Category: Festivals

Edhi Alice (에디 앨리스: 리버스, Kim Il-ran, 2024)

Posted on by

“I’m Alice, who is living in the present,” one of the two protagonists of Kim Il-ran’s documentary Edhi Alice tells the camera when asked to introduce herself. A transwoman in her 40s, Alice got her name from film director Lee Joon-ik while working on Dong-ju: The Portrait of a Poet, a film inspired by the life of a poet who died as a political prisoner yearning for freedom and authenticity in a Japanese jail during the colonial era. 

Freedom and authenticity are both things that Alice has found in her transition and is continuing to seek. As a child, she had a consciousness of herself as female until her sister remarked in a phone call that she was becoming a man after noticing that her voice was breaking. Surrounded by an intensely patriarchal society, Alice convinced herself to conform to common notions of masculinity, even getting married in an attempt to live as a man and prove herself as one by having a child. Only after the marriage ended did she begin to embrace her authentic self by undergoing surgery which, she points out, is somewhat unusual in that she chose to remove her genitals right away because she couldn’t bear to live with the reminder of her masculinity. However, she has avoided other kinds of medical interventions such as plastic surgery stating that she doesn’t see the point now that she is already in her 40s and has no plans to date. 

She does, however, live in a more liminal space in which her transness is not immediately apparent while working in a stereotypically masculine industry as a lighting director for film and TV in which, as she points out, her height and strength are definite advantages. Though she says she has not experienced much prejudice and discrimination while working on films, she reveals that she was dismissed from a TV project because the producers were “ultra-conservative” and did not want to work with her. Meanwhile, there’s a genuine poignancy in the crew’s visit to a public bath as Alice reflects that she probably won’t ever have the opportunity to visit one again, suggesting that she most likely won’t be admitted to the women’s bath given her gender presentation and fears may make people uncomfortable if she were. 

Edhi doesn’t have the same trouble, but has not yet completed her transition having visited a fortune teller and been advised to wait until a more auspicious time. Working as a councillor for LGBTQ+ youth, she assumed she must have been gay because she liked men but only later came to realise after joining an LGBTQ+ choir that the gay men around her did not experience the same kind of discomfort in their bodies and that she must be trans. But like Alice, she originally tried to conform to what it means to be a man in Korean society. When she tried to explain her identity to her mother, she had dismissed it by saying that it was only because she didn’t want to serve in the military. Trans people are not welcomed in the armed forces and Edhi reflects on the death of Byun Hui-su who fought for her right to serve by beginning her transition while on leave from military service. Her desire to continue being a member of the armed forces was denied and she was dismissed. She later took her own life.

While affected by the deaths of so many people around her who could not find a way to survive amid the intensely conformist pressures of Korean society, Edhi does her best to live her life while taking care of her parents and nephews. Though her father might use male pronouns and continue to refer to her as his son and her mother, though supportive, worries that she might regret her choices later, Edhi was surprised by the ease with which her nephews simply accepted her explanation of her transness and agreed that “Edhi is just Edhi,” agreeing to call her by her name rather than uncle or aunt. She fears being forgotten and regrets having thrown away photos of her other life but continues to pursue her dream of living in a house with her mother and opening a cafe. While never shying away from the physical pain involved in transitioning, the film reinforces the sense of liberation it can bring if tempered by the realities of life in contemporary Korea.

Edhi Alice screens at the ICA 18th May as part of this year’s Queer East.

Bel Ami (漂亮朋友, Geng Jun, 2024)

Posted on by

In the opening scenes of Geng Jun’s Bel Ami, a middle-aged man poses for a series of nude photos. The pictures and the poses echo a long history of queer iconography, but at first the man stands with his back to us. We can’t see his face, and he is hiding from us who he really is even as his nakedness suggests a desire for authenticity and a demand that we recognise his identity. “It’s repressive,” another man sighs, complaining that like everyone else he is forced to keep a part of himself hidden and is painfully lonely because of it. 

Like Geng’s other films set in Heilongjiang, Mainland China, the film’s queer themes would not play well with the censor’s board who are notoriously squeamish of any reference to the LGBTQ+ community and has found success only by screening in Taiwan where it won several categories at the Golden Horse Awards. There is a minor irony in play as a certain character makes clear in his rendition of the Internationale that the queer community in China has long referred to each other as “tongzhi” or “comrade” but do so to express solidarity against the oppressive authoritarian government which isolates and others them, preventing them from living authentically as full and free members of society. 

