A Story About Fire (燃比娃, Li Wenyu, 2025)

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A young monkey sets off on a journey to claim fire from the gods and also discover the secrets of his origins in Li Wenyu’s poetic indie animation A Story About Fire (燃比娃, ránbǐwá). Loosely based on the classic Qiang legend Ranbiwa Steals Fire, the film is also a tale of human enlightenment and coming of age as the hero and his trusty wolf friend Doggie traverse an icy, barren land looking for the so-called Holy Mountain in order to return warmth to the earth.

Animated in a style reminiscent of classical ink paintings, the tale is told along parallel lines as we follow Ranbiwa and Doggie intercut with the original journey of the AWUBAJI, the chief of the human tribe, who travelled to the mountain but brought back only the baby Ranbiwa and a white stone. As an adolescent, Ranbiwa is told that it is now his turn to journey to the mountain as a kind of rite of passage, which is to say he’ll become a man in all senses of the word, yet none who were sent have ever returned let alone brought fire back with them. As Ranbiwa gets closer to the mountain, he learns to walk standing upright like a human and finally has his tail bitten off by the monster that guards the cave of fire marking his transition into the world of adulthood and also the enlightenment of mankind as he unlocks his own future and banishes the cold.

To get there, however, he must traverse difficult terrain with little to nothing to eat and with only his best friend Doggie, a friendly wolf, to help him. Together they learn to survive by killing and eating other animals, which is both a kind of fall and also an example of the necessity of working with the natural world. This is truly nature red in tooth and claw as the pair inhabit this very primal world where violence and survival are synonymous. Nevertheless, even in this cold place, Doggie often gives Ranbiwa warmth by curling around him and protecting him from predators. When sources of food begin to decline as they approach the mountain, Ranbiwa is able to eat the fruit from the trees but Doggie is not. Ranbiwa gives him the meat he’d been saving as an act of true friendship and appreciation. 

On their travels they also rescue a young girl and eventually help her reunite with her family who have a large herd of woolly mammoths. Though they agree to give Ranbiwa and Doggie a lift to the mountain, they, by contrast, are heading towards where the sun rises in search of the same thing but on the plains rather than the mountain. Ranbiwa is happy the girl has found her family, but also sad to part with her even if this, the first of two partings, also marks the beginning of a transition from one state to another. Ranbiwa has never seen fire, but he’s never seen the rain either and each of things is necessary to return balance to the world.

Having studied under the legendary Ma Kexuan who worked as an animator on Havoc in Heaven and Nezha Conquers the Dragon King, Li spent six years completing the project alone while working as a professor of animation at the University of Sichuan, the area where the Qiang resided. The minimalism of the opening sequences eventually gives way to beautiful pastoral imagery of plum trees in bloom and the fiery battle in the cave of darkness in which Ranbiwa achieves Nirvana and receives enlightenment, the complexity mirroring Ranbiwa’s own path towards sophistication. At one point, images of civilisations throughout history fly by at breakneck speed lending Ranbiwa’s quest an elegiac quality as if all of human history stemmed from this one moment in which a little monkey toppled the oppressive holy mountain and liberated fire from the gods to return it to the people. Sparse narration adds to the mythical feel while lending a personal dimension to Ranbiwa’s story as he struggles to uncover his past and find out who he really is while finding solace in the warmth of friendship even in the harshest of winters.

A Story About Fire screens in Chicago 11th April as part of the 20th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Moonglow (Isabel Sandoval, 2026)

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A conflicted policewoman is placed in charge of investigating a crime that she herself committed in Isabel Sandoval’s moody noir, Moonglow. In many ways about the deadening quality of life under authoritarianism, the film contemplates complicity and resistance along with the “paradise of progress” that is touted as the modern Philippines though it faces many of the same problems as in 1979. You may think of yourself as some kind of moral crusader, Dahlia’s aunt warns her, but you’re no match for them.

Sister Therese may have a point. The news is full of stories of abandoned bodies and mysterious fires. Dahlia (Isabel Sandoval) characterises her theft as an act of rebellion and retribution. She does not keep this large sum of money taken from her corrupt boss’ safe for herself, but gives it to her aunt, a nun, with the instruction that it’s to be used to help the victims of a slum fire that later turns out to have been orchestrated by the police chief who is getting kickbacks from construction firms and envisions a bright future for himself in politics. 

