Category: New York Asian Film Festival 2026

Kinki (近畿地方のある場所について, Koji Shiraishi, 2025)

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“No one can be saved now” intones a victim of a curse having apparently accepted the futility of his situation. In Koji Shiraishi’s Kinki (近畿地方のある場所について, Kinki Chiho no aru basho ni tsuite), adapted from the writings by Sesuji later published in novel form, everything is indeed connected, though our heroes will spend the majority of the film trying to figure out how. Yet perhaps these breadcrumbs were dropped for someone to find, and in a certain kind of way the mystery in the end finds us no matter how we may try to hide from it or mistakenly believe that the truth will set us free.

A case in point, there are two mysteries in play. The first, the editor of a paranormal magazine has disappeared taking his laptop containing the draft of an upcoming article with him. His assistant, Ozawa (Eiji Akaso), calls in a freelance writer, Chihiro (Miho Kanno), to help him reconstruct the article using the materials Sayama (Atom Shukugawa) left behind. Finding Sayama is something of a secondary goal in that they are less interested in what happened to him and why he disappeared than they are in what he was investigating. They only want to find him to recover his article.

Yet the materials he left behind are strangely full of missing people and connected only by a series of strange images such as a woman jumping with her arms stretched out towards a tree, an eerie drawing of a figure under a torii gate with the symbols either for “woman” or “end” surrounding it, and references to local folklore that all point to the “certain place in the Kinki region” mentioned in the title. In the course of their investigation, Chihiro and Ozawa are also unwittingly exposing themselves to whatever Sayama may have seen, running the gamut from fragments of old TV programmes on worn VHS, to forgotten internet viral videos, and even a slightly creepy children’s animation based on a local folktale and intended to preserve local culture.

Perhaps some of these curses are indeed ridiculous. No one really believes in the power of a chain letter, as a gaggle of high school girls giggle over a viral text that says they’ll die if they don’t pass it on. But it’s hard to deny the eeriness that surrounds the disappearance of a ghost hunting vlogger who appears to have lost his mind after straying into an abandoned house, or the young student whose friend disappeared after watching a viral video titled “Watch this and die”. The young student later finds himself haunted too, but his attempt to enlist a Buddhist priest for help goes disastrously wrong, as does Chihiro’s to consult a psychic.

Whatever’s connecting this disparate series of strange events appears to be something dark and evil. But on the other hand, what lies behind it is maternal grief and the desire to reclaim something that has been lost. As part of their investigation, the pair come across a strange cult that promises its devotees that their loved ones will return if they worship their god. The local folktale, meanwhile, is about a heartbroken son who is devastated by the loss of his mother. A wizard who descends from heaven tells him that he cannot bring his mother back and should try to find a wife to ease his loneliness, which could he do by offering her a persimmon only no one is interested and he dies of loneliness. 

This might be the cause of the mysterious mantra “thank you for finding me” that is heard on several tapes, as if this presence, whatever it is, is happy to have been recognised though it otherwise spells doom for those coming into contact with it. It has, however, seemingly weaved its way into the fabric of society, pushing its way into the digital realm as a background presence in every creepy video that haunts the internet. “You could have warned me,” Chihiro exclaims after seeing something unpleasant in a video Ozawa played for her, but really there is no warning any more and you have no control when videos autoplay on your feed. Even if you choose not to look, they come at you from ubiquitous screens and short of going to live alone in the mountains, they’ve become impossible to avoid. For some, however, these disparate clues act like stepping stones towards a particular destination they will stop at nothing to reach. Yet the scariest thing of all may be that at the end of the trail there are no answers, only more questions, and a deepening sense of mystery in that which cannot be explained.

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

Trailer (English subtitles)

Take Off (飞行家, Pengfei, 2025)

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A young man’s dreams of flight are stamped out by a harsh reality only to be rekindled by a looming crisis in Pengfei’s warmhearted drama, Take Off (飞行家, fēixíngyuán). Beginning in the late 1970s and ending with a coda set in the present day, on one level at least the film attempts to chart the course of an ordinary man’s life through the tumultuous years of China’s economic and societal transformation in the late 20th century.

Viewed as something of an eccentric, Li Mingqi (Jiang Qimin), like his father before him, is obsessed with testing parachutes and the idea of breaking the record for the world’s highest jump. During the Cultural Revolution, Mingqi’s father was criticised for conducting unauthorised experiments, refused re-education, and was killed during his final, failed test flight. Mingqi’s fatherlessness and problematic background might explain why he is still an ordinary factory worker despite his obvious talent for engineering and has to conduct his experiments independently and in secret. Nevertheless, when given an ultimatum by his future father-in-law, Mingqi agrees to give up the parachute flights in order to marry his steadfast fiancée Yufeng (Li Xueqin).

