Category: Five Flavours 2021

Eternal Summer (盛夏光年, Leste Chen, 2006)

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A trio of emotionally displaced teens find themselves swept into an awkward love triangle while longing to escape their loneliness in Leste Chen’s melancholy youth drama Eternal Summer (盛夏光年, Shèngxià Guāngnián). Each in someway marginalised and searching for acceptance, the teens struggle to define themselves as the world changes itself around them while bound by the paradoxical qualities of their circular relationships, their unspoken secrets continually driving them apart even as they continue to long for the intimacy born only of sharing their authentic selves. 

A quiet, studious boy, Joseph Kang (Ray Chang) is asked to befriend his deskmate Shane (Jopseph Hsiao-chuan) who has ADHD and has been labeled disruptive in the hope that creating social relationships with other children will help calm him down. The arrangement in a sense backfires, Joseph’s academic achievement falling while his friendship with Shane only grows in strength and intensity. By the time they are teenagers, the pair are inseparable but Joseph has also fallen in deep, unrequited love with his best friend, a secret he is afraid to share with anyone and ironically cannot share with the one person to whom he is supposed to be able to tell anything. The friendship is further disrupted by the sudden introduction of transfer student Carrie (Kate Yeung Mei-ling) who has returned to Taipei to live with her mother after years of living with her father in Hong Kong. Carrie first develops a fondness for Joseph while working with him on the school paper, but later figures out that he’s secretly in love with Shane and decides to support him as a friend while in another irony Joseph’s ongoing internal crisis eventually forces his friends together, Carrie secretly dating Shane while each of them knows on differing levels how their relationship may hurt Joseph when he eventually finds out. 

In 2006 Taiwanese society was perhaps not quite as accepting as it would become, yet Joseph’s anxiety in his sexuality in compounded by the desire not to lose his friendship with Shane fearing not just that his feelings are not returned but that he may reject him altogether just for being gay. While Shane, a high school sports star with terrible grades, eventually blossoms academically after Carrie makes the ironic promise to go out with him in the unlikely event he gets into uni, it’s heavily implied that Joseph’s previously high level of achievement is damaged because of his preoccupation with his sexuality shockingly failing his uni entrance exams and thereafter further separated from his friends as they move on and he remains in cram school limbo hoping for better luck next year. Meanwhile he finds himself in potentially dangerous situations cruising in parks trying to verify his homosexuality while privately consumed by shame. 

For Shane, meanwhile, his problem is that he feels rejected by the world around him because of the way his ADHD was treated as a child. Regarded as a disruptive troublemaker none of the other kids would play with him save Joseph, meaning that he too is desperate to maintain the friendship in fear of his inescapable loneliness even while finding a similar connection with Carrie who is herself longing for love seemingly having strained relationships with each of her divorced parents while geographically and culturally displaced in having spent much of her life in Hong Kong. Carrie is, however, the only one to know the whole truth frustrated with the two men in her life that they can’t simply clear the air by voicing the secrets that continue to erode their relationship. 

Then again perhaps what they really fear is “change”, afraid of an uncertain adulthood in which their childhood connection will necessarily weaken. “We will lose each other in the future?” a conflicted Shane wonders, uncertain if his co-dependency is entirely healthy or fair on his friends but fearing becoming alone or having to make a choice unable to lose one or both of his essential connections. At heart a mood piece, Chen’s melancholy drama is filled with the strange canted angles of a world out of kilter and poignant reflections of the past in the midst of present torment, both elegiac and nostalgic for a particular moment in time which must in some way pass even if his parting words are painfully ironic in their cutting intensity.

Eternal Summer streams in Poland until Nov. 29 as part of the 15th Five Flavours Film Festival.

4K restoration trailer (Traditional Chinese subtitles only)

We Are Moluccans (Cahaya Dari Timur: Beta Maluku, Angga Dwimas Sasongko, 2014)

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A motorbike courier finds himself torn between conflicting priorities when his community is threatened by internal strife in Angga Dwimas Sasongko’s inspirational sporting drama We Are Moluccans (Cahaya Dari Timur: Beta Maluku). As the title suggests, team sports provide a means of communal healing fostering both hope and unity among the young but even so the traumatic memories of the recent past prove hard to overcome while the older generation struggle in the wake of their own broken dreams and contradictory responsibilities. 