Going into politics seems to be the ultimate goal for many. Charlie (Arjo Atayde) was also being groomed for office, but chose to emigrate instead after being confronted by the ugly side of his family’s elite status. The nephew of police chief Bernal, he’s just returned from America to look after his ailing father having become a lawyer rather than law enforcement official. Nevertheless, Bernal appoints him to the investigation presumably assuming he’s a safe person to ask because he’s family and therefore no threat to him. Old flame Dahlia, however, remarks on meeting him again that he now wears glasses, as if signalling Charlie’s ability to see things with more clarity than those around him whose vision has been blurred by continued exposure to life under the Marcos regime.

Dahila, who chose to stay rather than leave with Charlie, has indeed been compromised and is to an extent at least complicit as an agent of authoritarian power and according to some Bernal’s right hand woman. She says herself that she’s summoned in ghost in Charlie’s return and is haunted by the person she was before along with that of lost love. Each of them have repeated flashbacks to a lavish party shortly before Marcos took power which seems to hint at the coming future as Bernal introduces a man soon to be governor who echoes the contemporary radio broadcasts speaking of an era of prosperity hovering the horizon.

Alvaro manipulates Bernal with promises to make him his political successor, while it’s clear that any “prosperity” to come will only be for some. They burn slums to seize the land for shopping malls and luxury apartments leaving hundreds of people homeless and others of them dead. Alvaro later implies that some of the stolen money has been used to get the victims legal representation to challenge the government, a power that he also believes to have been “stolen” in that they have no right to it. Indeed, the authorities silence contrary voices without compulsion offing an investigative journalist reporting on the fires and later coming after Dahlia. Charlie reminds her that Bernal would sacrifice anyone, and indeed later implies he may do so with him when he starts asking the wrong questions about how much money went missing from the safe. 

Yet Dahlia’s tragedy is that in the end she can’t escape herself or her past. She can’t make all of this right through her act of rebellion, but neither can she accept the ways in which she did not resist or leave as Charlie had. That other life is also haunting her. Sandoval’s frequent use of dissolves signals the foggy quality of life under authoritarianism in which it becomes impossible to think or see clearly when every moment is self preservation or active complicity. Past, present, and future come to co-exist with Dahlia stuck somewhere in between, longing for a return to an elusive past while fearing that the future is no longer possible. She and Charlie are now, as she says, different people. Their romance belongs to another era which has now become inaccessible, or perhaps existing only in the realms of memory as a painful reminder of that which could have been.

Moonglow screens in Amsterdam 11th/12th April as part of this year’s CinemAsia Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Mag Mag (禍禍女, Yuriyan Retriever, 2025)

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The funny thing is, Mag Mag is only visible to the man she’s currently in love with, though what she seems to represent is the grudge of the unrequited lover whose gaze is never returned. The first release from K2 Pictures, a new production company launched in 2024 with the intention of shaking up the Japanese film industry by moving away from the production committee system, comedienne Yuriyan Retriever’s first feature sets out as if it’s asking why women become fixated on terrible men, only to eventually subvert its central premise with a series of unpredictable twists.

It’s true enough that (almost) all of Mag Mags targets deserve exactly what they get. The men are selfish and insensitive, bullying or abusive. Shunsuke (Fuku Suzuki), the first victim appears meticulously doing his hair in the bathroom mirror as if bearing out his vanity and self-obsession. Many of the men are popular and handsome, but the attention they get has only made them cruel and arrogant. Takuya (Junsei Motojima), the original victim said to have given birth to the curse of Mag Mag, is beloved of half the school but can’t resist punching down by making fun of a girl considered to be unattractive who had left him a love letter. Yurika Yoshida (Marina Mizushima), whose name is very similar to that of the director, is believed by some to have become Mag Mag after taking her own life and cursing Takuya in the process, but most of all represents the ugliness of the male gaze in being constantly berated for her appearance. The other kids tell her to lose weight and get plastic surgery, while Takuya takes her love letter as an insult to his status as king of the school. Mag Mag is described as being “freakishly tall” which also hints at ideas of monstrous femininity.

Perhaps this is one reason why Mag Mag rips out the eyes of her victims, though the point is that they were always pointed in the wrong direction anyway. Sanae is obsessed with an artist named Hiroshi (Oshiro Maeda), though he’s made a nude statue of another named Rumi apparently from his imagination and without her consent, which hints again at the self-involved nature of male desire. He does not appear to really notice Sanae (Sara Minami), though Rumi (Mai Fukagawa) may not be lying when she says he found her creepy. After Hiroshi’s death, Sanae begins investigating Mag Mag in attempt to unmask her and avenge Hiroshi, only to ultimately see herself in the vengeful spirt’s sinister cries of “I love you” which aren’t so different from those expressed for Hiroshi while essentially stalking him from her shrine lair. 