In someways, Mingqi’s philosophy might be seen as subversive. He says that flying higher gives you a different perspective that changes the way you think and that by changing your thinking, the world around you also changes. China is already changing around Mingqi who remains more firmly grounded but continues to experiment with jetpacks in secret. Mingqi’s desire for success through his inventions is contrasted with that if Yufeng’s brother Xuguang (Dong Baoshi) who is forever studying to get into university for a better life outside the factory system and their small-town environment. When he’s injured by one of Mingqi’s experiments;, he begins to hold him responsible for his own ruined dreams while Mingqi also gives up his hopes of powered flight and further grounds his expectations. 

But this decision to give up his dreams slowly starts to eat away at him even as the nation begins to move away from the planned economy towards a more capitalistic society. Mingqi and Yufeng open a dance hall as a “public-private” partnership in conjunction with the local factory and using donations from other factory workers who are supportive of their ambitions. Mingqi fills the place with various contraptions such as a novel system of delivering beer by machine, but after his jetpack is ridiculed by visiting foreign tech investors he begins to enter a depressive funk. A few years later the contraptions no longer work. Mingqi has taken to drink and gambling while the business founders as the factories begin to close and workers either leave the area in search of work, like Mingqi succumb to gambling, or simply have no money to spend on entertainment.

Xuguang too eventually returns from Beijing hiding the fact that he has failed in business amid the boom and bust economics of the day. He’s brought with him a “best friend” with whom he seems to have an unusually close, potentially queer coded connection, though Yufeng is right not to trust Dezeng (Dong Zijian) who turns out to be among the breed of amoral capitalists rising in conjunction with the economic reforms. Presumably having failed in someway himself if he’s bothering with this moribund factory town, Dezeng steals the dance hall out from under Mingqi’s feet by exploiting local workers’ desperation and then sells it to open a revolving restaurant at the top of a nearby tower designed for an economic elite which may not yet exist in this area.

The implication seems to be that increasing capitalism has poisoned Mingqi’s idealism, leaving him a broken shadow of a man who no longer has a reason to live now that he’s given up him dreams, but it’s better to live like this than be a man like Dezeng. A family crisis gives him the opportunity to rekindle his dreams by vowing to win a TV competition by jumping from Dezeng’s tower and landing at a spot a few kilometres away in return for a cash prize. Watched live on television, Mingqi’s attempt to fly becomes that of every other disenfranchised worker cast adrift by the 90s reforms as if giving them permission to stand tall and chase their dreams. It would not have been possible, however, without Yufeng’s support. She never wanted him to stop inventing things, just to be a bit more mindful of safety, and is happy to be reunited with the man she married. While the final message may seem contradictory, simultaneously encouraging the idea of dreaming big while emphasising solidarity, it is heartfelt and is clear in its advocation for the liberating power of dreams.  

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

Trailer (Simplified Chinese subtitles only)

Gamer Girls (電競女孩, Sophie Yang & Veronica Bassetto, 2025)

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Losers never win again, according to some in Sophie Yang & Veronica Bassetto’s e-sports dramedy Gamer Girls (電競女孩). Now in her mid-20s, Summer (Angela Yuen Lai-Lam) gave up her e-sports career after a defeat, disbanding her team, and going back to school to get a regular corporate job instead. But somehow she can’t quite settle into the conventional life her boyfriend and family want for her. Still seeing the world like a video game, she dreams of winning e-sports glory once again but faces several barriers from ingrained societal misogyny to ageism and workplace exploitation.

Indeed, it seems that part of the reason the team broke up was the unreasonable expectations of their manager, Ms. Chiu (Cheuk Wan-chi), who now works for the Hong Kong e-Sports Chamber of Commerce. Another reason seems to have been conflict between team captain Summer and fellow player Lilith (Alma Kwok) who became frustrated with what she saw as Summer’s unilateral decision making and inability to take her teammates’ thoughts and feelings into account. Raven (Sabrina Cheung), meanwhile, still resents Summer for abruptly selling out by abandoning them to take a more conventional path despite having promised to carry on playing games together forever.