At the turn of the century, a violent conflict breaks out between Muslim and Christian communities who had until that point lived together in relative peace. With his motorcycle courier business disrupted by the ongoing chaos, former youth footballer Sani (Chicco Jerikho) begins coaching a collection of local boys mostly as a means of keeping them away from the immediate violence of the riots. As the situation begins to stabilise, his new responsibility to the children places a strain on his relationship with his wife, Haspa (Shafira Umm), who complains that he spends too much time giving back to the community while the family is struggling economically to the extent that she can no longer extend their tab at the grocery store. His old football friend Rafi (Frans Nendissa) is also struggling with his fishing business having lost most of his crew who fled the area’s violence and so the two of them begin to make the football club more formal but it soon becomes clear that they each have differing goals and responsibilities that endanger their partnership and the commitment they’ve made to the boys.  

At several points Rafi, not to mention Haspa, criticise Sani for what they see as irresponsibility while some of the other village men also accuse him of unmanliness for choosing to look after the children rather than fight with them to protect the village. His problem is that he’s too kind hearted but is entirely unable to order his priorities torn by the necessity of providing for his family and following through on the commitment he’s made to the neighbourhood boys. He often gives his hard won money away to those in need, angering his wife who cannot understand why he continues to help others rather protect his own family even giving away money he’d saved for their youngest daughter’s vaccinations and abruptly selling their goats without discussing it with her when she’d earmarked them as an emergency fund to pay the enrolment fees when the oldest daughter starts school. 

Because of the ongoing violence, many of the boys are in single parent families and live in relative poverty often needed to help out with their parent’s businesses. To begin with many are fine with them playing football so long as it keeps them safe but as they begin to grow older attitudes harden, many believing that it’s a “pointless” waste of time and too much of a distraction when the children should either be earning money or studying. Sani becomes a kind of surrogate father teaching the boys diligence and responsibility even if struggling with the same in his personal life but obviously cannot overcome the social and economic difficulties of small town life all on his own. His original goal was only to keep the children safe and ensure they had happy childhood memories that weren’t about hate, violence, and fear, whereas Rafi is much more ambitious floating the idea of opening an official football school while eventually deciding to run for public office further adding to Sani’s sense of personal inadequacy. 

“Nothing can destroy us as long as we have will to live a better life” Sani later tells the children, mistaken it seems in his belief that they would find it easier to overcome the differences between them when acting as head coach for a team representing the entirety of the local area. Many of the original team resent the introduction of “outsiders” from the nearby Christian town, but the difficulties turn out less to be about religion or community than trauma, the source of the problem being that the father of two of the Christian boys is a policeman whom another of the players blames for his own father’s death. While such tensions exist within the group the team continues to fail, losing not because of a lack of ability but because they cannot overcome the legacy of trauma to work together. The problem is only solved through a reassertion of their commonality as “Moluccans” rather than Muslim or Christian ironically forged in opposition to their current other which happens to be a team from Jakarta, the urban pitted against the rural. 

In any case, Angga Dwimas Sasongko’s inspirational drama eventually makes the case for mutual forgiveness as path toward putting the past to rest in order to move forward into a kinder and more prosperous era. The emotional closing scenes provide both a personal sense of acceptance in as Rafi begins to put his pride aside to support the local team while Muslims and Christians come together to listen to the nail-biting penalty shootout through their respective contacts in the auditorium after the TV broadcast cuts out before extra time. Demonstrating the power of sports to overcome cultural barriers, We Are Moluccans finally advocates for the right to dream as the youngsters begin to develop self-confidence and a sense of possibility while working together towards a clearly defined goal. 

We Are Moluccans streams in Poland until Nov. 29 as part of the 15th Five Flavours Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Foul King (반칙왕, Kim Jee-woon, 2000)

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A dejected office worker seeks release from a mundane life of constant degradation as a masked wrestler but finds himself ultimately unable to escape the headlock of the corporate society in Kim Jee-woon’s pro wrestling farce The Foul King (반칙왕, Banchikwang). As the title may suggest, you might have to play a little dirty in order to claw back some dignity but then perhaps everyone’s struggling to free themselves from something be it old debts, middle-aged disappointment, or complicity with the dubious business practices of turn of the century capitalism. 

Even before he enters the ring, Dae-ho (Song Kang-ho) is wrestling, fighting his way onto and out of a packed rush hour train only to arrive at work a few minutes late to be given a passive aggressive dressing down from his boss (Song Young-chang) during the morning pep talk. His boss then in absurd fashion corners him in the gents and places him in a headlock while telling him off some more just to ram the message home. Poor Dae-ho finds this so humiliating that all he really thinks of is a short term solution of learning how to evade his boss’ control while mooning over his attractive desk mate Miss Jo and further berating himself for being too shy to ask her out. His other problem is that he’s not very good at his job as a low-level bank cashier. He and his work friend Doo-sik (Jung Woong-in) are bottom in the office rankings for failing to secure any new accounts.

