side of the street drinking glances at his phone and we notice that his mother is the only person on his call list with several calls on recent days lasting only seconds. He then receives a call from his brother informing him that she is in a coma after having apparently attempted to take her own life in the wake of a terminal cancer diagnosis she had not shared with either of them. 

Apparently autobiographically inspired, Yoshitaka Kamada’s Hokkaido-set drama Ranshima Bound (蘭島行) examines fracturing familial relationships and the subterfuge that is sometimes necessary to make them work. After receiving the phone call, Yoshio comes across the body of a woman floating in a river. Next thing we know, she’s travelling with him to Ranshima where he purchases a pair of wedding rings and dress in a pawn shop. Feeling unhappy about what he has achieved in life, he asks Maki (Yuko Kii) to pose as his wife so that he can show her off to his mother when she wakes up.

It seems that Yoshio (Tomoki Kimura) went to Tokyo to be a punk musician, play in a band, and change the world, but he is no longer living a punk lifestyle and his musical dreams seem not to have panned out. He tells his brother than he has a part-time job inspecting concrete to ensure it meets safety standards, but it is not clear if this is actually the truth. Satoshi, meanwhile, is a respectable middle-aged man with a successful career who is married with a teenage daughter. The two brothers seem to be somewhat estranged and not particularly well informed about what’s going on with each other’s lives, though Satoshi is still a little hurt and surprised that Yoshio has apparently got married without even letting him know. In any case, he tries to include Maki in all the arrangements while she does her best to play along.

She does, however, become unexpectedly upset when the two brothers joke about disposing of their mother’s ashes, perhaps because she comes to stand in for the mother’s absence. Reading his mother’s diaries, Yoshio comes to understand his mother’s wishes for after her death and also that she missed her sons who seemed not to have paid her much attention while she was alive. For unexplained reasons, she didn’t contact them when their father passed away and seems to have become depressed in her widowhood even before the cancer diagnosis. Both sons appear to feel guilty in different ways, Yoshio having avoided his mother because of his internalised shame and suspicion that she would have preferred him to become a regular salaryman like his brother. Satoshi, meanwhile, justifies himself that he prioritised his family, though as it turns out he maybe a victim of his own “success”. His marriage is failing largely because he is always away working and hardly every home. He and his wife are considering divorcing when their daughter finishes high school.

Neither of them particularly want their mother’s apartment, but they don’t want to deal with it either while they’d still have to go on paying the land taxes until it’s sold if their mother were to die. They’re also now responsible for paying the storage fees at the temple where their mother had interred their father’s ashes, though in her diary she states that she wants their ashes scattered at sea together. The request baffles the boys who aren’t quite sure why she wanted that or what sea she means before deciding it’s probably where they used to go holiday when they children, a once prosperous but now rundown resort area that seems to mimic their own sense of lonely despair. It seems that their mother wanted to return to a time when the family was at its happiest, while in the present day each has become mired in their own sorrow and insecurity. Though in some ways it may seem as if Yoshio is able to heal a rift through his fake marriage subterfuge, it cannot in the repair his family nor can the family really save any of them. Nevertheless, there is a vague sense of hope amid bleakness as the Yoshio returns to say goodbye to his mother with Maki still waiting at the train station rather than leaving alone.

Ranshima Bound screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Heaven’s Door (ヘブンズ・ドア, Michael Arias, 2009)

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After finding out he may only have a few days to live, a young man runs off with a terminally ill teenage girl who has never seen the sea in Michael Arias’s road trip movie, Heaven’s Door (ヘブンズ・ドア). A remake of the German film by Thomas Jahn, Arias’ version explores the impact that impending mortality can have on ordinary person as the pair flee the city looking for a more natural sense of ease and tranquility.

After being abruptly laid off from his job as a mechanic, Masato (Tomoya Nagase) experiences a debilitating headache that sends him straight to hospital. The doctors tell him that he has an inoperable brain tumour and that chemotherapy is unlike to prove effective. He has at most a week to live, most likely a few days, and could die at any moment. While in hospital, Masato ends up running into Harumi (Mayuko Fukuda), a 14-year-old girl also recently told that her condition is no longer treatable. Unlike Masato, Harumi has lived a sheltered life never getting to experience the kind of things that healthy children take for granted.

That may be why Masato finds himself sympathising her, allowing her to try one of his cigarettes and a bit of tequila left behind by the previous inhabitant of Masato’s bed who died of drink. When she remarks that she’s never seen the sea, it gives him the excuse too to cut loose, escape the hospital and set off for a place beyond all the confusion and difficulties of contemporary city life. On walking out of the hospital doors, they spot a fancy sports car and temptation proves too difficult to resist as they drive off with it, little knowing that it belongs to a pair of henchmen working for a dodgy motivational speaker and contains a significant account of money hidden in the boot.