To that extent, the film seems to be another in a recent line exploring young people’s sense of dissatisfaction with the working environments their parents have railroaded them towards all their lives. Given the economic pressures of the contemporary society in which things like buying a flat and starting a family are out of reach for most, many feel that it’s no longer worth the sacrifice of long hours spent in an office doing a job that probably doesn’t interest them for so little reward. Instead they favour less conventional lifestyles that offer more freedom even if it comes at the cost of economic stability. Summer feels embarrassed around her family having insisted that e-sports could be “a real job” only to end up working in an office anyway, but still isn’t really ready to commit fully to the conventionality being imposed on her not least by her handsome and kind boyfriend who nevertheless can’t understand any other way of living and thinks her decision to quit her job is an act of madness.

But at the same time, it’s clear that she’s fighting an uphill battle in the e-sports world where male players refuse to accept that girls could be real gamers, instead branding them “gamer whores” who are are only there as eye candy to trick men into buying things they don’t need. Ms. Chiu makes it clear that Summer blew her chance and she doesn’t want to work with her as a gamer because losers never win again, but would be willing to collaborate with her in business terms which aren’t so much different from her own job. Summer’s escape from the corporate life is in that way also being swallowed by it as big business seeks to control the world e-sports through things like licensing and sponsorships.

The fact that the Gamer Girls rebel by setting up their own local community tournament in Lilith’s family-run cha chaan teng could also be seen as their desire to defend traditional Hong Kong culture against oppressive external forces. Whatever else happens, the cha chaan teng will still be here, one says as they root themselves more firmly in a local community filled with people who just want to play and not have to deal with any of the corporate rubbish that stands in the way. There is a kind of naivety involved in Summer’s certainty that it’ll be alright despite being warned several times that they don’t have licences to use the games in this way and the only reason they haven’t been shut down yet is because the companies are turning a blind eye. When Ms. Chiu feels threatened and decides to act, the swift deletion of everyone’s accounts, along with years of gaming history, reminds them that their world could be taken away from them just like that.

But their response is one of mutual solidarity, committing to rebuilding and defending the community they have created in the cha chaan teng and competing on their own terms. Even Summer’s online friend Login (Chase Chan Chung Chak) who was “banned for life” after protesting exploitative employment practices in professional e-sports begins to realise that nothing actually prevents him from just playing the game aside from his own sense of disappointment. Which is to say, they took their world back, if only to an extent in that they are still at the mercy of those who own the games and their in-game successes are only ever fantasy projections of battles unwon in their offline lives. Nevertheless, have at least decided to play on their own terms valuing sportsmanship and community over corporate success.

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

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

My Sassy Girl (엽기적인 그녀, Kwak Jae-yong, 2001)

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A smash hit and social phenomenon on its original release, My Sassy Girl (엽기적인 그녀, Yeopgijeogin geunyeo) is one of a small number of films from the early 2000s that like Japan’s Densha Otoko drew inspiration from the new media of online blogging and message boards. In a meta touch, the film includes these origins within the action as the hero, Gyeon-woo (Cha Tae-hyun), begins writing about his relationship with a strange and intimidating young woman (Jun Ji-hyun) on the internet only to see his work optioned for major feature film.

In some ways, these meta themes play into the central ideas of fate and time travel while giving the love story a sense of epic, romantic heft. It could be said that in the character of the unnamed woman, the film undercuts contemporary notions of gender roles and traditional femininity, but at the same time even in subverting them perhaps leans into a societal sense of misogyny. Gyeon-woo paints himself as a feminised man, raised for a time as a girl which is why he is mild-mannered, submissive, and lacks ambition in life. All qualities he associates with traditional femininity. He is attracted to the girl, but also disgusted by her unfeminine behaviour and most particularly by her public drunkenness. Her chewing of her own vomit on the train is apparently inspired by a real-life event and the reason for designating her the “bizarre and freakish” woman of the title. 

Gyeon-woo also suffers physical violence at the hands of most of the women in film including his mother, further marking him out as weak and hard done by in comparison to these strong women while most of the men, such as his own father and that of the girl who is a habitual drinker, are ineffectual and go along with their wives for a quiet life. The girl continues to boss him around, ordering for him in cafes, making him wear her high heels while she takes his trainers when her feet hurt, and generally telling him what to do in the relationship. Gyeon-woo appears to have a slightly masochistic streak and despite describing his discomfort this rejection of traditional femininity, actually seems to like being bossed around and physically abused by the girl, even later seeking out similar women, though the film does also include a transphobic joke that is very of its time. 

Eventually, he begins to realise that the girl’s violence and demanding nature are awkward ways of expressing love while she works through issues of her own that exist to one side of him. There are reasons that all her screenplays are about a heroic woman travelling in time to save someone she loves while simultaneously convinced she is destined to meet someone from the future. Gyeon-woo, meanwhile, an engineering student, is more grounded and down to earth. He nurtures their love in another way, replanting a damaged tree solely so the girl won’t be sad if she returns to find that it has died. Fate deliberately keeps them apart as their paths repeatedly fail to cross with a series of near misses before a fateful encounter, implying that romantic timing is much about the readiness for love as anything else, or as someone puts it, building a bridge of chance. Only once the girl has begun to work through her feelings, and Gyeon-woo has accepted his filial responsibilities, can their love be fulfilled. 