Nevertheless, this misdirected gaze is going in both directions as we, the viewers, too do not really see the person we should have been looking at all along. Deep-seated senses of inadequacy can provoke the jealously and resentment of unexpected and seriously inappropriate targets, and perhaps what we’re looking at here isn’t the societal urge to mock an “unattractive” woman who dares to ask for love, but rather the toxic rage of an invisible man who loathes those who seem to be unfairly popular with women despite being terrible human beings and unpleasant to be around. Perhaps in the end, it’s Sanae’s “delusional” fixation pitted against the passivity of a man who believes himself to be unattractive and in fact becomes so because of his intense self-loathing.

But then, there does appear to be a real ghost and unflinching embrace of the arcane with its Shinto priests, lines of prohibition, and apparently magic trees whose ability to end bad relationships is potentially more than just psychosomatic, or just little psycho. Yuriyan Retriever’s absurdist humour blends perfectly with the grimness of the Mag Mag curse and the world it seems to mirror. With an overt reference to Guard of the Underground, she celebrates and subverts J-horror tropes while skewering contemporary entertainment trends in her house share fantasia of hopeful youngsters that turns out to be a quasi-incestuous nest of betrayal and misplaced desire. Influencers too are a one-way relationship, and you only see what they you want you to. Mag Mag, however, just might let you go if only you’re brave enough to say you love her too rather than, like her unfortunate victims, spurning her affections and thereby invoking and ancient curse born of the suffering of an unreturned gaze.

Mag Mag screens in Chicago 10th April as part of the 20th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer (English subtitles)

A Foggy Tale (大濛, Chen Yu-hsun, 2025)

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A young girl witnesses the horrors of the White Terror when she travels from her rural hometown to retrieve the body of her brother who has been executed by military police in Chen Yu-hsun’s otherwise light-hearted odyssey through 1950s Taipei, A Foggy Tale (大濛, dà méng). The title refers to a story the heroine’s brother Yun (Tseng Jing-hua), whose name means “cloud”, tells twice. First, it’s a metaphor for a resistance movement as two drops of water join many others to form a cloud that then descends on a patch of land that makes it farmable. Secondly, the second water droplet never makes it to the cloud, but instead becomes trapped half way and dissolves into the mist.

It is, however, into a foggy town that Yue (Caitlin Fang) arrives after leaving alone when her uncle, who has taken over her parents’ house following both of their deaths, explains that he can’t pay to retrieve Yun’s body. Their aunt is already resentful of the money they spent trying to save, and in truth does not want the extra mouths to feed of her niece and nephew. She would much rather have the house, which she regards as her husband’s rightful inheritance anyway, to herself for her sons to be the masters of. While he was in hiding, Yun had approved of Yue’s desire to become a teacher though she’s been taken out of school and, as he says, women in the country generally have little other choice than to become wives and mothers working the land. 

To add to the sense of displacement, Yue has an older sister in Taipei whom she’s never met because she was fostered out as a future daughter-in-law before Yue was born. Hsia (9m88) has since left the family who brought her up after refusing to marry the man she was betrothed to because they had been raised like siblings, though he remains somewhat resentful and badgers her to return. She had been acquainted with Yun while he was a student in the city, but has no idea that he has been killed after being arrested as a possible “communist” for protesting against the regime. 

Though she may not have felt it in the country, the forces of oppression are all around Yue in the city in the very presence of the military police. After being caught sleeping in the street, she’s taken in and beaten up by a policeman for talking back, while they also push her to “explain” where she got her money as a prelude to confiscating it for themselves. A kind yet flawed rickshaw driver (Will Or Wai-lam) who saves her from being kidnapped and sold into sex work, explains to her that the funeral home even charges for the bullets that were used to shoot her brother and she likely needs two or three times as much as she thought or they’ll throw him in a mass grave with the other victims of the regime.

Years later, an older Yue who has fulfilled most of her dreams though she no longer speaks Taiwanese with her adult daughter but Mandarin, sees a news report about the discovery of a mass grave and checks the names of those identified looking for someone she lost. This unearthing of the buried is past of symbolic of the desire to expiate this history, though Yue does not find the answers she’s looking for and the question is left hanging. When times where unbearable, Yun had told her to wind his watch forward and think of the Taiwan years to come that would be better where people could be free from oppression and exploitation. It took longer than expected, but some of that world has come to be, the film seems to say, if not completely and still with this mist hanging in the air that is the victims of the White Terror. Still, Yue’s story has its share of whimsy as she chases through the backstreets of a labyrinthine city. She encounters both kindness from the justice-loving rickshaw driver who tries to help but also scams her out of her brother’s watch only to return it years later as a means of assuaging his guilt, and cruelty from the men who tried to sell her, the secret policeman who apparently went into business, and unforgiving detectives. But in other ways, what she finds is a kind of peace and her place as a part of this nation and society as time continues its eternal march forward.