When Zhiyong spots a man he assumes to be gay in a cafe, he addresses him as “tongzhi”, but the man first denies his identity and responds to Zhiyong’s question about why he’s dressed in what he sees as a stereotypically gay manner if he’s not actually gay by saying that his son is really into rock music so he’s trying to look “cool”. He later confirms that he is actually gay and is annoyed his outfit is giving him away while similarly worried that Zhiyong will expose him. By contrast, a pair of lesbians sit in the next booth over and are overt and open in their relationship. They remark that the men behind them appear to be hiding something, while one insists that men have no morals or integrity. 

Xuanyu is, however, the most authoritarian of all as she keeps gay barber Quan, the prospective father of their child, under total surveillance. She insists on micromanaging his life, stalking him and installing a camera hidden in a clock in his barber shop. Her partner tells her love is freedom and asks if that’s what they give each other when they receive little of it from elsewhere, though it’s a question with no answer. Xuanyu is happy with the way that things are. She’d rather adopt than involve a man in their desire for a child and suggests just eloping while her partner says her parents would never accept it. Shooting in a crisp black and white that adds to the film’s breezy, deadpan humour, Geng switches to colour only once as Jing poses in a wedding dress only to be joined by a reluctant Quan suggesting a possible marriage of convenience that will satisfy both of their families and their filial obligations in the birth of their child. Quan leaves the frame as soon as possible, taking his flowers with him, for Xuanyu to enter now dressed in a black suit and occupying the space the groom.

Quan had been the lover of the man in the nude photos, Gang, but abruptly broke up with him. A baker who likes to strike back against an unforgiving society by hiding stands of his hair in his bread, Gang is also isolated and lonely, fearing he won’t be able to find another partner. He ends up meeting Zhiyong at an exclusive and very weird gay membership club run by “K” for King who gives Zhiyong the “codename” “Apollo” and immediately embarks on a sadomasochistic game pressuring Zhiyong for sexual favours as a means of joining the community expressing the way in which the oppressed oppress each other. While semi-stalked by an incredibly lonely and socially awkward restaurant owner, Zhiyong first runs from his queer identity but eventually finds a kind of hope and freedom in his relationship with Gang. They are each searching for connection and the freedom to love and be loved which is also in its way a means of resistance against entrenched authoritarianism. Don’t lose hope, they encourage each other while basking in the isolated patch of sunshine of the freedom they have found. 

Bel Ami screened as part of this year’s Queer East.

My Sunshine (ぼくのお日さま, Hiroshi Okuyama, 2024)

Posted on by

A golden light seems to pour into the life of Takuya (Keitatsu Koshiyama), a nervous young man with a stammer, as he stands transfixed by the elegant movements of a figure skater. As the world around him literally brightens, he begins to discover another side of himself, though it’s never quite clear if it’s Sakura (Kiara Takanashi), a moody teenage girl whose attitude to figure skating seems ambivalent at best, with whom he’s fallen in love or the simple act of figure skating itself. 

Drawing on autobiographical experience, Okuyama studied figure skating himself while his older sister trained to be a champion, My Sunshine (ぼくのお日さま, Boku no Ohisama) otherwise roots itself in the small-town Japan of the late ‘90s and 2000s in which being different was not exactly welcomed. But in fact, most people seem accepting of Takuya, if in a sometimes patronising way, viewing him as a boy with his head in the clouds and cutting him off when he attempts to speak rather than give him the time to finish. When the teacher is going around the class asking the children to read out a stanza of a poem each, he picks on Takuya and tells him to take his time, though the boy’s anxiety is palpable. The teacher may be caught between two options and struggling to decide which is better, not asking him to read at all to spare him from his classmates’ mocking which would also be to exclude him and reinforce a sense of inferiority in his otherness, or to ask him deliberately and try to encourage patience to teach him and the other children that there’s nothing wrong with the way he speaks. 

But in any case, Takuya is already something of an outsider in that he has no aptitude for sports and it’s never clear if he actually enjoys them or just participates because it’s what you do in this town to be man. When a recent arrival to the town and former international pro-figure skater Hiroshi (Sosuke Ikematsu) catches sight of him clumsily trying to teach himself how to dance like Sakura, it enlivens something in him that reminds him of the passion he once felt for skating. He finds himself wanting to help the boy, gifting him his old figure skating skates and teaching him for free before hitting on the idea of training him alongside Sakura as a pair.

Sakura isn’t all that keen to begin with, though at times, it seems as though she may not even like figure skating and is only doing it because her mother makes her. She tells Hiroshi that she isn’t aiming to become the best ice dancer and is a little resentful of being forced to go back to basics to meet Takuya’s skill level but goes along with it because the coach says so. What she thinks of Takuya isn’t exactly clear, though she seems to look down on him a little like the other kids who also mock him giving up ice hockey to do a “girl’s” sport. For her part she seems to have a crush on the handsome and mysterious Hiroshi that, like Takuya, she is unable to articulate. For this reason, along with an insecurity in her talent, she resents the special attention Takuya seems to be getting when it’s her mother who’s paying for the lessons and comes to the conclusion that he’s just more interested in him than her.