Trapped between his abusive boss and dismissive father (Shin Goo) with whom he still lives, Dae-ho finds himself both emasculated and infantilised while continuing to indulge childhood fantasies drifting off into a dream sequence in which he is Elvis in the wrestling ring trying to impress Miss Jo but still defeated by his giant bug of a boss. He first turns to a friend who teaches Taekwondo to children but he tells him Taekwondo is a “mental discipline” while a real martial artist would never end up in a headlock anyway. But then as if by magic he wanders past a moribund wrestling gym and ventures inside only for the coach, Jang (Jang Jin-young), to throw him out for being a bit odd. Threatened by a gangster into training up a comic relief character specialising in cheating to bolster the profile of another wrestler, Yubiho (Kim Su-ro), hoping to drum up publicity for a Japan tour, Jang relents remembering Dae-ho’s manic rank about his love for classic heel Ultra Tiger Mask as seen on TV decades earlier. 

Being a heel is not quite what Dae-ho had in mind, after all what he wants is to figure out how to escape a headlock yet he finds himself bizarrely in his element if a little clumsily rejoicing in moustache twirling villainy, cartoonish pranks, and comic pratfalls. He begins to grow in confidence but also overreaches, managing to teach a gang of youths (amusingly standing under a huge mural ironically reading “Korea! Fighting!”) a lesson and redeeming his sense of masculine pride after a defeat while making a total drunken fool of himself in his unrequited love for Miss Jo at the office karaoke party once again getting pummelled by his boss. While Dae-ho turns to wrestling in search of freedom and personal fulfilment, Doo-sik tries to regain his self-respect by doing the right thing refusing to be a part of his boss’ obviously dodgy business practices while threatening to blow the whistle if like Dae-ho perhaps realising that there is no way to beat this system while remaining inside it. 

Dae-ho discovers that he gains confidence by putting on a mask, specially the Ultra Tiger Mask worn by his childhood hero, while “winning” in the ring through “cheating” getting audience laughs with zany cartoon stunts. Only when the mask is torn by an unnecessarily aggressive Yubiho does he enter full on rage mode attempting to take revenge for his constant belittlement by ignoring the script to teach Yubiho a lesson as the pair of them brawl all over the stadium making weapons of random chairs and even at one point the session bell itself. Yet in a real sense Dae-ho never really achieves much of anything, scoring a symbolic victory in provoking a tie but never figuring out how to escape the corporate headlock while continuing to be bullied by his boss, rendered entirely powerless within the hierarchal corporatised society of early 2000s Korea. A darkly comic take on existential futility, Foul King meditates on the compromises inherent in playing the game Dae-ho ironically finding confidence in wilful humiliation as a dishonourable heel while unable to escape his constant degradation wrestling for agency within the confines of his regular office worker life. 

The Foul King streams in Poland until Nov. 29 as part of the 15th Five Flavours Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Anatomy of Time (เวลา, Jakrawal Nilthamrong, 2021)

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In a rural village in 1960s Thailand, a young woman sniffs a bottle of expensive French perfume gifted to her by her military suitor, and then opens a bottle of honey obtained from a rickshaw driver childhood friend and smears some of it onto her face. The honey and the perfume in one sense represent choices between two men but also between two ways of life, one timeless and innocent, and the other violently modern. You could say that each is in its way compromised, the life cycle of bees described by the harvester as he smokes them out of their home, while perfume is perhaps only an attempt to remake what nature had already perfected, but in the end the young woman may come to regret her choice decades later longing only for the tranquility of her childhood home. 

Told in fragmentary, non-linear flashes of memory belonging either (it seems) to the heroine, Maem (present day: Prapamonton Eiamchan, 1960s: Thaveeratana Leelanuja), or her husband the unnamed Soldier (present day: Sorabodee Changsiri, 1960s: Wanlop Rungkumjad), Jakrawal Nilthamrong’s Anatomy of Time (เวลา) opens with an elderly woman realising the man she has been nursing has died. Picking up a straight razor from a nearby table, she cuts into his thigh and removes what seems to be an ancient bullet, an ironic act of healing which sends us straight back into the past in which the Soldier is part of a militant insurgency that later fails. “How many more must die before you get the nation you want?” a fellow officer asks him, disgusted by his betrayal of a young woman who’d helped them and the implication that they will soon take care of her baby too. The Soldier justifies his actions by insisting that there can either be a fair system under a ruthless leader or else a system full of lies and deception in which the rich exploit the poor. Unconvinced, the officer tells him he’ll have no more part of it, but the Soldier is seemingly too far gone to turn back the bullet in his thigh a symbol of his ongoing corruption. 