A Foggy Tale screens in Chicago 10th April as part of the 20th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Republic of Pipolipinas (Republika ng Pipolipinas, Renei Dimla, 2025)

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Declaring herself sick of being a Filipino, disillusioned farmer Cora decides to secede from the Philippines and start her own nation which she calls the “Republic of Pipolipinas”. She chose this name, she says, in memory of the People Power Revolution in 1986 which showed her that anything is possible when people work together for the nation. She may have spelled “people” in a non-standard way, but really what does that matter if it sounds right and you know what she means?

A mocumentary shot in the style of Parks and Rec, Renei Dimla’s deadpan satire uses its heroine’s zany idea to explore the contemporary reality of the Philippines in which many others are also sick of being Filipino and want to start again. What Cora most objects to is that the local authorities are trying to take her land which her family have been farming since the days of her great-great-grandfather. They say they have deeds going back to the Spanish colonial era saying the land is theirs, but Cora points out that’s really just neocolonialism. How can they tell a Filipino woman that this land doesn’t belong to her? Her children are buried there, and so she refuses to move, sending letters from the office of the President of the Republic of Pipolipinas to the mayor telling them that if they come on her land she’ll charge them with trespassing which incurs a fine to be paid in ducks, chickens, and cows.

In a way, that might demonstrate that Cora is living in the past, but she has a point when she says that she doesn’t want money in the Republic of Pipolipinas because that’s when you start getting corruption. Most of her neighbours think she’s a bit mad, but see her as a local eccentric, except for the few who think she might have killed her abusive husband with rat poison. Nevertheless, many of them are mired in poverty. The lady at the local shop lets Cora pay in eggs, but another woman comes and asks to add to her tab because there’s nothing to feed the children and her husband hasn’t been paid again. Local boy Ogie has dropped out of school because his mother’s ill. She’s refusing to see a doctor because they can’t afford it. Cora puts back some of her purchases and asks for the money instead which she gives to Ogie so his mother can get medicine. 

Many of the people who later join the Republic of Pipolipinas have similar problems. One woman has lost a son to extrajudicial killing. A man working as a tour guide hates himself for greeting people so warmly when he knows the country is in a bad way and the vision they sell to tourists is a lie. But once the Republic of Pipolipinas starts to grow, the same kind of issues appear. Led by actress Alessandra de Rossi playing a version of herself, the new citizens become frustrated with Cora’s lack of sophistication and begin talking about constitutions and what kind of nation they want the Republic of Pipolipinas to be while vying for power.

Cora asks herself why they’re expected to die for the nation when the government’s job is to keep people safe from harm. After discovering that her farm is to be bulldozed to build a waste treatment centre, or really a landfill site filled with rubbish imported from Korea and other wealthy nations, she discovers corruption in the local government and tries to expose it only to end up being accused of embezzlement herself, which is ironic because she consistently rejected the presence of money precisely because it leads to corruption. Even a local official who refuses to believe Cora would do something like that sheepishly admits that it’s difficult to avoid temptation once in power, as if corruption is an inevitability that can’t be resisted. But even collaborators aren’t exempt from the wrath of the regime. The mayor believes he’ll weather this storm just fine and continue to “serve the people” while throwing his underlings under the bus.

At heart, Cora isn’t really sick of being Filipino, she just wants the Philippines to be a better place for the children to grow up. She can’t stand the flag ceremonies and enforced patriotism, the expectation that they must serve a nation which no longer serves them. What she holds onto is a lesson that her father taught her during the People Power Revolution, that the nation is not abstract concept but collection of people who can still turn this thing around no matter how hopeless it might seem now.

Republic of Pipolipinas screens in Amsterdam 10th/11th April as part of this year’s CinemAsia Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Period of Her (Erlina Rakhmawati, Yulinda Andriyani, Praditha Blifa, Sarah Adilah, 2025)

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Four emerging female filmmakers explore the experiences of women in contemporary Indonesia in anthology film The Period of Her. Though in different styles and approaching the issues from different angles, each of the segments highlights the ways in which women suffer disproportionately due to double standards in a fiercely patriarchal culture, from being prevented from following their dreams to being trapped at home by an abusive partner expecting total obedience from his wife.