This is perhaps most obvious in the episode in which they become involved in a military siege when a soldier takes them hostage in an amusement park after deserting because his girlfriend has left him for another man. While the soldier’s obsessive love turns dangerously destructive, the girl is able to talk him down by reminding him that if he really loved his former girlfriend he’d set her free and rejoice in her happiness. The film’s quirky atmosphere with its series of weird events in a strange way recall the world of Tomihiko Morimi with its cosmic coincidences and tiny ironies that are nevertheless underpinned by a genuine sense of poignancy and warmth, willing these two star-crossed lovers to finally find each other at the right time as past and future finally coalesce into a more perfect present. 

My Sassy Girl screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

I Blew Out the Candles Before Making a Wish (我未許願先吹蠟燭, Chao Koi Wang & Hu Chin-Yen, 2025)

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“Money can’t solve everything,” according to Jojo’s teacher, but life without it is certainly very difficult in Chao Koi-Wang and Hu Chin-Yen’s heartwarming drama I Blew Out the Candles Before Making a Wish. The film’s title perhaps bears out the sense of disappointment and futility among those trapped on the margins of contemporary Macanese society where life is one great crap shoot and the only way out of their straitened circumstances is to win big at one of the area’s famous casinos. 

But as recently released ex-offender Hua points out, there are wins and losses in gambling and more often than not they lost. Jojo is living with her elderly grandmother following her parents’ divorce and father’s disappearance after fleeing to avoid loan sharks who now pester them for their money. Jojo’s father told her he was scammed by his business partner, but her grandmother suggests it was down to a gambling problem. It’s ironic then that Jojo’s proposed solution is to use an insanely large number of “dead chips”, those that can’t be cashed in but can be used to place bets, to get rich quick and pay off her father’s debts so he can come and the family can live in a comfortable environment. The only snag is that, thankfully, they don’t yet let small children enter casinos.

While it’s clear that everyone seems to be feeling a sense of desperation, there are also those who help others such as the landlord that lets Jojo’s grandmother rent a makeshift rooftop apartment cheaply while even the evil loan shark turns out to have a compassionate side. Nevertheless, Jojo’s attempts to lean on adults for help largely fail, beginning with her hypocritical teacher who criticises gambling but agrees to help her then pockets the money for himself telling her he lost it all. He’s later seen looking in an estate agent’s window with his girlfriend, implying he wanted the money to buy a flat because, realistically speaking, there’s no way he could do that on a teacher’s salary and without the means to own property things like marriage and a domestic life also become more difficult. 

Hua, who came to Macau from Taiwan for love, also believes his economic situation caused the breakdown of his marriage and is desperate to win his wife back. Fearful she’d leave him, he committed a scam to buy a flat she moved out of when he went to jail. He’s now renting it out to a collection of migrant workers like himself to cover the mortgage while working as a debt collector. Yet he too is touched by Jojo’s plight and agrees to help her, though even he is tempted by the idea of scamming her out of her all money. Perhaps he sympathises with her because they are both in effect waiting for someone who likely won’t return, he his wife and she her father. As such, they form a kind of familial bond with Hua trying to take care of Jojo and her grandmother while keeping half an eye on the prospect of paying off his mortgage. 

On the other hand, it says something about societal indifference that Jojo goes on living on her own while her grandmother’s in hospital and their electricity has been cut off because she’s not around to pay the bill. They need someone to sign a consent form so her grandmother can have surgery, but there don’t appear to be any other responsible adults in Jojo’s life. An attempt to ask her mother, who has remarried and has a new family, proves more traumatic than anything else. No one except the loan sharks appears to check in her at all. She is resourceful and proactive, but also still a child and largely unable to understand the long-term implications of her plan or that gambling is a dangerous habit that, as Hua says, can ruin lives.

In that way the film is subtly critical of Macau’s economic dependence on the casino industry and the wealthy inequality that comes along with it. Jojo is only a little bit worried about the owner of the chips coming back for them, while Hua suggests they have belonged to someone so rich they probably just forgot about it. Gambling is something rich people do he says, and after all you can only really do it responsibly by playing with money you can afford to lose which neither of them have. Still, they keep rolling the dice anyway, hoping that their numbers will come up. Grandma may try to caution them, revealing a mistake she made in her own youth born of fear and desperation, that greed will always come back to bit you, but there is at least a sense of tempered optimism in their mantra of “lose today, win tomorrow,” that keeps hope alive when all else seems bleak.

