Category: New York Asian Film Festival 2025

MA – Cry of Silence (မ – Cry of Silence, The Maw Naing, 2024)

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After their factory withholds wages for two months, seamstresses decide they have no other option but to strike in The Maw Naing’s hard-hitting drama, Ma – Cry of Silence (မ – Cry of Silence). As the opening title cards explain, Myanmar has seen a series of military coups over the last few decades and is now in a state of civil war. The military’s burning of villages has forced young people into the cities in search of work and shelter, but also left them in a precarious position and vulnerable to exploitative conditions. 

Mi-Thet, at least,ƒ is haunted by memories of her village burning and lives in a kind of hell where smoke is always on the horizon. She has a job as a seamstress and lives in a dorm with other young women in similar positions, but the factory hasn’t paid wages in two weeks and the landlady is beginning to get fed up. She snaps at the girls and ironically asks if they want her to starve to death, laying bare both the domino effects of this world in collapse and the pervasive heartlessness of capitalism. At the factory, the Forman watches over them, ruler in hand and often strikes them if he thinks they aren’t working hard enough while they’re terrified of taking breaks or visiting the bathroom because he also peeps on them or tries to extract sexual favours which some of the girls grant because they need the money.

The foreman’s face is kept offscreen and even when the women confront him, he appears as a ghostly silhouette behind the plastic sheeting. The factory boss, even when he supposedly arrives by car, is never seen at all. It may be that the political situation makes it impossible to run this kind of business, but at the same time it seems more like the factory just don’t want to pay the women because they think they don’t have to. After all, they have money to hire thugs to break up the protests when the women decide to strike rather than just giving them what they’re owed. The foreman alternately threatens them and makes false promises of payment that the women can’t believe because they’re still owed so much money even though as Mi-Thet says, she spends her days between the factory and the dorm. It wouldn’t surprise her if she died at her machine, while one of the others quips they’d still keep them working after they died.

Mi-Thet remains on the fence about even joining the strike, as do many of the other women afraid of the repercussions and of losing the money they’re owed entirely though it doesn’t seem as if it would be paid anyway. Her neighbour U-Tun who is disabled and is covered in scars from the 1988 protests for democracy remains world-weary and not so much encouraging as fatalistic but offers Mi-Thet a series of books that help her commit to the cause though it’s seeing her friend who works as a maid be badly beaten by her employer that convinces her they have to act now. 

As U-Tun says, the country should have changed but it stayed the same, while Mi-Thet can’t figure out if they’re emerging from the darkness or walking deeper into it. News reports speak of torched villages and refugees but also of the food shortages the destruction has caused. Even the cook at the dorm complains prices have gone up so much she can’t get good food and says she’ll cook better when they pay her more. “Better” doesn’t really matter at the factory as long as the girls hit their quotas, but workers can’t work on empty stomachs and no sleep even as the foreman seems intent in working them to their deaths. Mi-Thet and the others attempt to stand up against this cyclical destruction, but discover that they have almost no power and the factory owners don’t care at all if they live or die because they think there’s an endless stream of displaced girls looking for work. Gunshots and the rumble of fire echo in Mi-Thet’s ears, but ultimately she discovers herself trapped within this historical loop but issuing a rallying cry to the youth of Myanmar to rise up against this continuing oppression.

MA – Cry of Silence screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

To Kill a Mongolian Horse (一匹白馬的熱夢, Jiang  Xiaoxuan, 2024)

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The Mongolian Steppe is known for its vastness and ever-extending horizon, but for Saina it’s shrinking to the extent that seems to be homing in on him and threatening to destroy the only environment in which he feels he belongs. Saina is himself often likened to a runaway horse, though he’s forever catching them and bringing them back, longing for a world in which he could exist within this natural environment just as his ancestors did but finding only futility everywhere.

Once a racer, Saina injured his shoulder and is now relegated to the sidelines while trying to find other ways to work. His father, a broken man who drinks and gambles, has already sold off most of his sheep and is on at Saina to sell the horses too. His friend Hasa has also sold up, first rejoining the circus but then declaring himself sick of being a herdsman. After getting injured he decides to try his luck in the city and ironically ends up getting a job working for the mining company that is quite literally disrupting the foundations of Saina’s life.

The main enemy is modernity, but it’s delivered by the Chinese. Saina finds himself surrounded by Mandarin speakers, while it’s a Chinese mining company that is gradually buying up the Steppe to open a mine and eventually tries to force Saina and his father off their land. Saina’s father keeps telling him a Chinese horse broker could get them a good deal, but he’s also told that his beautiful white horse isn’t worth very much because it’s Mongolian. It’s meat wouldn’t even be worth as much as a cow’s, though that’s the only reason the broker is interested in it.