Perhaps the clearest indication of this is that the women are expected to scrub their sanitary pads to remove “dirty” blood even though they are disposable and will just be thrown away. Women are often seen trying to wash blood stains out of their clothes and towels as if expected to hide the evidence of their womanhood. Nisa gets her period during swimming training and is immediately forced to reckon with her sudden entrance into adulthood. Though she enjoyed swimming and was good at it, now that she is a woman it is no longer permitted. They tell her that she’s polluting the water, while it’s now improper for her to wear “revealing” swimming costumes. At first, she tried to keep it a secret from her school friends, but once they find out she has to dress differently, marking her out as an “adult”, though she is clearly still a child no different from the other girls. Though her male teammate doesn’t agree with the way she’s being treated and just wants to swim with her again, he is eventually picked to represent the school while Nisa is forced to retire. She takes a used, unscrubbed, sanitary towel and smears blood over the display cabinet featuring all her trophies and certificates for which the school has taken all the credit.

Nisa’s mother had also wanted to pursue her dream of swimming, but was pulled into an early marriage meaning she had to give it up which isn’t what she wants for Nisa. But motherhood is it seems the only role for a woman. Wati also turns down her husband’s sexual advances because of her menstrual cramps, but he too becomes angry and is apparently fed up with her inability to conceive a child after five years of marriage. He says this is the reason that he married her, but, at the same time, refuses to be examined by a doctor unwilling to consider that the issue may lie with him. His family have called her a failure as a wife, while Watik complains that she’s struggled for five years trying to prove her husband’s manhood. When she comes across an abandoned baby, it seems like all her problems are solved, though her husband is unhappy complaining that he wanted her to have his child, not raise someone else’s, and then bizarrely taking them both to a brothel in search of help.

Rendi, a cheating boyfriend, similarly says he can do what he likes and smirks that his girlfriend, Shela, wasn’t a virgin anyway so he doesn’t owe her anything even if they slept together. The girl she caught him with, Desi, tells her that Rendi said he was bored with her, though he’s evidently made no attempt to end the relationship or treat Shela as anything other than object. She can’t really challenge him, but becomes so enraged during the traditional dance she’s performing that the MC has to stop it for her safety. Nevertheless, she pretends to be possessed by a spirit to call Rendi out, seeing as he’s at the festival in the guise of a “virgin shaman”. Despite the animosity that might exist between them, the episode ends on a note of female solidarity as Shela and Desi share a drink on the way home, laughing together as they ride away on their motorbikes.

An inversion of this female solidarity can be seen in the final segment, Not Dead Enough, in which an overbearing husband drops dead of a heart attack after picking up a machete to attack his previously meek wife who has been pushed to breaking point by his uselessness. On waking up, he discovers himself in a world in which gender roles have been completely reversed. He is now bullied by his domineering wife and a host of female debt collectors, not to mention casually sexually harassed even though he’s not really allowed to go out of his house. He has only the solidarity of the other husbands who try to help and take care of him. In place of hijabs, they wear bicycle helmets on their heads, and are expected to serve their wives with absolute obedience. Experiencing period pain for the first time along with the threat of violence from his wife and other women, Kempas gets a taste of his own medicine and realises what it’s like to live as a woman in this society, though he never really gets the opportunity to put what he’s learned into practice and be a better man and husband. Each of the women is, in their own way, trapped by the patriarchal order and struggling to find a way to live while looked down on and dismissed by men who think it’s their birthright to be served and take each refusal as an assault on their manhood.

The Period of Her screens in Amsterdam 9th/10th April as part of this year’s CinemAsia Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Becoming Human (ជាតិជាមនុស្សា, Polen Ly, 2025)

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In a way, all cinemas are haunted spaces. They echo and replay time while becoming repositories for the thoughts and feelings of all who walk through their doors. Perhaps that’s why many of them feel so human, as if they really had a soul. Or perhaps they steal a little bit of ours and hide it away behind the screen. The cinema in Polen Ly’s Becoming Human (ជាតិជាមនុស្សា), however, really does have a spirit of its own now facing eviction as it, too, is to be torn down to make way for a new that no one may really want. 

This feeling of unwilling displacement and rootlessness echoes through the film, not the least in the figure of the woman across the way cleaning out her late mother’s home. She looks lovingly at a tree on the rooftop knowing she will never see it again and this last memory of her childhood will not last much longer. Her son sarcastically asks her why she doesn’t take it with her and the house too for that matter if she likes them so much. She would if she could, she replies, with a tone that suggests she’s put out not have the option of doing so. Thida, the cinema ghost, is also in search of a tree, one that once stood outside her childhood home, though she’s no idea if either of them are still there now. She’s rooted to this place, or more precisely to a small shrine inside it that is later rather unceremoniously put out for the bin men with the rest of the demolition refuse. 