I Blew Out the Candles Before Making a Wish screens as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (Tradition Chinese / English subtitles)

Deep Quiet Room (深度安靜, Shen Ko-shang, 2025)

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Reeling after his wife’s unexpected suicide, a bereft husband begins to discover the destructive effects of unresolved trauma amid the oppressive patriarchal social system of Taiwanese society in Shen Ko-shang’s hard-hitting drama, Deep Quiet Room (深度安靜, shēndù ānjìng). The “deep quiet room” of the title is both literal in referring to that at the back of the couple’s flat they had designated as a nursery where pregnant wife Yu-ting cocoons herself, and to the psychological space into which her husband cannot enter.

Told from Yu-Ming’s (Joseph Chang) perspective, the film centres on his sense of confusion and inability to understand the psychological changes that his wife underwent following her pregnancy which led to her taking her own life. Through repeated flashbacks, it becomes clear that Yu-Ting (Ariel Lin) was suffering from depression and uncertain whether she wanted to give birth to this child. Though everything may have seemed normal on the surface, we can see that there is something not quite right in the way that Yu-Ting interacts with her parents while cryptic allusions are made to two other sisters who are for some reason no longer part of the family while Yu-Ting’s mother is otherwise an entirely silent and passive presence.

This silence and passivity may stand in for that of Taiwanese women, or least those of her generation, who find themselves powerless against male authority figures such as husbands and fathers. When Yu-Ting expresses anxiety that their baby may be a girl, Yu-Ming assumes that his overbearing mother has said something to her reflecting a cultural bias that favours sons over daughters. Yu-Ming appears to not to share it while the doctors at the hospital also stress that the sex is irrelevant as long as the child is healthy. But when Yu-Ting’s father (Chin Shih-chieh) states that girls are better, there is something uniquely chilling in his words that further deepens Yu-Ting’s dread and sense of responsibility in bringing a little girl into this kind of world.

The father cannot be questioned and his home is filled with silence. This is the deep quiet room in which the film seems to suggest all Taiwanese women are to one degree or another trapped inside. Yu-Ming necessarily exists on the other side of it and is to some extent unaware of its existence. He is frustrated that his wife shuts him out and desperately wants to her to share with him what it is that makes her so unhappy and prevents her from embracing the kind of domestic happiness that he is seeking to create. When Yu-Ting unexpectedly snaps that she hates herself for being unable to abandon her father, Yu-Ming seems bemused and replies that it’s a daughter’s filial duty to care for him. His own decision, which seems odd to others, to continue caring for Yu-Ting’s father, who has dementia and therefore can no longer answer for whatever he may have done in the past, is another symptom of his desire to maintain this ideal of a traditional family. 

What he discovers therefore implodes Yu-Ming’s conception of the values that he assumed underpinned his society and his own role within them. His eventual decision to abandon Yu-Ting’s father is symbolic of an ultimate desire to reject and escape from this patriarchal superstructure of which he has also been a part. Yu-Ting’s two sisters chose other paths to escaping their trauma, the oldest spending most of her adult life in a psychiatric institution, and the younger fleeing abroad severing all ties with her family. She has married a man who is not Taiwanese and is living a happy family life overseas. Informed of her mother and sister’s deaths, she simply replies “R.I.P” and that it’s no longer any concern of hers. She has sealed her childhood off in its own deep quiet room and now refuses to open the door, suggesting that the only path to survival lies in exiting this system entirely and never looking back.

As such Shen paints a fairly bleak view of the contemporary society as mired in outdated patriarchal social codes while women like Yu-Ting are left with no recourse. She cannot share this part of herself even with those close to her, not even with her sisters who suffered the same way she did but have each withdrawn themselves into different kinds of isolation, and must therefore carry the burden alone. There is however a glimmer of light in the otherwise grim conclusion that suggests a desire at least to exorcise this trauma by abandoning the patriarchal order and building something new in its place.

Deep Quiet Room screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Last Night in Taipei (明日的過客, Kuo Cheng-chui, 2025)

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Three old friends who haven’t seen each other in years are forced to confront the reality of their lives after a chance encounter in Kuo Cheng-chui’s Last Night in Taipei (明日的過客, míngrì dì guòkè). Less an odyssey through the midnight city, the film is really more about finding accommodation with a sense of middle-aged regret and letting go of what might have been, though it does not necessarily seem that any of them are really happier after dealing with their unresolved feelings.