This really is the first sign that Masato has departed from a sense of conventional morality while consumed by desperation in the face of  his mortality. Without thinking it through, he stops for petrol and has no money to pay. He attempts to fob the old man off with excuses that he’s forgotten his wallet and will come back with the money later, but the attendant is insistent. Searching the car for money, Harumi unexpectedly finds a pistol in the glove compartment. The old man thinks he’s being robbed, allowing Masato to go along with the chaos by robbing the shop but taking only a small amount of money. 

Harumi is more sceptical, not approving of Masato’s actions but still going along with the sense of adventure. Unlike him, she is mostly motivated by curiosity about life and melancholy resignation. When the pair pass through the city, Harumi looks on wistfully at a group of high school girls in their school uniform as if longing for that kind of normality. She tells Masato that she hasn’t left the hospital for seven years, and has spent her entire life being fussed over and protected, so a part of her also wants to escape her mother’s (Hiroko Yakushimaru) control if only temporarily. After picking up a new outfit, she begins cutting her own hair as bold gesture of independence and symbolically reacting her infantilisation. 

As they get closer to their destination, however, Masato’s headaches and seizures seem to intensify. The beach for him seems to be associated with death, and he does not actually want to go there. Admitting he doesn’t want to die, Harumi tries to comfort him with reassurances that there’s nothing to fear in death. The final scenes are indeed filled with a sense of peace and tranquility as the two of them sit alone at the beach, in contrast to the chaos of the preceding scenes in which they are chased both by a dogged policeman (Tomokazu Miura) and the gang’s henchmen. Still, perhaps feeling a degree of pit for them, the policeman eventually urges the pair to “never stop running”, allowing them to accept and embrace their deaths in their own way. Filled with small moments of humour, mostly at the police’s expense, the film is more melancholy than maudlin and finds a genuine sense of poignancy in the relationship between Harumi and Masato, bonding in a shared sense of mortality but also discovering a new sense of freedom in their final days.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Triads: The Inside Story (我在黑社會的日子, Taylor Wong Tai-Loi, 1989)

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“Brother Ho, you’re a kind leader, but not a good triad member,” a underling remarks of his rival, the biological son exiled from the world of crime now returned but struggling to accept his triad inheritance. Though Taylor Wong Tai-Loi’s Triads: The Inside Story (我在黑社會的日子) is said to have been intended to depict the life inside the triads in a more realistic way, the Chinese title, which translates as something more like “my time in organised crime,” more closely implies that this is a personal story of one man’s attempt to reconcile the two sides of himself.

Aging boss Uncle Kwan (Tien Feng) is challenged by a young upstart and killed during an ambush. With his dying breath, he instructs his right-hand men Shing (Michael Chan Wai-man) and Keung (Shing Fui-On) to tell his son, Ho (Chow Yun-fat), not to join their gang or seek revenge but to continue living his life in America. Kwan evidently sent Ho there with the intention of keeping him out of the world of organised crime, making sure he got an education and can live a nice, middle-class life. Ho indeed seems to have done quite well in the US. He has a large suburban house he lives in with his wife and young son, and has recently got into the real estate business. Nevertheless, he has a close relationship with his father even if he never approved of his triad activities.

Despite Kwan’s request, when Ho and his family return to hold the funeral, Shing and Keung press him to take over as head of the gang. Ho is understandably reluctant and insists he’ll be returning to America when all the formalities have been completed. Nevertheless, he ends up becoming somewhat involved in the gang’s business, using his corporate knowledge from America to suggest they simply sublet some of their territory to other gangs to stave off conflict and turf war, little realising that will lead to just that. Not knowing how the triad world works, he makes some catastrophic mistakes that lead to some of his father’s men being killed or injured.

In many ways Kong (Roy Cheung Yiu-Yeung), one of Kwan’s protégés, is his mirror image. Taken in by Uncle Ping (Lam Kau) and raised in triad society, he is in some ways Kwan’s natural heir but resents both still being treated as a petty foot soldier and that Ho has had all the opportunities not afforded to someone like him. Ho tells him that he’s still young, and could get a “proper job,” but Kong is illiterate and has been in triad society for most of his life. There are no other jobs he could go to, while Ho was sent abroad to study. Ho does not really belong in this society, but is respected as the biological son, while Kong, who cannot live anywhere else, is shunned and ignored.

Ho takes him to task for recruiting other young men to act as foot soldiers and scapegoats, but as Kong points out, this is how his father recruited him and triad society does at least provide a family for those who have no other. In going to America, Ho has lost touch with his culture and become somewhat exiled from his family, but also feels responsible for the empire his father built and the men who followed him. In some ways, his internal conflict may reflect a sense of anxiety that those who go abroad with the Handover looming will lose both their cultural identity and any possibility of influencing the future of the place they’ve left behind.