But Hai, a young photographer weary of his life as a journalist in a world in which no one wants to talk about anything serious, is also in his way haunting this space. He tells Thida that he has no home to go back to. Abandoned as a child, he took shelter in a pagoda which, when Thida breaks free and visits it, looks much like the ruined cinema with the light streaming in from above. Now the pagoda is to be torn down too, this time for a quarry which is slowly destroying the very landscape in levelling mountains to build tall buildings in other places. After being sent off for rebirth, Thida encounters a woman who used to be the guardian spirit of a lake, but has learned to live with changing times. Nevertheless, she laments that the lake was filled in to build more apartment blocks and shopping centres for the wealthy. The lake, meanwhile, was used by the poor villagers to water their crops and provided them with fish. The villagers were made into wandering ghosts too. They lost their homes, went to prison for protesting, or took their own lives because they could not find a place for themselves in this changing landscape.

Thida resisted rebirth because her suffering was too great in this life and she’s no desire to repeat it. Being a ghost’s not all that bad, she insists, but there are reasons she can’t move on and in, someways, it’s the country that’s haunting her rather than she it, much as her presence provides both comfort and melancholy for Hai who perhaps risks becoming trapped in nostalgia for a lost past he never really knew. He sings old songs in the abandoned cinema, while ironically playing a classic film for Thida on his smartphone. Perhaps in a way this demonstrates that things don’t disappear so much as merely migrate. Somewhere, the film is always playing even it’s just echoing in the ears of Thida and Hai as they look for new homes in a place where it feels as if the foundations are always been dug out from underneath them.

Still, Thida is also a temporal ghost carrying with her the lingering trauma of a war that continues to scar a landscape if only in its empty spaces. Given the ability to go anywhere, Thida realises there is nowhere to go but home. She grasps the grass where her house once was and seems to make peace with something. Nevertheless, in the end she can’t let it go, choosing to take her memories with her however painful they might be. This land is being reborn too, dying and being rebuilt, while in some respects at least forgetting itself while simultaneously unable to move on from its past.

Becoming Human screens in Amsterdam 8th, 10th, and 12th April as part of this year’s CinemAsia Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Salsali, You Didn’t Know (007 폭소판 살사리 몰랐지?, Kim Hwa-rang, 1966)

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Gwang-sik (Seo Young-chun, a popular comedian nicknamed “Salsal”) is the very definition of someone who’s seen too many movies. The film opens with him playing a joke on his boss by messing around with a chocolate gun and stabbing a mannequin after becoming obsessed with the world of James Bond. Gwang-sik’s fixation echoes the kind of Bond-mania that was sweeping the globe, but has an additional flavour in the Korea of the 1960s that was ever watchful for North Korean communist spies. The title cards preceding the film even include a number to contact if you catch one or want to turn yourself in.

Nevertheless, Gwang-sik’s interest in 007 has a pulpier quality in which he sees himself as a kind of justice-minded vigilante and indulges in various gimmicks such as attaching knives to the bottom of his boots. The knife boots, however, turn out to be fairly impractical, getting stuck in a wall and making him a sitting duck for his enemies. Though they might fall for his chocolate gun, it doesn’t take them long to figure out that Gwang-sik is a complete idiot bumbling his way through life. He does, however, seem to have luck on his side. After going on the run with no money and promising to help a young lady who was robbed but also needs to get to Busan, Gwang-sik enters an amateur boxing competition despite weighing almost nothing and somehow ends up winning just on a fluke. 

He has a rather camp, effeminate quality that is finally fulfilled when he cross-dresses to go undercover as a dancer at a cabaret bar in order to unmask the criminals who robbed the jewellery store where he works. While he continues to read Casino Royale and idolise the hyper-masculinity of James Bond, the scenes at the cabaret bar seem inspired more Some Like it Hot as Gwang-sik unwittingly breaks hearts all over Busan and gets to do some very nifty dancing. For the avoidance of doubt, his relationship with Myeong-ja, the woman he met in Daegu, originally remains chaste, but she takes a liking to him for exactly that reason and, despite her appearing to be into the cross-dressing, they eventually become a heteronormative couple after Gwang-sik has solved the mystery and reclaimed his masculinity by putting on a stylish leather jacket.

Though he makes constant references to the Korean War which mark him out as being from a slightly older generation than Myeong-ja, Gwang-sik seems caught between old and new Koreas by virtue of his job at the jewellery shop. Seong-ja, the unwilling scammer and Myeong-ja’s sister, carries out a complicated heist by trying to buy 950,000 won’s worth of jewellery suggesting that the economic situation has developed to the extent that it’s produced a new class of super rich people willing to spend this kind of money, which as someone later says is enough to buy a house in a nice part of town, on something inessential purely as a status symbol. She claims that she’s been robbed, as Myeong-ja is actually later hinting the growing wealth disparity and that there are still those trapped and desperate at the end of the economic ladder. Seong-ja herself is only doing all of this because she wanted to get enough money to send her sister to university, but has since fallen into crime and immorality and is now afraid to face her, leaving the two sisters on either side of a dividing line.