Nevertheless, it’s largely for Chinese tourists that Saina is obliged to parade his culture. He takes part in Medieval Times-style dinner shows where the audience is repeatedly reminded they can buy drinks for their favourite riders and carrots for the horses, though the riders and horses almost certainly don’t see them. Saina rides dressed as a heroic Mongol warrior, but has dreams of himself dying on the battlefield alone with his white horse. His ex-wife Tana encounters something similar, as her Chinese boss makes her serve drinks at dinner parties with Chinese businessmen while insisting she sing a Mongolian song for the local colour. Later Saina gets a job at a ranch where city slickers come to experience life on the Steppe, but complains that the tourists ride the horses too hard and end up injuring them. They don’t have a connection to the land or know how to treat animals, while the ranch owners exploit the horses in the same way they exploit Saina, taking little interest in their physical wellbeing only their ability to work. At the show, Saina discovers his horse is injured and asks to switch to another one to let it rest, but encounters resistance in being told to get higher approval from the boss.

Meanwhile, he applies for a job at a fancy equestrian facility but is basically told he’s too he’s common for this elite, aristocratic Western sport that’s no longer about racing but fine technique. The snooty woman who interviews him says that Mongolian riders don’t ride properly and their skills aren’t needed somewhere like this. Saina could possibly start from the ground up as a stable boy but most of those are teenagers. Meanwhile Saina reflects that his father never actually taught him how to ride, he just placed him in the saddle and left the rest up to him with the natural consequence that it feels like something that is innate and essential. Yet he wonders if his son will ride at all or if these grasslands will still exist when he comes of age. Tana lives in the city and wants to send the boy to a school she thinks is better where they speak Mandarin and English while Saina is worried he’ll lose his Mongolian. When he puts him on a horse, the boy is terrified and asks to get off. All Saina really seems to want is to ride horses and raise sheep, but this way of life is dying out and the grasslands are shrinking all around him. There is something quite sad and defiant in his riding of his horse along a motorway in the juxtaposition between the traditional way of life and the modernity which all but destroyed it even as Saina is seemingly left with nowhere to go and no place to roam.

To Kill a Mongolian Horse screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Gowok: Javanese Kamasutra (Gowok: Kamasutra Jawa, Hanung Bramantyo, 2025)

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There’s an essential contradiction at the centre of Hanung Bramantyo’s spicy romantic melodrama Gowok: Javanese Kamasutra (Gowok: Kamasutra Jawa) in that, on the one hand, the gowok is said to exist so that men learn how satisfy their wives’ sexual desires. Which is to say, the sexual desires of women are recognised and approved rather than denied or taboo while men are expected to live up to satisfying them as part of what it means to be a proper man. But at the same time, women are constrained by the patriarchal institution of marriage, have few rights of their own, and are largely unable to live independently while lacking status as anything other than a man’s wife. 

Indeed, the inserting of increasingly outdated notions of sex and class that stand in the way of romance and set the tragic events in motion rather than the black magic to which many attribute the looming crisis. Years before, Jaya’s mother had been in love with the soon-to-be king, but he couldn’t marry her because she wasn’t of sufficiently noble birth. She agreed to step aside and marry a mutual friend on the condition he would be given high office and her son would marry into royalty so that she would be a queen in all but name and their family would enter the royal bloodline.

Now a university student, Jaya (Devano Danendra / Reza Rahadian) is sent to a gowok to make a real man out of him, though as he explains to his father, that’s not what a real man is. Jaya is a young man of the new Indonesia who believes in things like equality of the sexes and the breaking down of the old class system even if he maintains his privilege in other ways, including submitting himself to the gowok. Nevertheless, while he’s there, he falls in love with the adopted daughter of his gowok Santi (Lola Amaria), Ratri (Alika Jantinia / Raihaanun), and makes her a lot of promises about the future while introducing her to the women’s movement in 50s Indonesia that offers her the vision of a different future in which she might become an independent woman rather than being forced to become a gowok herself. To become a gowok necessarily means that she would not be able to marry. Most gowok adopt children to succeed them. Accidentally seeing a secret ritual, Santi fears that Ratri has fallen victim to a pure love spell that threatens spiritual disaster should the man break his promise which, as an older woman, she knows he almost certainly will. 

Then again, that turns out not quite to be the case and the lovers are in fact betrayed by those still clinging on to to the old class system. The destructive quality of their romance is played out against the background of the screws tightening across Indonesia as anti-communist fervour takes hold and suspicion falls on the women’s groups when military generals are abducted and murdered. Despite his progressive views, Jaya ends up married to a princess at his mother’s behest, exemplifying the ways in which women try to hold on to power by exerting matriarchal control over their sons. As for the princess, she is already pregnant by her communist boyfriend but prevented from marrying him and forced to marry Jaya instead though apparently coming fall in love with him after their marriage. Meanwhile, it turns out that there is an awkward connection between Jaya and Ratri that lends their fateful meeting a tragic quality even as his mother refuses to entertain the idea of Ratri marrying her son because her mother was a sex worker and she is not of their class.