In subsequent flashbacks, we see the elderly Soldier rejected by the world around him. A nurse hired to care for him, ironically wearing a t-shirt reading “my life is just an old man’s memory”, whispers that she hopes he dies a long and painful death while a local cafe owner throws him out as soon as he, painfully and with great difficulty, sits down unwilling to have a “fascist” in his shop. The older Maem cares for him with great tenderness, though her life cannot have been easy even if their well-appointed home in contemporary Bangkok hints that it was most likely comfortable. Her memories take her back to their courtship, the Soldier young and handsome with his fashionable sunglasses and confident swagger, while she found herself torn by her relationship with the simple local boy Don who took her to see the bees while her outing with the Soldier to what seems to be an almost empty oppressed village eventually turned inexplicably dark and violent. At his funeral only she and another old soldier are present, the man presenting himself as his son (but seemingly not hers) apparently absent. 

A conversation with her father had reminded her that as Buddhists they believe that their choices dictate the course of their lives, Maem feeling responsible after Don is beaten up by the military but later it would seem choosing the Soldier anyway. A stand in for her nation, Jakrawal Nilthamrong seems to imply that Maem may have been beguiled by the false promises of modernity falling for a man whose handsome face masked his ruthless violence. At the end of her life she chooses to go back to the rural past, returning to wind the clock at her father’s shop its heart beating once again. Perhaps she regrets her choice, perhaps the Soldier regretted his that left him an outcast, but now all they have are memories as imperfect as they may be with their echoes of other lives and the untapped possibilities of youth. Often beautifully photographed if somewhat obscure, Jakrawal Nilthamrong’s ethereal drama contemplates the legacies of trauma historical and personal while embracing finally the tranquility of life beside a wide river as his elliptical tale concludes with both dream and exit.

Anatomy of Time streams in Poland until Nov. 29 as part of the 15th Five Flavours Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Weeds on Fire (點五步, Steve Chan Chi-Fat, 2016)

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“Even though disappointed, do not lose hope” reads a piece of graffiti in the closing moments of Steve Chan Chi-fat’s nostalgic coming-of-age drama Weeds on Fire (點五步). Though touted as a baseball movie, as incongruous as that may sound given that the sport is a niche interest in contemporary Hong Kong, Chan’s strangely hopeful if quietly melancholy tale of ‘80s Sha Tin is bookended by scenes of the present day city in the midst of the Umbrella Movement protests the story the hero wants to offer seemingly intended for an audience of dejected youngsters as confused and disappointed as he once was in order to encourage them that what’s important isn’t winning or losing but staying the course and gaining the confidence to take the first step. 

Now in his mid-40s, Lung (Lam Yiu-sing) casts his mind back to the Hong Kong of 1984 when he lived on a rundown council estate in Sha Tin and attended a high school with a less than stellar academic record. A shy and nerdy boy, he was often bullied but always had childhood friend Wai (Tony Wu Tsz-tung), physically imposing and with a confident swagger, at his back. When the city comes up with additional funding for schools to use in the promotion of sport their enterprising headmaster Lu Kwong-fai (Liu Kai-chi) hatches on the idea of starting the region’s very first local high school baseball team, recruiting both Wai and Lung in the hope of teaching them teamwork and discipline. Nevertheless, being teammates begins to place a strain on their friendship and it becomes clear that the boys are destined for different paths. Wai quits the team in a huff and leaves school, mooching round in pool bars and hanging out with triads while Lung steps up to the plate but is troubled by the loss of his friendship and the fracturing relationship between his unhappily married parents. 

Chan somewhat unsubtly ties Lung’s personal development to that of Hong Kong as he finds himself coming of age in era of anxiety. The world is literally changing around him, 1984 being as says the year that the redevelopment of Sha Tin began in earnest while it also marked the signing of the Sino-British Declaration paving the way for the transfer of power in the 1997 Handover. A young man, Lung wants to “change” himself in that he longs for the confidence to ask out a young woman he’s developed a crush on but is too shy and disappointed in himself for doing nothing when witnessing her being harassed by a drunken creep in the lift of the apartment block where they both live. Yet in other ways change frightens him and really he wants everything to stay the same believing that saying nothing will maintain the status quo only to realise that there are situations over which he has no real control. 