Blanche’s marriage has begun to turn cold owing to her husband’s deference to his mother who is upset that they have yet to conceive a child and continually dropping off Chinese medicine to help them along. After arguing with her husband Ben when a date night is abruptly cancelled she decides to stay in the city alone where she immediately runs into an ex, Jake, who is on a trip home from Paris where he as lived for the last few years. To begin with, it isn’t quite clear whether Blanche has actually met him at all or is just fantasising about what her life would be like if she’d stayed with him rather than ending up Ben whose chief advantage seems to be his wealth.

But Jake is similarly feeling lost in that he feels out of place in both Paris and Taipei and is perceived as a foreigner in both places. Meanwhile, he’s harbouring unresolved feelings about the end of his relationship with Blanche. While wandering though the city, the pair walk into a bar where their old friend Axin is currently working. His current girlfriend, Mao Mao, later joins them, but their relationship is not all it seems as Mao Mao essentially hired Axin to play the part of her boyfriend for 99 days to make an ex jealous and is now having difficulty dealing with the end of the arrangement.

The trio met when they were all aspiring actors, and they have to one extent or another each failed to fulfil their dreams. Only Axin is seriously persevering with performing, but he to is coming to the conclusion that he has failed as an actor and it’s time for him to leave Taipei. Blanche, too, regrets not having had the opportunity to play a proper role and is feeling unsatisfied with her married life. She wonders if this is all there really is and her entire life is already decided. Perhaps she only stays with Ben because it’s become convenient while the risks of leaving outweigh the benefits. Jake too always felt as if Taiwan was a liminal space, not somewhere he’d stay indefinitely, so he never put down roots. He reflects how much the city has changed, almost if it did so deliberately to give them memories as these spaces seem to retreat from them back into the past. 

The frequent references to missiles and intrusions into their airspace echo this sense of restless anxiety that this current existence might soon disappear or be taken from them. The sense of impending doom forces the three friends to reassess their bonds and missed connections providing an opportunity for at least partial emotional honesty even if these unresolved feelings are not fully addressed. Mao Mao too must reevaluate what she was looking for in her relationship with Axin in which he too was perhaps merely putting off the act of confronting himself and his life.

Though they may each discover a way of moving forward, no one seems all that happy about it. Blanche considers leaving her marriage, but ultimately stays perhaps because she lacks the courage to actually do it and resigns herself to an unfulfilling future. Jake still feels adrift and blames himself for the failure of his relationship with Blanche, realising that he let her down out of fear and immaturity. Axin too decides to move on, but is left with a sense of regret, while Mao Mao too can only resolve to start over again from day one. In some ways the friendship between them might have been repaired with the air cleared, but on the other hand as Axin says real friends don’t necessarily need to be in contact all the time and each seems to be left a little lonelier even than before in having closed a door to the past with seemingly none to open to the future.

Last Night in Taipei screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (dialogue free)

Funky Freaky Freaks (충충충, Han Chang-lok, 2025)

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The gentle balance between three outsiders is disrupted by an elite transfer student in Han Chang-lok’s stylish drama Funky Freaky Freaks (충충충, Chungchungchung). Divided into three chapters, Impulse, Collision, and Shock, the film is, in many ways, a slow motion car crash or a path towards an inevitably destructive conclusion as the hero finds himself cast further out and abandoned by those close to him while his dream of becoming a superhero and saving the world by saving the woman he loves drifts further and further away.

Yong-ki (Joo Min-hyeong) doesn’t have many friends at school and is a fairly non-descript presence. He spends most of his time with two friends who, like him, are cast out of the mainstream and battling a sense of powerlessness. Ji-sook (Baek Ji-hye) is a survivor of domestic violence and has developed body dysmorphia that has left her with an eating disorder. She sells used underwear to men with fetishes in order to buy weight-loss drugs and seems to be considered the weird girl at school. Dumbo (Shin Jun-hang), meanwhile, is bullied for two different reasons. The first being that he is simply chubby. The second is however that he is gay and effeminate. He puts on a woman’s voice and chats to men on the internet, often conning them into buying him dinner before, perhaps unwisely, reverting to a more masculine voice to humiliate the person he’s been calling. 

Everything changes for each of them when a new transfer student arrives at the school. Woo-ju (Jeong Soo-hyun) is said to be from a wealthy and prominent family and a candidate for the national Olympic judo team. Of course, it’s a little odd for someone like him to transfer to Yong-ki’s school which is in a fairly rundown backwater and not exactly offering top facilities or teaching staff. Most people don’t think this far, but it’s obvious that Woo-ju has most likely been sent there there because it’s out of the way. His elite father is sick of his antics and is keen to limit the damage. Nevertheless, with his handsome looks and cool demeanour along with a touch of urban sophistication Woo-ju is an instant hit at school all of which inflames Yong-ki’s resentment especially when he seems to become friendly with Ji-sook.