In any case, though the gowok system may not actually be that different from other folk practices, there is something uncomfortable about it in that some of the “men” are very young and do not want to be there. Though Jaya, who is also sent there against his will, is in university and falls for Ratri who is around the same age, when his own son, Bargas, is sent to the gowok he is only around 14 and looks very childlike while ushered into “manhood” by a then 33-year-old Ratri. The system is at least potentially abusive and unethical while demonstrating how men are also ensnared by the patriarchal trap in that they too are being groomed for marriage whether they like it or not. It was in fact a man’s inability to remain faithful to the wife chosen for him that led to Ratri’s mother’s death and the activation of a black magic curse.

In any case, it turns out that human motivations can be far more damaging than any curse in the long years of anger, resentment, and misery born of misunderstandings and deliberately misdirected love. Ratri desperately tries to overcome her past and become an independent woman as a gowok but finds herself frustrated by the changing nature of society which promises so much freedom and opportunity in her youth only to immediately roll back on it while her own attempt at revenge backfires with tragic results. Poignant in its themes of tragic romance, the film quietly hints that this kind of oppression may not have really gone away even as Ratri seeks to reclaim her legacy in the 1980s-set coda by turning the gowok house into a school that educates women in a final attempt to finally free them from patriarchal control.

Gowok: Javanese Kamasutra screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Travesty (Гажуудал, Baatar Batsukh, 2024)

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“One man’s screams will not fix this social travesty,” according to an exasperated police officer sent in to quell a hostage crisis in a quiet rural town in Baatar Batsukh’s Mongolian crime drama. Led by chapter headings reading The Town, The City, the Nation, The State, the film pushes deeper towards the centre of corruption in an indifferent society in which the lives of citizens are barely valued and the authorities will do little to protect them. Indeed, the hostage taker’s claims that he will kill one person an hour seems to stand in for the slowly ticking time bomb of governmental indifference.

Or at least, that’s how it seems to Davaa whose teenage son keeps ringing him but he can’t help because he’s so far away on a case. His absent paternity seems to echo the ways in which the old have abandoned the young. The hostage taker turns out to be a young man who feels left out and hopeless. Rendered mute during his military service, he tried to sue the government but couldn’t while his mother, who worked for the government her whole life, ruined her health doing so and then was unfairly denied a loan to pay for medical treatment. The boy’s father appears to have been in the military, but is otherwise not around leaving him alone after his mother’s death having lost pretty much everything, which is why he takes revenge by holing up in the hospital with 20 hostages and asking 1 billion Mongolian tugrik a person. He’s clearly putting a price on a human life, but then so is the government when it declares I won’t pay.

The fact that it’s the hospital he takes over obviously has knock on consequences preventing local people from accessing health care, but the government does that too. As the doctor points out, rural hospitals are understaffed and under resourced. They can only offer basic services and send more seriously ill patients to the cities, but there aren’t enough beds there either so those like the hostage taker’s mother are sent back anyway. Meanwhile, a local crook’s ageing wife goes into labour with her fourth child which will earn them a medal from the government. The pregnancy is high risk and the doctor is worried about her because all of her previous births have involved complications which endangered the life of mother and child. But the woman insists she doesn’t care about the risks and is willing to die to get the medal from the government even though it appears they won’t care very much about her child after it’s born and fulfils their aim of expanding the population. 

Her husband is well known to the local police who’ve rounded up two other petty crooks who are listening intently to the unfolding crisis from their place in the cells. These middle-aged men, one of whom is a former nurse, don’t seem to have much to do except get into trouble. The police are doing their best, but like the hospital, they’re also under staffed and under resourced. A hostage crisis in their tiny town is an absurd development they have no idea how to deal with which is why Darvaa is dispatched to deal with it. The town can’t hope to raise the money the hostage taker is asking for, while the government could but it won’t pay despite Davaa’s please that they just give the hostage taker what he wants so he’ll stop executing people. When the authorities eventually turn up, it turns out they’ve lied. They didn’t bring the money and are planning to storm the building to end the crisis quickly without giving much thought to the hostages’ lives. Taken hostage himself, their representative grovels and pleads but refuses to offer the apology Davaa suggests as a last resort to appease the hostage taker with whom he has come to sympathise. 