Meanwhile, she makes an unwitting co-conspirator of an acupuncturist who says he treats mental illness by telling him that Gwang-sik is her brother-in-law who literally lost his mind when she inherited her late husband’s estate instead of him. Now, she says, he just goes around asking everyone he meets for money and rants about cheques and promissory notes. Swayed by her 10,000 won certified cheque deposit, the acupuncturist seems to take all of this at face value and even describes the brother-in-law’s condition as a modern malady that causes people to become obsessed with money and consumerism. Ironically enough, Gwang-sik ends up “arresting” two men for counterfeiting currency they intended to circulate in the city as if symbolising the essential meaninglessness of money as a concept, though it’s all anyone’s after.

Seon-ja turns out to be working for a kingpin (Heo Jang-gang) who runs a swanky nightclub whom she appears to despise. No matter how much she regrets her choices, she is already too corrupted and cannot be allowed to join the new society like her sister Myeong-ja. Most of the film is taken up with silliness and Gwang-sik’s anarchic spy craft in which he has the ability to turn any situation to his advantage, uttering his iconic catchphrase, “Surprise! Salsali.” and behaving more like a hero from a classic serial rather than international spy James Bond, who didn’t really do a lot of crime prevention or protecting civilians in the course of his work. Nevertheless, the film ends on a note of reconciliation as Gwang-sik’s boss patches things up with the acupuncturist. Both men look on from a paternal position, supportive, if a little embarrassed by Gwang-sik’s intention to marry and wishing the new couple well for their future having fully transitioned into the contemporary society.

Pavane For An Infant (搖籃凡世, Chong Keat Aun, 2024)

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While manning the night shift at a baby hatch, social worker Lai Sum (Fish Liew) reads a newspaper article which wonders if progressive gender politics is responsible for a rise in abortions and the abandonment of babies. It’s a sentiment that comes off as a bit rich, given that most of the reasons given on the form that accompanies a child is that it is a result of rape, often of a very young girl by her close relative or another authority figure such as a teacher or a boss. Yet nothing is really being done to change male behaviour in a fiercely patriarchal society which regards childbirth and motherhood as a woman’s duty. 

Lai Sam visits a Taoist priest and pretends to have had an abortion as a means of exposing him. When women like her come and ask for his help, struggling to come to terms with their decision and haunted by nightmares, he drugs and sexually abuses them while recording it all on tape. It’s almost as if he thinks that women like these are fair game, even before accusing Lai Sam of corrupting her maternal destiny and insisting that she’s sure to become a young widow and lonely old woman. Not even everyone at the facility has sympathy with the women who use it, the woman in charge explaining that there is a strict 30-second time limit for changing your mind and that once a woman has placed a child in the hatch it is no longer hers. Despite the pleas of one of her employees, she refuses to look for a woman who ran off after screaming and pleading with them to open the door because she wanted the baby back. Even if she got it, the woman explains, she wouldn’t be able to raise it anyway.

The reason that Lai Sam herself gave up a child six years previously was that her boyfriend refused to take responsibility and then disappeared. She couldn’t afford to raise a child on her own and felt she had no other choice than to put him up for adoption. All these years later, she is still haunted by her decision and continues to look for her son. Siew Man (Natalie Hsu En-yi), a young woman she tries to help, is also haunted by having had an abortion which has left her with suicidal thoughts and nightmares of a baby crying. She too had a difficult home life after her birth father died and her mother remarried. The pair of them run into a birth ritual being conducted by the indigenous community, the leader explaining to them that in their society the birth of a girl is a happy occasion because women inherit property rights, contrasting with a lullaby which laments that a son will care for you when you’re old, but a daughter belongs to someone else once married.

In other ways, the use of the baby hatch signals the division in Malaysian society as those who place their children there are expected to fill in a form stating its race and religion so that it can ideally be raised by the same ethnicity. Lai Sam did not fill in the form, so her son was placed into a Malay family who are raising him Muslim though she is Chinese and are paranoid about the child being taken back. Another baby is given up not only because the father ran out on them, but because the child has ambiguous genitalia. Though the baby hatch only exists because this isn’t a practice that will ever be stopped and at least this way the children are kept safe, the centre faces a huge amount of hostility from religious communities who brand it “Satan’s Ally” and the “Cradle of Sin”, even while each of the women who has made a difficult decision to give up their child sobs bitterly and stares into the hatch until the very last second as they close the door. Lai Sam recalls a teacher who used to tell them to stand under the Bodhi tree if they’d done something wrong. She hasn’t, but she feels like standing under it anyway, which is, the film seems to say, what it is to be a woman living in Malaysia.