His headmaster and coach of the baseball team Lu admits that he set Wai and Lung against each other in order to encourage him to come out from his friend’s shadow embracing his own identity and discovering a sense of self-confidence. Yet Lung continues to struggle, a little lost unable to find clear direction in his life while everything changes around him occasionally consumed by a sense of despair as perhaps are the young protestors in believing their movement has failed. In baseball what he realises that it isn’t about winning or losing but having the confidence to step up to the plate, subtly telling the protestors to hang in there because there’s still time to turn this around. “I never said we had to win”, inspirational coach Lu reminds the boys, “but I did say never give up!”.

Loosely based on the real life story of the Shatin Martins though as the closing credit reel reveals the original team were primary school children rather than high schoolers, Chan shifts away from sporting drama towards the more familiar youth movie metaphor of two former friends heading in different directions, the good boy knuckling down while the “bad” becomes a victim of his own hotheaded arrogance even if managing to repair his fractured friendship with Lung before tragedy strikes. Filled with memories of Handover anxiety and a healthy dose of ‘80s nostalgia, the film’s incongruous jauntiness is perhaps at odds with the gravity of the tale though that is perhaps itself part of the message the older Lung has for the young. “This is the city where I grew up. It’s become increasingly unfamiliar” he laments striding through streets filled with tents occupied by student protestors, sympathising with their cause while offering them a note of melancholy hope in his own, sometimes painful, tale of finding his feet in a changing Hong Kong. 

Weeds on Fire streams in Poland until Nov. 29 as part of the 15th Five Flavours Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Not in This World (이 세상에 없는, Park Jung-bum, 2019)

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“What is love? Have you seen it?” a dejected young man asks, wondering how if he can’t even afford a ticket to the movies he’s supposed to find the energy to feel love. Love may be the substance the title of Park Jung-bum’s nearly three hour epic of human misery Not in this World (이 세상에 없는, I Sesange Oebsneun) refers to, each of its wandering youngsters deprived of a sense of hope or of emotional fulfilment by the cruelties of contemporary capitalism. Unable to feel their own pain, they inflict it on others, their despair leading to nothing other than violence and cruelty in a mistaken effort to exert control over their lives. 

Despair colours the lyrics that aspiring rapper Ji-su (Moon Ye-ji) performs in a courtyard by day detailing her insecurity and longing for “a warm spring to melt my frozen heart”. Seemingly no one is very interested in listening to her, least of all her father in whose tiny workshop she also toils. With his business strained, Ji-su’s father is an exploitative employer berating his daughter for not working hard enough while otherwise telling her that she is free to do something else with her life but only if it makes money. After smashing her microphone in a mistaken attempt to make her come around, he later burns her sheet music and recklessly tells her to find somewhere else to live while she in turn points out that he unfairly projects his resentment onto her knowing that his dream of owning a family home will never become a reality seeing as the business barely makes enough money to pay the interest on the mortgage he will never be able to pay off. 

This sense of despair born of failure passing from one generation to the next leaves Ji-su and her similarly troubled friends with an even greater sense of futility. She discovers a temporary source of hope after accidentally bonding with a strange middle-aged man, a kind of holy fool living all alone in the forest in a house he calls a “spaceship” seeing as it’s surrounded by complete darkness with only he aboard as if existing in an entirely different dimension. Jeong-cheol (Park Jung-bum) is Ji-su’s only “fan”, encouraging her with her music but also infinitely naive advising her to share it with her friends and family in the conviction that they would then begin to understand her but the result is quite the reverse. Ji-su’s few friends, all of whom have become sex workers, simply laugh at her while apparently offended by what they perceive as “hypocrisy”, an attempt to exploit their pain for her gain. 

Forced at knife point to witness the reality of sex work, Ji-su’s illusions are shattered while her only other source of hope in her relationship with intense childhood friend Won-ho (Park Young-Duk) also begins to crumble. Won-ho too had a dream, working as a delivery driver while saving up to buy a taxi license he hopes will enable him to earn a steady living leading to a traditional middle-class sense of stability with a wife and family home. Yet he too is eventually forced to acknowledge his dream won’t come true, again projecting his sense of resentment onto Ji-su in unfairly blaming her for a bike accident that brought them both into contact with a source of infinite corruption that is a remote sex work campsite hidden in the woods where a gang of obnoxious rich kid students get their kicks humiliating those they perceive as their social inferiors. 