Yong-ki sees Woo-ju as an embodiment of everything he’d like to be but isn’t, and is therefore desperate to knock him off his pedestal. Part of his resentment stems from the fact that Woo-ju has large numbers of online followers which seems to be how the kids measure success and social hierarchy. Yet through his investigations he discovers that Woo-ju may simply have paid for them, while there are rumours that he’s a bit of a playboy with a history of callous behaviour towards sexual partners. Others suggest that he was once a wimp and the shortest guy in class until his wealthy family got him growth hormones. His father clears up his messes by forcing people to sign NDAs, but Woo-ju may be a kind of victim too in that his father can’t accept failure and beats him every time he fails to win a judo match.

This fuels Yong-ki’s belief that they are basically the same in that Woo-ju is a loser too and the only difference between them is money, though rather than provoking empathy it seems to deepen his resentment. He becomes determined to avenge Ji-sook who has been seduced and abandoned by Woo-ju, becoming a figure of fun at school, as a means of convincing her to choose him, though she does not appear to have realised that Yong-ki has feelings for her. Abandoned by his mother who has not returned home in two months and has secretly been living somewhere else with a new man, Yong-ki’s sense of loneliness and desperation begins to push him towards an eventual explosion. Woo-ju too may have been fighting back against a sense of powerlessness, but his existence only bears out the ways in which Yong-ki continues to suffer because of social inequality. Han mixes media using CCTV footage, poetic black and white sequences, video cam, and VHS-style imagery to reflect Yong-ki’s childhood dreams while lending a note of ironic absurdity to the bleakness of his life in which the only possible reaction to his despair is violence.

Funky Freaky Freaks screens as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Kiss Me My Ghost Friend (啵me之我的青春住了鬼, Chen Ta-pu, 2026)

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A young director finds himself unwittingingly bonding with a ghost after agreeing to stage a performance in a disused theatre in Chen Ta Pu’s romantic dramedy, Kiss Me, My Ghost Friend (啵me之我的青春住了鬼, bō me zhī wǒ de qīngchūn zhù le). The theatre in question turns out to be haunted, not just by its past and legacy but by young woman betrayed in love whose story dovetails neatly with the tale he has been asked to tell.

To that extent, Jim is also haunted though only by the spectre of his father, a once prominent playwright who has become a recluse. His Bo-Chuan was to be a new and revolutionary kind of theatre updating traditional opera for a new age. It was, however, never staged and following the death of his grandfather, Jim’s mother wants to have the ASI theatre torn down. Jim is less than keen on accepting the job, in part because he is embarrassed by his privilege and prefers to keep the fact that he has a financial safety net in coming from a wealthy and prominent family secret, and because he does not really want to reckon with his family legacy.

The irony is that Jim’s previous show was an interactive ghost experience set in a disused building. Unfortunately, it failed to find an audience and the last performance had to be cancelled. After a year with no success, Jim’s theatre troupe is forced to disband and he’s dumped by his girlfriend, formerly the troupe’s lead actress. He wanted to explore the meaning of life through a ghost story, but laments that the audience just wanted entertainment. He has no idea that Shi is a ghost and originally believes her to be the assistant managing the theatre, but it’s true enough that she has a connection to the story of Bo-Chuan, not just in her involvement with the original production but the ways in which it mirrors her own life as a woman left in limbo, haunted by the spectre of lost love.

Bo-Chuan too waited 18 years for the man she loved to return, though while alive Shi had her doubts about the story. She thought this tale of love and sacrifice was too old-fashioned and bound to destructive patriarchal mores. If it were her, she says, she’d spend the 18 years looking for value in her life rather than waiting around for man. She and Jim’s father decide to change the end of the play, but still, Shi became a lonely ghost trapped in the theatre that itself became a relic of the past. Though she can no longer play a leading role, helping Jim stage another Bo-chuan with an ending of his own allows her to restore the theatre to what it once was, purifying it of its evil spirits and overcoming her romantic trauma.