A late twist makes the situation all the more tragic with the boy another victim of governmental indifference which would rather kill first and then refuse to answer any questions later. They try to fob Davaa off with a promotion in return for his silence, but he refuses while implying that he doesn’t really want to talk about this whole sorry affair either and would rather to get on with his job and looking after his family. In any case, the government representative seems more concerned that Davaa will embarrass him by exposing how he grovelled and begged for his life rather the fact they acted with callous disregard for the lives of the hostages and failed to take into account the fragile mental state of the hostage taker. The travesty is then not the hostage crisis but the state of the nation in which the citizens are themselves taken hostage by an indifferent and oppressive authority which extracts its ransom but offers little in return.

Travesty screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Unexpected Courage (我們意外的勇氣, Shawn Yu, 2025)

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Faced with a surprise pregnancy at 45, a workaholic music executive finds herself re-evaluating her life choices in Shawn Yu’s autobiographically inspired maternity drama, Unexpected Courage (我們意外的勇氣, wǒmen yìwài de yǒngqì). A kind of pun, the unexpected baby is later given the name “courage”, the film’s title hints at the resolve needed by the couple to face their new situation from the prospect of parenthood to the cracks already undermining the foundations of their relationship.

Those would partly be economic, but also their contradictory desires for professional fulfilment. The fact is that even before the baby they are already exhausted. Advertising filmmaker Po-en (Simon Hsueh) has been out all night on a shoot and walks in zombie-like just as Le-fu (René Liu), an executive at a record label, is walking out the door to travel to Shanghai with one of her stars so he can participate in a reality TV programme. They already live somewhat parallel lives and are barely connected to the extent that it seems their relationship may have run its course.

They aren’t really alone in that as Po-en discovers on running into another man at the hospital who is undergoing IVF treatment with his wife. The process is hampered by the fact that he works in Mainland China and only returns every three months which obviously makes trying for a baby logistically difficult. His wife accuses him of not really wanting children, while he later seems less than impressed on being told they’re having twins presumably because of the increased expense while his wife coldly tells him not to ask her to reduce the number because she won’t. A later phone call conversation reveals that the couple can’t afford a three-bedroom home in their preferred neighbourhood, while the husband would prefer they all move to Shenzhen which has a lower cost of living but this would necessarily mean the wife uprooting herself, losing her home and community while there would be no one left to look after her parents as they age. 

Le-fu is also considering taking a big promotion to head up the office in Beijing which is what she’s been aiming for throughout her career. It’s not clear if she intended to take Po-en with her, but in any case the discovery of the pregnancy, brought on by the scandal of one of her biggest stars being involved in a sex tape scandal, forces her to reassess her possibilities. Originally, she resolves to sign the contract and is resentful of the entire situation for throwing a spanner in the works, but is also touched by Po-en’s devotion and reluctant to give up what might be her only chance to become a mother even if it comes at the cost of her career. 

For his part, Po-en wants to keep the baby and is excited, if also anxious, about becomgina father. Having undergone a previous operation to remove part of her womb, Le-fu was led to believe she couldn’t have children and this too seems to have presented a fault-line in their relationship that prevented them from fully committing to each other. At 32, Po-en is 12 years younger, and Le-fu assumes he will eventually leave her for a younger woman while he at times seems resentful that she keeps him at arms’ length. 

The windowless hospital room in which Le-fu is confined then becomes a kind of womb from which she herself is reborn as a mother. Po-en’s tying a red ribbon to each of their wrists is both a romantic gesture that echoes the red string of fate connecting fated lovers, but also a kind of umbilical cord that finally helps them cement their relationship. Nevertheless, they also live in a patriarchal and conservative society that forces the question on them more directly as friends and family suddenly start asking if they’re getting married while others seem to disapprove of the fact that they’ve conceived a baby outside of wedlock. Likewise, the implication is that Le-fu must choose between motherhood and her career and the motherhood is the “proper” choice, negating the choice and agency she is otherwise given in the option to terminate the pregnancy. Po-en, meanwhile, wrestles with himself unsure he is up to the responsibility of fatherhood given that he did not have a father himself and therefore has no role model to follow. A grumpy sugar juice seller explains that his child will teach him, which is what children are put here to do as Le-fu has already realised. Expressing an anxiety surrounding the declining birthrate, the film does not shy away from its causes and the knock-on effects of life in a fast-paced, capitalist society but does in the end find a kind of serenity in the courage of both parents and child to embrace this new life with hope and excitement.

Unexpected Courage screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Jinsei (無名の人生, Ryuya Suzuki, 2025)

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A man goes by many names before he dies. The hero of Ryuya Suzuki’s almost entirely self-produced anime Jinsei (無名の人生, Mumei no Jinsei) never tells us his name. He doesn’t say anything much at all, but passively allows himself to be called whatever others call him while struggling to come to terms with the death of his mother and continually looking for new forms of family along with a place he can really call their own.