Pavane For An Infant screens in Chicago 5th April as part of the 20th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer

Beyond the Fire: The Life of Japan’s First Pride Parade Pioneer (熱狂をこえて, Hiroaki Matsuoka, 2026)

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Hiroaki Matsuoka’s documentary Beyond the Fire: The Life of Japan’s First Pride Parade Pioneer (熱狂をこえて, Nekkyo wo Koete) follows the life of Teishiro Minami who started the first Pride parade to take place in Japan in 1994. The film is not, however, an exercise in hagiography and examines Minami’s troubled legacy as someone whose attempts to control the movement ended up destroying it and leading to tragic and unforeseen circumstances. The parade has since been reborn under Tokyo Rainbow Pride which aims for greater inclusivity for sexual minorities and operates out of a community hub where all are welcome.

As for Minami, he was born in 1931 on the island of Sakhalin which was eventually taken by the Russians during the war. The family evacuated to Akita to live with his mother’s relatives, but his father refused to come with them and remained behind. This sense of physical dislocation and displacement only deepened Minami’s sense of rootlessness and lack of belonging having figured out his sexuality while hanging out with part-timers at his family’s shop. With his mother having to support the family single-handed, Minami was keen to start working and got a civil service job after high school working in the local prosecutor’s office. Once his father returned, he asked for a transfer to Tokyo and began looking for the mysterious “House of Secrets” and the gay world he’d read about in magazines.

But after failing to gain a promotion, Minami resigned due to a discomfort about the way of thinking at the prosecutor’s office. His repeated decisions to resign from most of the jobs he held echoes his forthrightness, but also an unwillingness to compromise or inability to work with others who might not agree with him. He quits his job in broadcasting in part because he overhears his colleagues using slur words and speaking disparagingly about men like him which makes his workplace an unpleasant and unsafe environment, though times being what they were he couldn’t exactly complain about it. Most of the men he meets at gay bars when he finally discovers them are unable to be out at work and some of them are married, only able to live their gay lives at weekends. Minami too gets married out of a sense of social obligation and to give his mother grandchildren. As an older man, he seems to feel guilty about the way he abandoned his wife and children to live a more authentic life, but also seeks no kind of reconciliation.

His path to Pride began with a series of gay-themed magazines and a meeting with international activist Bill Schiller who convinced him that the gay rights movement was something that could make a difference in Japan. Having travelled to San Francisco and witnessed the Pride parade there, he begins planning one in Japan but despite the success of the first event, internal divisions came to the fore. The biggest of these was that though Minami had followed Schiller’s example and included lesbians in the movement, he’d largely done it for cynical reasons and really had no interest in working with them, admitting to finding women difficult in general. Admitting now that he went too far, the real crisis arrived when Minami tried to turn the third Pride parade into an exclusively political event, banning outlandish outfits or celebratory behaviour. He intended the parade to end in a rally in which they’d adopt a manifesto he’d written by himself without discussing it with the wider community. When some of them protested, a member of Minami’s team was heard to ask what the women were even doing there, making it clear that the organising committee believed this to be an event solely for gay men. Minami then took back control by excluding women from the committee entirely.

In some ways, his story is a cautionary tale about how strong personalities with a need for control can derail a movement or risk turning it into a vanity project. A young man who’d worked as a part of Minami’s team and had stayed to mediate when protestors stormed the stage later took his own life in despair with the direction things had taken. Many had been uncertain a Pride parade would work in Japan given the levels of hostility and the risks involved for those taking part. Their fear was that no one would come, but attendance was much greater than expected and many joined the parade later, encouraged by seeing that others had already done so and they were not alone. Though many praise Minami’s efforts and activism, not only with the Pride parade but during the AIDS crisis, and acknowledge the importance of his courage in taking the first step towards creating a gay rights movement, they also question his methods and motivations. Using a mixture of animation, archive footage, and talking heads interviews, the film does its best to record this landmark moment in the history of Japan’s LGBTQ+ community through the eyes of an elder statesman but never shies away from his mistakes if only in seeking to learn from them.

Beyond the Fire: The Life of Japan’s First Pride Parade Pioneer screened as part of this year’s BFI Flare.

Trailer (English subtitles)