Pushed to breaking point, Ji-su commits a transgression of her own and embarks on a path of self-destruction aiming to become what she hates and burn her world to the ground. Becoming the campsite’s bookkeeper she terrorises the former friends who laughed at her song and left her with lasting trauma while taking an indirect revenge against Won-ho for his indifference towards her. While she decides to become an oppressor in order not to be oppressed, Jeong-cheol wrestles with himself believing that he cannot abandon Ji-su because to do so would mean she had been abandoned by the world, while also realising that the world has many Ji-sus and he can’t help them all. Jeong-cheol believes himself alone, conversing only with the ghost of his late father who seems to represent his inner goodness something which he alternately feels he should bury along with his father’s ashes yet is unwilling to part with. 

Unlike Park’s previous films of similar length and bleakness, Not in This World swaps crushing naturalism for a touch of magical realist imagery as Park’s holy fool tries to repair the world around him armed only with his own inner goodness which simultaneously makes him an exile of contemporary society. Even as Ji-su continues to destroy herself, Jeong-cheol continues to believe she can be saved, his conviction perhaps borne out as the traumatic events of the film’s conclusion appear to break the spell she’s cast over herself though whether she will ever be able to accept everything that led her there is far less easy to discern. Once again an attack on an inhuman, ultra capitalist society defined by class conflict and petty humiliation, Park’s latest epic of human misery is also in its closing minutes at least quietly hopeful in the innocent power of a newborn baby’s cries. 

Not in This World streams in Poland until Nov. 29 as part of the 15th Five Flavours Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Story of Southern Islet (南巫, Chong Keat Aun, 2020)

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A wife finds herself thrown into a complicated world of spiritual confusion when her husband is struck down by a mysterious illness he himself attributes either to black magic or divine wrath. Set in 1987 (a year which saw a series of authoritarian crackdowns), Chong Keat Aun’s autobiographically inspired tale A Story of the Southern Islet (南巫) is partly a treatise on the absurdity of national borders but also one of cosmological ambiguity in which the acceptance of that which cannot be explained provides the only hope of cure for those burdened by the sin of transgressing against the gods. 

The gods are a constant source of tension in the marriage between Yan (Jojo Goh), a Westernised educated woman from another village, and her husband Cheong (Season Chee), a superstitious Chinese-Malaysian who makes a living selling seafood at the local market. Yan wants to have the statue of local deity Datuk Gong moved, finding it inconvenient in front of their house while Cheong chastises her for potentially offending the god by disrespectfully hanging her washing out to dry right next next to him. All the trouble starts however when Cheong chases a poisonous snake away from the statue and accidentally damages the fence of the man opposite, Nam (Kuan Kok Hin). Cheong already feels conflicted, worrying that the snake was a manifestation of Datuk Gong and he may have made a grave mistake in being so unwelcoming when a an extremely upset Nam comes over late at night and bangs on their door insisting on compensation. Nam is then killed on his way into town to get repair supplies leaving Cheong feeling extremely guilty and later collapsing with a mysterious illness that among other things causes him to vomit rusty nails. 

To Cheong, that sounds like black magic, a mild degree of suspicion falling on devastated widow Keaw (Pearlly Chua). Yan first takes him to a regular hospital where he’s diagnosed with “food poisoning” and sent home with a few pills, Yan’s attempt to convince a nurse by showing her the nails backfiring as the young woman backs away in horror insisting that she have some respect, they are doctors not shamans. An attempt to ask a local hardware store to help her identify the nails ends in a similar fashion, the salesman offended by the implication that the nails he sells are rusty. Out of her depth, Yan finds herself progressing through each of the spiritual systems in place in the local area, turning then to a shaman who is offended that she hadn’t come to him earlier her local friend Loy (Ling Tang) explaining that she’s from another village and didn’t know shamans did healing only for the shaman to express incredulity not only that there are places where no one worships Datuk Gong but that Yan is a Malaysian woman who cannot speak Malay and needs Loy to interpret for her. 