Indeed, in the wordless opening sequence, Se-chan’s father and mother meet, get married, have a child, and split up, but are killed together in a freak accident in which the young Se-chan watches helplessly as a pickup truck being driven by an elderly man mows them down. After that, he ceases to speak and looks on at the world vacantly. He becomes a kind of mirror for the world around him, an empty vessel onto which others may project their own fears and anxieties. Thus at school they call him “grim reaper” because he doesn’t speak or move. When another boy in the neighbourhood tries to reach out to him, he punches him in the face. Nevertheless the two eventually become friends, bonding in their shared status as bullied outsiders rejected by mainstream society. 

Kin, who in some kind of nominative determinism has dyed blond hair, is marginalised because of his interest in male pop idols and dreams of becoming one. A man named Shiratori comes from the city with a prophecy for Se-chan in the form of a VHS tape featuring his father dancing as part of a chart-topping boy band. Se-chan too has the desire to sing and dance, but the entertainment industry feeds on broken dreams. His father, Eito, had been the son of an aristocratic family who rejected him for following his dreams of becoming a singer. His father pulls a gun on him when he returns in disgrace having been caught using drugs and getting cancelled by the world at large. Eito too apparently could not cope with the pressures of showbiz and tired of the cage of stardom. Shiratori is clearly modelled on Johnny Kitagawa whose decades of sexual abuse were an open secret acknowledged only after his eventual death. He tells the boys that they’re in a cage to which he holds the key, but that it’s protection not imprisonment even as they become tools exploited by moneymaking execs intent on selling them body and soul.

Se-chan’s stepfather had told him that life was a swan and he should spread his wings, but cages are hard to avoid as he discovers on working as a Kabukicho club host once again exploited as a hook dangled to get money from women only to fall victim to another heartless man and the woman who couldn’t tame him. Se-chan found a kind of family in the boy band that he doesn’t really find anywhere else, certainly not in Kabukicho, until he decides to renounce the world entirely as a caveman recluse living in a disused building which is to say in a kind of past. Suzuki’s increasingly bleak descent into the near future echoes this desire for more genuine connections and familial warmth uncorrupted by the darkness of contemporary capitalism and the young Se-chan’s unresolved trauma. War and apocalypse give rise to shady cults, which are also like families, but exclusionary in calming themselves to be some kind of elite as a dangerous feudalism resurrects itself.

Travelling 100 years from 1995, the film moves from the biting cold of winter in Yamagata to the blazing heat of a post-apocalyptic society but seems to imply that in the end we find ourselves again and make the world anew as a great family of humanity. Suzuki apparently made the film up as he went  along, working without a script and stitching one scene on to the next, but his images move with a quiet power and purpose even they move towards an inevitable ending and the final goodbye. The man who was the lonely boy Se-chan, grim reaper, God, a pop star named “Zen”, someone’s Love, comes to embody the concept of life itself in being all things to all men while life in effect lived him in the depths of all his longing and loneliness only to find a sense of hope in confronting the eternal void.

Jinsei screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Deep in the Mountains (如意饭店, Li Yongyi, 2025)

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Such in the confusion in mid-90s China that the chaos has penetrated all the way to a remote village in Li Yongyi’s satirical farce Deep in the Mountains (如意饭店, rúyì fàndiàn). What begins as gritty Sino-noir soon turns into black comedy as the unfairly demoted policeman hero finds himself chasing a serial killer right into a traditional village community that seems to be home to some of the nation’s least astute people who are themselves caught between the old China and the New but also obsessed with their own status and petty vendettas.

The problems begin when middle-aged former detective Yao (Qiao Shan), now working as a vehicle checker after being demoted for chasing a woman he thought was a missing person while in his underpants which frightened her so much she ran into traffic, is knocked out by criminal mastermind Ge Wenyong (Wang Yanhui) and the pair are taken into custody by the current village chief’’s daughter. She hopes that by catching the “thief” before the public security representative she can secure her succession to the role. As such, she’s inclined to believe Ge Wenyong when he says that he caught Yao breaking into his restaurant while as Yao came out in search of his missing friend on his off hours, he doesn’t have anything on him that proves he works in law enforcement. The villagers’ inability to believe him signals their declining faith in the authorities, while Ge Wenyong signals the rise of the new merchant class which is in this case quite literally bludgeoning the workers to death. 

As a vehicle checker, Yao is immediately suspicious when one of the fog light caps he fitted on a now-missing lorry turns up on another one. The increasingly nervous driver tells him there’s an out of the way place where people sell parts from scrapped vehicles on the black market. Amid the economic reforms of the 90s as the nation transitioned away from the planned economy to a market one, many lost their jobs along with, at least as far as the film goes, their moral compass. Infected by greed, they climb over each other in search of material wealth. In some ways repentant lorry driver Yang is symbol of this newly materialistic impulse. His business went bust and he’s racked up massive debts which is why he ended up becoming a long-distance lorry driver. Even if his gift of pretty white shoes for his wife hints at this new consumerist society in their frivolity, the fact that Yang is dying of pancreatic cancer suggest that he too has been poisoned by the corrupting influence of capitalism. Now his only wish is to clear his debts so that his wife and daughter won’t be burdened by them when he’s gone. 