Yet, on the other hand, there is perhaps the idea that Ho survives abroad, while Kong sacrifices himself to save him in recognition of the fact that Ho has tried to do the same. In torching the Taoist altar along with his father’s photo, Ho sets fire to triad society itself along with the world his father left behind, asking for his father’s forgiveness while leaving to return to his new life in America without looking back. One of the first films to be awarded a Cat III certificate for its depiction of triad ritual which upset the colonial authorities, the film plays out more like a yakuza drama of fragmented paternal legacy and compromised brotherhood while exposing the inherent corruption of a gangster society before reaching a sense of catharsis as Ho prepares to burn it all down.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Black Report (黒の報告書, Yasuzo Masumura, 1963)

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When an overworked prosecutor is handed a murder case, his colleagues tell him he’s lucked out. Election fraud and bribery are dead ends, one says. They hire fancy lawyers, public prosecutors don’t stand a chance. But with a murder, it ought to be fairly straightforward to get a conviction. They are however fateful words, as Kido (Ken Utsui) finds himself squaring off against a ruthless opponent willing to subvert the law in all ways possible in order to get his client off the hook, 

Part of Daiei’s “Black” series, Yasuzo Masumura’s Black Report (黒の報告書, Kuro no Hokokusho) is another in a line of films from the 1960s expressing a lack of confidence in a justice system that is increasingly compromised by social inequality. Kido has 200 cases on his docket. They’ve received seven new ones just this morning, and he’s under pressure to get through them quickly. His boss has told him that a successful conclusion of the murder case will get him a promotion and a transfer to Tokyo. They’ve recently failed to secure convictions in two previous cases, which means the boss’ reputation is on the line and they urgently need to correct the record. Make no mistake, these are the good guys from the film’s perspective, but it’s also true that there’s 99.9% conviction rate in Japan. Losing cases is something that isn’t meant to happen and an embarrassment for law enforcement. 

As his colleague said, however, there is an inequality when it comes to accessing justice given that wealthy people can afford to hire fancy lawyers, while poorer ones can’t and are at a disadvantage. After pinpointing their suspect, Kido is dismayed to find himself up against corrupt lawyer Yamamuro (Eitaro Ozawa) who is willing to use every dirty trick in the book, even buying off witnesses to lie on the stand. Meanwhile, one of Kido’s central arguments relies on leveraging a conventional view of morality in claiming that the suspect, Hitomi (Shigeru Koyama), committed the crime in part because he was having an affair with victim’s wife, Miyuki (Mieko Kondo). The dead man, Kakimoto, had been a womaniser himself, while Miyuki was his second wife and a former bar hostess. In the judgemental atmosphere of the times she is perceived as a woman of low moral character. 

But as Kido’s friend points out, proving things like affairs isn’t particularly easy and even if Miyuki and Hitomi are morally flawed people, that doesn’t make them murderers. Kido is essentially trying them for the wrong “crime” while leveraging salacious gossip and hearsay to bolster his case. His other main argument is that Hitomi killed Kakimoto in order to be able to keep money he had placed with him to earn high interest through illegal loans. Kakimoto had embezzled the money from his company and at some point needed to replace it. This again signals the corrupting influence of money in the post-war society as men like Hitomi take advantage of of people’s desperation through issuing high interest loans, while others like Kakimoto game the system in order to satisfy their greed. Kakimoto does after all seem to have been given to excess with his womanising lifestyle.

Miyuki seems to have taken against Kakimoto’s secretary Ayako (Junko Kano), believing she and Kakimoto were having an affair. Though Ayako declares herself outraged and says that she intends to avenge Kakimoto’s death, even she is eventually corrupted by the possibility of inheriting money from his will along with hush money from Miyuki. Similarly, Kakimoto’s resentful son seems to have come into money recently, having his bought the building where his theatre troupe rehearses. Pretty much everyone else seems to have loathed Kakimoto, so there’s little sympathy for his death and tremendous interest in what’s going to happen to his riches.

It never really occurs to Kido that his case could fall apart if everyone suddenly changed their story on the stand, which is what proceeds to happen. Yet, Kido maintains his faith in the justice system, certain the judges will find their way to the truth without fully considering the fact he’s built an incomplete case and left openings for Yamamuro to undermine it through bribing and intimidating witnesses. Kido seems to think he’ll win just because he’s on the side of righteousness, but the world doesn’t work like that. The film ends on a note of anxiety in which it appears the guilty parties are going to get off scot-free while Kido is exiled from the city, transferred to the provinces in Aomori rather to Tokyo with his career in ruins. Nevertheless, his faith in the justice system to right itself remains absolute as he declares himself ready to trust people again having been reassured by his prosecutor friend and police mentor that they will ensure justice is served so that he can once again return to a world less morally corrupt.

Trailer (English subtitles)