Yet this village is on the border between Thailand and Malaysia, many of the local people speak Thai while the boys are prone to knock the TV onto a (not really suitable) Thai broadcast in an attempt to avoid the endless speeches about national unity and patriotism. Then again the boys attend a Chinese school where pupils are discouraged from speaking their home dialect and one girl’s mother has even changed her name in the hope of giving her an easier future (as part of Operation Lalang teachers not educated in Chinese were parachuted into Chinese-medium schools giving rise to fears of an attempt to undermine the language). No one at the market seems to want the local seafood, everyone wants the “better” quality, if apparently more expensive, catch from Thailand leaving Cheong with a minor business problem. The shaman tells Yan that Cheong’s condition was caused by accidentally urinating on sacred land but when she ventures into a cave in the hope of praying directly to the mountain deity a disembodied voice tells her that Nenkan Keriang is not so petty, and not only that neither is she Malay meaning the gifts Yan has been told to bring of betel nut and a sarong are also inappropriate. 

Nenkan Keriang’s sad story is in one sense a historical echo of female subjugation, Keriang apparently a Chinese princess who became the victim of an evil shaman after turning down his romantic overtures. If anyone would be motivated to help Yan, it is most likely Nenkan Keriang (and it may well be to her she eventually owes her salvation). Nevertheless, after Malay shamanism fails, Chong courts (further) controversy by sending Yan to ask a Muslim spiritual leader instead who first insists he no longer dabbles in Shamanism before agreeing to help giving Yan instructions and the equipment she needs to rid herself of an unwanted demonic presence squatting on her land. 

It remains unclear if Cheong’s affliction is self-delusion, that in his guilt over Nam and also a series of other minor transgressions including “stealing” fish from a paddy field that belongs to another deity he’s made himself ill and can only be cured psychologically through the reassurance of ritual, or if Yan, who may or may not believe herself, actively cures him by exorcising their demons with the assistance of a transplanted animist deity. Beautifully shot with a lingering ethereality, Chong’s mystical tale places gods and demons amid the everyday while demonstrating the ebb and flow of deeply held cultural beliefs in a border community where harmonious coexistence has long been the norm. 

The Story of Southern Islet streams in Poland until Nov. 29 as part of the 15th Five Flavours Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Five Flavours Confirms Complete Programme for 2021 Hybrid Edition

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Five Flavours Film Festival returns for its 15th edition in a hybrid format streaming across Poland Nov. 17 – 29 with cinema screenings taking place in Warsaw Nov. 17 – 24. This year’s festival will include the recent Wong Kar-Wai touring retrospective as well as specialist strands themed around The Olympics and Taiwanese queer cinema.

China

  • Cliff Walkers – taut 30s spy movie from Zhang Yimou following Communist Party agents as they attempt to extract a former prisoner who can blow the whistle on Japanese war crimes committed by Unit 731.
  • Spring Tide – an alienated investigative journalist struggles to free herself and her 9-year old daughter from the legacy of toxic parenting both personal and national in Yang Lina’s powerful family drama. Review.

Hong Kong

  • No.7 Cherry Lane – animation from Yonfan set in the Hong Kong of the 1960s.
  • The Empty Hands – a jaded young woman rediscovers a sense confidence through reconnecting with karate in Chapman To’s soulful character piece. Review.
  • The Way We Keep Dancing – a collective of artists finds itself torn between complicity and resistance in the face of rising gentrification in Adam Wong’s musical dance drama. Review.
  • Weeds on Fire – true life sporting drama following baseball team Shatin Martins.

Indonesia

  • Death Knot – Siblings enter a dark world of supernatural dread when unwisely returning for their estranged mother’s funeral in Cornelio Sunny’s eerie folk horror. Review.
  • We Are Moluccans – a motorbike taxi driver attempts to tackle religious division through an integrated children’s football team.
  • Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash – an impotent hitman living for nothing but violence falls for a female bodyguard after she effortlessly defeats him in Edwin’s genre hopping adventure romance.

Japan

  • The 12 Day Tale of the Monster That Died in 8 – Takumi Saitoh plays a version of himself raising “capsule kaiju” as means of combatting Covid helplessness in Shunji Iwai’s whimsical pandemic drama. Review.
  • A Balance – an idealistic documentarian’s journalistic ethics are strained when she uncovers scandal close to home in Yujiro Harumoto’s probing social drama. Review.
  • Blue – a trio of dejected boxers contemplate their place inside and outside of the ring in Keisuke Yoshida’s unconventional boxing drama. Review.
  • Last of the Wolves – sequel to Kazuya Shiraishi’s Blood of Wolves set in 1991 in which a rogue cop attempts to keep the peace between yakuza gangs.
  • Red Post on Escher Street – the extras reclaim the frame in Sion Sono’s anarchic advocation for the jishu life. Review.
  • The Wife of a Spy – an upperclass housewife finds herself pulled into a deadly game of espionage in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s dark exploration of the consequences of love. Review.