There are a series of family photos that appear in the film besides the one that Yang keeps in his lorry beginning with the wedding photo which is dramatically shattered in the opening sequence. The “missing” woman we’re first introduced to is perhaps of this new China and looking for a more modern “freedom” in fleeing an abusive marriage to a man who tells the police that he didn’t hit her “that hard”. But unfortunately, she ends up running into Ge Wenyong who takes her prisoner and forces her to be a tool in his dark and exploitative criminal enterprise which involves knocking off lorry drivers and stealing their vehicles which are often carrying new consumerist goods such as televisions and video players. Yet, suave and manipulative, he manages to convince the villagers that he is actually an undercover public security agent while Yao is just a thief. 

Meanwhile, they squabble amongst themselves while ironically preparing to accept an award as a “civilised advanced village”. The title cards at the end of the film assure us they were all punished too for “obstructing official duties, picking quarrels and provoking troubles”, though they are perhaps symptomatic of the problems of the old China, which have not exactly gone away, in their petty politicking at the expense of the people they’re supposed to be protecting. Yao, however, is redeemed by solving the case, if not without a few casualties, and is rewarded with reinstatement as a detective. He continues to be plagued by anxiety about the “missing persons” of China’s transitionary period as a representative of an authority almost certainly a little less benevolent than it’s being made out to be if also positioned as the only real force of resistance towards the rise of rampant capitalism and heartless “entrepreneurs” like Ge Wenyong.

Deep in the Mountains screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Montages of a Modern Motherhood (虎毒不, Oliver Chan Siu-kuen, 2024)

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A title card at the end of Oliver Chan’s Montages of a Modern Motherhood (虎毒不) dedicates the film to all women who chose not to become mothers, and it’s true enough that the picture it paints of contemporary child rearing is relentlessly bleak. Governments in much of the developed world are fiercely trying to encourage more couples to have children, but few are really addressing the reasons why they aren’t while the ways people live their lives have undeniably changed rendering commonly held notions about parenting incompatible with the contemporary reality.

A case in point, Jing (Hedwig Tam) lives a long way from her birth family and is not surrounded by a supportive community network of other women in similar positions. Though her mother-in-law lives next-door and offers to help with the baby, it soon proves more trouble than it’s worth as she more or less takes over and runs Jing down in the process. Jing describes her to friends as “conservative,” and it’s clear that she disagrees with Jing’s parenting choices while also trying to exclude her from the family as if the baby were only her and her son’s. Ching, a fussy newborn who cries nonstop from morning to night, isn’t gaining weight and the mother-in-law immediately jumps straight to the conclusion that it’s because Jing’s milk isn’t good enough. According to her she doesn’t eat right, and going back to work may also have somehow caused a problem. Her unilateral decision to switch formula milk, tipping away all the breast milk Jing has been painstakingly expressing, without telling either of the parents is a huge overstepping of the boundaries and a betrayal of the trust Jing placed in her to look after her child, though of course the mother-in-law insists that she was only trying to do what’s best for the baby despite also having bathed her in burnt sutras.

The problem is compounded by the fact the in-laws seem to own the apartment they live in, which is why her husband, Wai, is reluctant to move closer to her family when she suggests it. As the oldest son, he is also supposed to be caring for his parents though in reality this of course also falls to Jing. As Ching’s crying is so loud and piercing, they begin receiving complaints from neighbours which eventually leaves Jing forced to take the baby outside in the middle of the night. This might not have been so much of a problem in the past before urban living environments became so cramped and people began having less children making the noise more obvious, but it’s nevertheless an unavoidable obstacle for the new parents who find themselves additionally pressured by the necessity of maintaining good relationships with their neighbours. 

To make matters worse, Jing’s husband Wai pats himself on the back for “helping” with the baby, which is after all also his responsibility so he should be doing his fair share. He still seems to operate with a patriarchal mindset that tells him the home and flat are Jing’s to take care of while his job is to earn the money. Both he and his mother seem to hold it against Jing that their baby is a girl. She asks him for more help, but he responds by getting a job that pays more but requires further hours. He spends evenings out with his friends and repeatedly fails to get the breast milk pump fixed despite frequent reminders before accusing her of “whining” too much when she tries to tell him how difficult it’s been for her stuck at home all day with the baby. Like his mother, his ideal solution is for her to give up work and devote herself to their home because they don’t “need” her money and her working is perhaps a suggestion that they might which offends his sense of masculinity.