Jim too gets a second chance at his artistic career having previously decided to give up the theatre after his repeated failures. Though a potential romance with Shi never gains traction, she does however lead him towards artistic fulfilment in the acceptance of his legacy as his father’s son as they finish the play together. The other members of Jim’s troupe too all come to accept Shi even after realising that she is a ghost. They too had all be financially inconvenienced by Jim’s failure, though unlike his girlfriend his troupe chose to stand by him and return for this gig in an apparently haunted theatre which nevertheless offers huge financial rewards. Unlike Bo-chuan, Ying Ying wouldn’t wait, but her place is quickly taken by Shi who patiently teaches Jim’s actors how to work with this more classical material. Though Jim’s mother may want to tear the theatre down because it reminds her of a past she’d rather forget and symbolises her guilt, in the end it becomes a place of healing that allows all to move on from the past while giving Jim’s theatre troupe a new place to belong along with a brighter artistic future rooted firmly in the past.

Kiss Me My Ghost Friend screens as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Street Kingdom (ストリート・キングダム 自分の音を鳴らせ, Tomorowo Taguchi, 2026)

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Tomorowo Taguchi is probably best known to international audiences for his starring role in Tetsuo the Iron Man, but he started his career as an illustrator and theatre actor while also active in Japan’s underground punk music scene as a member of the band Bachikaburi. For the last few decades, he’s been a fairly ubiquitous presence in mainstream Japanese films as a jobbing actor turning up in small supporting roles in all sorts of unexpected places, but Street Kingdom (ストリート・キングダム 自分の音を鳴らせ, Street Kingdom: Jibun no Oto wo Narase) is a look back to the early years of the punk movement and the creation of Telegraph Records.

Scripted by Kankuro Kudo, most of the names in the film have been slightly altered to reflect the fictionalisation of the narrative and so we follow Yuichi Hibiki (based on Yuichi Jibiki and played by Kazunobu Mineta), a struggling photographer who feels lost in an increasingly consumerist Japan. Like many of his generation, he spent his formative years in the student movement and is looking for a way to fill that void following the movement’s collapse in the wake of the Asama-sanso Incident. Japan’s economy had improved quite markedly by then and many former student protesters simply moved on into more mainstream lives as regular salaryman men and women, much as Yuichi’s friend has done by joining a record label and becoming obsessed with Pink Lady, the epitome of the disposable contemporary pop music topping the charts and making them money. Inspired by Yuichi, the friend later also jacks in his corporate career and becomes a punk rocker because he too discovers he wants more than the emptiness of a salaryman existence.

After a trip back to his family pig farm, Yuichi’s epiphany comes after hearing the Sex Pistols on the radio, though he is dismayed to find out that they have already broken up. Nevertheless, he determines to go Tokyo and find the real Japanese punk as opposed to that imported from New York or London. It’s inside this world that finds freedom outside of the Japanese mainstream as an independent artist, vowing to create a Street Kingdom with Momo (Ryuya Wakaba), the lead singer of influential band Tokage, and zine publisher Sachi (Riho Yoshioka). An out-of-touch journalist at one point tries to offer them expensive champagne and shames the band members for still living at home with their parents, and there is something a little bit incongruous about Momo’s lovely mother asking him what he wants for his tea before he goes off to play one of his anarchic gigs. But in another way, this is exactly the essence of punk in the sense of domesticity, friendships and solidarity that existed between the members of this community.

It all only begins to go wrong when the music labels start getting involved and commercial decisions conflict with artistic ones. Yuichi becomes a de facto manger because he’s a “decent” sort, which is to say he’s a bit of a square existing to one side of the movement which is a designation he resents at times, but also allows him a more privileged position of guiding it. He’s the one who advises they quit on a high after their “Tokyo Rockers” multi-band tour threatens to get too big and provoke rivalries and discord in what had been a fairly non-competitive, collegiate scene. He also helps Momo overcome some of his artistic conflicts by starting a parallel indie label so they can release songs the label rejects, such a nonsense tune about fish and pollution that the suits deem “too political”. What he can’t fully help with, however, is Momo’s descent into depression and drug abuse when the label pushes the band into debt, refuses to help financially after their band members are involved in a crash while on tour, and finally suggests they were only really interested in Momo as a potential solo artist doing more mainstream pop. Nevertheless, it’s Yuich’s friendly intervention encouraging Momo to get his act together that finally convinces him that something has to change.

To that extent, the film may be a fairly sanitised and nostalgic exploration of the director’s youth, but it’s also an advocation for dancing to one’s own tune which, it argues, has not necessarily become any easier in an age when anyone has access to the tools to become an artist. The punk spirit lives on in those who are prepared to be fully themselves in a culture that can be oppressively conformist and as the film would have it, the greatest legacy of the punk rock era was the sense of community between young people who wanted to build their own utopia which is something that in itself will never die.

Street Kingdom screens as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)