Korea

  • Fighter – a young woman from North Korea finds both purpose and a new sense of security in found family in the boxing ring in Jéro Yun’s gritty drama. Review.
  • The Foul King – dramedy by Kim Jee-woon starring Song Kang-ho as banker entering the wrestling ring.
  • Not in This World – gritty drama from Park Jung-bum in which a mountain recluse attempts to save a drop out teen.

Malaysia

Myanmar

  • Money Has Four Legs – an ambitious filmmaker turns to crime in order to escape his desperate circumstances in Maung Sun’s meta satire. Review.

Singapore

  • Number 1 – a straight-laced executive discovers a new sense of freedom after losing his job and taking up drag in Ong Kuo Sin’s cheerful Singaporean dramedy. Review.

Taiwan

  • The Silent Forest – an idealistic student is caught between justice and complicity when he uncovers a culture of bullying and abuse at a school for deaf children in Ko Chen-Nien’s hard-hitting drama. Review.
  • We are Champions – two brothers find themselves on opposite sides of an ideological divide as they chase their dreams of basketball glory in Chang Jung-Chi’s family-themed sports drama. Review.

Taiwanese Queer Cinema

  • Alifu, the prince/ss – empathetic drama in which a transgender woman from an indigenous community finds herself caught between conflicting cultural mores. Review.
  • As We Like It – a romantic exile meanders through an internet free corner of Taipei in Chen Hung-i & Muni Wei’s all-female adaptation of the Shakespeare play. Review.
  • Born to Be Human – a teenager’s life is upended when they discover they are intersex but have almost no rights over their bodily autonomy in Lily Ni’s elegantly designed social drama. Review.
  • Dear Tenant – a grief-stricken man lovingly takes care of his late partner’s family but finds himself continually othered in Cheng Yu-Chieh’s melancholy familial drama. Review.
  • Eternal Summer – 2006 classic in which the intense friendship between two boys is disrupted by a transfer student from Hong Kong.
  • Spider Lilies – two women connected by childhood tragedy struggle to overcome their respective anxieties in Zero Chou’s ethereal reflection on love and the legacy of trauma. Review.
  • The Teacher – a politically engaged teacher’s worldview is challenged when he starts dating a man who is HIV+ in Chen Ming-Lang’s sensitive drama set in the run-up to marriage equality. Review.

Thailand

  • Sawanee Utoomma as Nim – The Medium – Photo Credit: Sasidis Sasisakulporn/Shudder
  • Anatomy of Time – drama set in a rural village in the 1960s and present day Bangkok as a young woman finds herself torn between a calculating soldier and kindhearted local man.
  • The Medium – a shamaness suspects her niece’s shamanistic consciousness is awakening but soon discovers something far more sinister in play in this atmospheric Thai folk horror. Review.

Wong Kai-Wai Retrospective

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  • As Tears Go By – Wong Kar-Wai’s moody triad debut stars a young Andy Lau as a lovelorn petty gangster who is forced to host a distant cousin (Maggie Cheung) when she comes to the city to seek medical treatment for a respiratory illness. Review.
  • Days of Being Wild – a rootless playboy breaks hearts all over Hong Kong in Wong’s ’60s tale of irresolvable longing and existential displacement. Review.
  • Chungking Express – lovelorn policemen seek new directions in Wong Kar-Wai’s frenetic journey through pre-Handover Hong Kong. Review.
  • Fallen Angels – lovelorn denizens of a purgatorial Hong Kong fail to connect in a world of alienation in Wong Kar-Wai’s chronicle of pre-Millennial loneliness. Review.
  • Happy Together – lovers on the run flee pre-Handover Hong Kong for Argentina to “start over” but discover only more loneliness and heartache in Wong’s melancholy romance. Review.
  • In the Mood for Love – betrayed spouses accidentally fall in love but are unable to act on their desires in an atmosphere of social repression in Wong Kar-Wai’s heady ’60s romance. Review.
  • 2046 – a quasi-sequel to In the Mood for Love and Days of Being of Wild, 2046 follows Tony Leung Chiu Wai’s Chow Mo-wan as he struggles to overcome his longing for Maggie Cheung.

Five Flavours takes place in Warsaw Nov. 17 – 24 and online throughout Poland Nov. 17 – 29. More information on all the films as well as screening times and ticketing links can be found on the official website, and you can keep up to date with all the latest news via the festival’s Facebook Page, Twitter Account, Instagram, and YouTube Channels.