But Jing wants to work for reasons of personal fulfilment and safety. As other women remind her, you need your own money in case there comes a time you need to leave, but also because some men keep a tight grip on the purse strings and often won’t give their wives enough housekeeping money. Jing was paying for a lot of the baby stuff herself out of the money from her job at a bakery, but after she loses it and her savings run out she has to ask Wai who isn’t keen to chip in. Ironically, her boss chooses to make her redundant when the bakery hits a bad patch because her colleague is single and at least she has her husband’s wage to rely on. Jing continues applying for similar jobs, but they all fall through when she reveals she is married with a newborn child. In the end, she lies that she’s single but the job only offers night work which is obviously no good for her situation.  

Her job was the last thing that Jing felt connected her to her old self. With no one to talk to but the baby, she fears the erasure of her identity and tells her mother that she misses the time that she was a daughter rather than a mother. She gets some support from a kind retired lady who looks after Ching and tries to encourage her, reminding her that it was different for their generation because they could just leave the kids in the house and ask a neighbour to check in on them and no one thought anything of it. But Jing still feels herself inadequate, as if she’s failing at motherhood or breaking a taboo by asking to have some sort of life for herself without being completely subsumed by the image of “motherhood”. The in-laws keep a little bird in a cage with which Jing seems to identify, even as its chirping adds to the noise and the constant thrumming of the breast pump raises her stress levels. Left with no real support, there is only really one way that Jing can escape from a world of sleeplessness and anxiety as she tries to find the smallest moment of peace and tranquility free of social expectation and the crushing guilt of maternity.

Montages of a Modern Motherhood screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Smashing Frank (搗破法蘭克, Trevor Choi, 2025)

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Youth’s attempt to televise its revolution results in unforeseen consequences in Trevor Choi’s crime thriller Smashing Frank (搗破法蘭克). Giving Hong Kong a kind of comic book gloss, Choi locates the source of corruption in a thuggish gangster posing as a businessman and laundering his ill-gotten gains through a fake church all while claiming to be working for the prosperity of the city. Fed up with a world so obviously corrupt, Ayla (Hedwig Tam) and her friends attempt to fight back through theft and their mission of becoming robbery influencers in social media. 

It later becomes apparent that Ayla is doing most of this as a kind of revenge. Her sister took her own life after being sexually assaulted and becoming pregnant, while Ayla sacrificed her own bright future by assaulting a “rich pervert”. Despite having gained a first-class degree and being on track for a job as a hotel manager, Ayla now appears to have gone rogue and has lost faith in mainstream society and law enforcement which turns a blind eye to certain crimes to keep the peace. After being sentenced to community service, she teams up with childhood friend Hugo (Locker Lam) and Tao Chun (Kaki Sham), a man convicted of voyeurism who becomes their getaway driver, to do crime she describes as a kind of performance art.

Yet Ayla claims she’s no kind of Robin Hood and mainly in this for herself and the glory, explaining that she uploads the videos for “fun”. Nevertheless, she eventually realises that everything links back to the Unity Haven Church and its shady CEO, Ho (Ben Yuen). Ho has already been featured in the news having been accused of misusing church funds and as the gang discover may have links to human trafficking and child exploitation. But he’s also pretty well entrenched within the infrastructure of the city and otherwise untouchable. As such, he comes to represent the corrupt authoritarianism of the contemporary society while Ayla and Frank echo the protestors of recent years. Given the opportunity for a giant payout, Ayla tells Ho where to go and explains that her generation never got to have nice things, so the reason she robbed his jewellery shop was to show them that luxurious mansions were being built in the slums. 

He may be one of the old men that’s ruining the world, but despite herself, Ayla seems to be consumed with a sense of injustice that the rich get away with their crimes while people like her sister and grandmother are left to suffer. Through her influencer revolution, she intends Frank to become a kind of militia resisting the hyper capitalistic society on behalf of the youth it has betrayed. As Hugo says, if he had a regular job he’d never be able to buy a house anyway while others seem equally fed up with disappointing corporate existences that no longer provide a decent quality of life. Ho may be all about making the city prosper, but it’s mostly for himself and his friends rather than the wider society. 

Chelsea (Renci Yeung), Chun’s former associate running badger games, even says that they didn’t really care that she blackmailed them because they had bigger things to worry about. There is then a kind of solidarity that exists between the team in their shared victimisation under men like Ho and desire for the liberation of those like them that gives their mission a weight beyond simple rebellion, even if the constant flirtation between Chelsea and Ayla dangles like an unresolved plot thread. Even so, Ayla’s recklessness reeks of desperation as Hugo points out they may all die the following day but perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad as continuing to live like this. The nihilism that colours their lives is all pervasive, and perhaps a reaction to the imposition of authoritarianism and failure of the protest movement that causes Ayla to launch her revolution in the distinctly youthful space of the internet and spread the word through social media which those like Ho cannot fully control. Hong Kong media does not, she claims, report on certain crimes in the interests of making the city feel safe and stable for men like Ho which is why she had to televise her revolution herself. It may be a forlorn hope, but it’s all she appears to have while otherwise trapped in a world of constant corruption.

Smashing Frank screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Babanbabanban Vampire (ババンババンバンバンパイア, Shinji Hamasaki, 2025)

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It turns out immortality’s not all it’s cracked up to be in Shinji Hamasaki’s adaptation of the manga by Hiromasa Okujima, Baban Baban Ban Vampire (ババンババンバンバンパイア). At 450 years old, Mori Ranmaru (Ryo Yoshizawa), one-time lover of Oda Nobunaga (Shinichi Tsutsumi), is working as an attendant in a bathhouse in an attempt to, as he says, “live an ordinary life earnestly,” while staving off the darkness of an existence free of the spectre of death. 

Yet, there is an uncomfortable darkness at the centre of this otherwise humorous and ironic tale in that what Mori Ran is actually doing is grooming a child so that he can enjoy him when he judges that he is “ready.” There’s an obviously unpalatable reading of the film that renders it as an allegory for paedophilia, while there’s also an undeniable poignancy in likening the figure of the vampire of that of a gay man in an oppressive society. Mori Ran accosts his victims in dark alleyways and his assignations with other men are necessarily short and secretive. They also result in death, while Mori Ran describes most of his victims as tainted and disgusting as if echoing an internalised sense of self-loathing. He continues to hold up Rihito (Rihito Itagaki) as a figure of innocence and purity because he once saved his life when he was baking in the heat of an usually hot spring when the boy was only five years old. 

Mori Ran’s internalised homophobia is somewhat mirrored in that of the teacher Sakamoto (Shinnosuke Mitsushima) who is also a vampire hunter but bewitched by Mori Ran and longing to be initiated by him, though Mori Ran declines to give him what he sees as a curse. Imbued with a gothic sensibility, Mori Ran believes that humans are beautiful because they die, while vampirism is debased and ugly. He refuses to condemn someone he admires to his own fate which he describes as a kind of inescapable hell in which he is unable to die. He no longer believes in love, though is haunted by his loss of Nobunaga, and sees humans merely as food. 

Nevertheless, it seems he has found purpose in his present life of living with Rihito’s family and working in their bathhouse despite convincing himself that he’s only biding his time until Rihito is ripe for the picking. According to Mori Ran, the sweetest blood belongs to that of 18-year-old male virgins which is why his goal of ensuring that Rihito remains virginal and pure is becoming more difficult now that he has entered adolescence. Much of the comedy derives from Mori Ran’s emotional cluelessness and paranoia on discovering that Rihito has fallen for a girl, Aoi (Nanoka Hara), with whom he had a stereotypical meet cute on his way to his high school entrance ceremony. Knowing that he has to nip this in the bud as soon as possible, he pays a visit to Aoi to warn her off but fails to realise that not only did she barely notice Rihito let alone fall in love with him, but that she is actually obsessed with vampires and is keener on him. 

But then again, there’s something additionally troubling about Rihito’s immediate classification of Mori Ran as a “love rival” in the mistaken belief he’s after Aoi too rather than as someone who should probably be reported to some kind of authority. After all, even if he were not 450 years old but the 25 he claims to be, hanging around exclusively with high schoolers is odd and bordering on inappropriate in itself. Having misunderstood his intentions, Aoi also believes that Mori Ran is waiting for her to be “ready,” in a partial recognition that this is wrong because she’s a child but also prepared to wait for the mysterious vampire without considering the implications of his being interested in a 15-year-old girl if that actually were the case. 

Nevertheless, what Mori Ran discovers is really a different kind of love in his gradual integration into the human world and the the friendships he forms not only with Rihito, but Aoi, her muscular brother Franken (Mandy Sekiguchi) who also has a crush on Mori Ran, and the lovelorn teacher Sakamoto, even if he’s still focused on his mission of keeping Rihito pure so he can drink his blood on his 18th birthday. His attempts to prevent a relationship forming between Rihito and Aoi are all countrerprodcuteive and would like end up bringing them together if it were not for the fact of Aoi’s crush on him of which he remains oblivious. The inherently zany humour of the situation with its series of concentric love triangles along with the warmheartedness of Rihito’s homelife when contrasted with the “mysterious” serial killings on the news cannot completely overcome the unpalatable undercurrent of Mori Ran’s pederastic quest, if glossing over it with admittedly delicious irony and absurdism.

Babanbabanban Vampire screens 27th July as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.