She may not altogether be incorrect. In his early coaching sessions with Sakura, Hiroshi doesn’t seem all that invested and is distracted by Takuya in the same way Takuya is distracted by the sunlight or the snow. In trying to help Takuya, he’s trying to help himself and for a time succeeds as the three of them generate a joyful familial relationship, culminating in a day skating on a frozen lake. But he too is unable to be honest about the fact that he came to this rural town to be with his partner who decided to take over the family business when his father passed away. Kai (Ryuya Wakaba) laughs off questions about whether he’s married yet, and the two men seem to live together quietly otherwise isolated from the community around them. When Sakura catches sight of them together, she realises something she may not really be equipped to fully understand, only further deepening her sense of resentment in an unreasonable feeling of betrayal. It isn’t really homophobia that motivates her as much jealousy when she suddenly brands Hiroshi as “‘disgusting” and accuses him of getting a kick out of making a boy do a girl’s sport, excusing her conviction that he prefers Takuya over her and potentially giving herself an out to quit skating (though it seems her mother’s not taking the hint).

But like Sakura, Hiroshi is also uncertain if this is the right place for him or if he and his partner can really live together in this small town permanently. Though he answers “of course” when Kai asks if he’s glad he came, Hiroshi pointedly gives no answer when he’s asked if he really wants to be here. Kai says that he hasn’t talked about skating like this for ages nor seemed so happy, suggesting that there may have been something missing in his life that the relationship didn’t compensate for and may not survive without. How his professional career ended is never explained, though his telling Sakura that he only got to compete internationally because of the lack of male dancers speaks to a degree of insecurity that contributes to a lack of ambition in his personal and professional lives. All three of them are, for varying reasons, unable to say what they really want or how they really feel. Though they find temporary solace in their fragile bond, it is only, as Takuya’s brother cruelly puts it, meant to last until the snow melts. Nevertheless, now dressed in a new school uniform clearly far too big for him that suggests he has some more growing to do, Takuya may have found a means of self-expression in dance that might give him the courage to speak his mind.

My Sunshine screened as part of this year’s Queer East.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Silent Sparks (愛作歹, Chu Ping, 2024)

Posted on by

Recently released from prison, a young man discovers that it might be easier to be free behind bars than amid the incredibly homosocial world of urban gangsterdom in Chu Ping’s poignant LGBTQ+ drama, Silent Sparks (愛作歹, ài zuò dǎi). Pua (Akira Huang Guang-Zhi) is a kind of silent spark himself. As the gang boss describes him, he’s too rowdy and can’t keep his cool, which makes him a liability, but he’s also reticent and lonely, not to mention hurt by the seeming rejection when the man he fell in love with in prison ignores him on his release.

There is indeed a latent violence in Pua that hints at his frustration and inability to express himself. When we see him enter prison, he appears as a small boy lost in his own thoughts and silently crying, though he was sent there for breaking a man’s leg in a fight. Though he’s served his time, Pua is still paying off the monetary compensation he owes to the man whose leg he broke and otherwise struggles to get by, which leaves him almost dependent on the gang boss who agrees to take him under his wing as a favour to his mother. It seems that he once knew Pua’s long-absent father, presumably also a gangster, and plays a quasi-paternal role but only half-heartedly in seeing Pua more as a resource to be employed or otherwise an irritating burden he can’t quite seem to shake.

It was the gang boss who asked Mi-ji (Shih Ming-Shuai), his right-hand man, to “look after” Pua in prison. The boss sneers a little, and claims responsibility for saving him, adding that things could have ended up “real nasty” for him inside, by which he means “getting it up your ass”. The irony is that Mi-ji was Pua’s prison lover and Pua is excited about the idea of his release fully expecting to pick up where they left off. But the reunion between them is awkward. Mi-ji is not happy to see him. He speaks tersely and makes it clear he’s not exactly keen for a catch up while keeping one eye on the room in case anyone is getting the right idea. Though Pua continues to pursue him, Mi-ji is avoidant. Perhaps for him, it really was a prison thing that he’s embarrassed about on the outside, whereas Pua is more secure in his sexuality and less afraid of its exposure, only longing to resume the intimacy they once shared.

Mi-ji’s ambivalence hints at the toxic masculinity and entrenched homophobia of the world around them in which homosexuality is not really accepted and “getting it up your ass” is synonymous with defeat and humiliation. The irony is that Pua and Mi-ji were freer in prison where they could embrace their love without shame. Pua is imprisoned within the outside side world by virtue of being unable to be his authentic self, but is also trapped by his socio-economic prospects, which leave him dependent on the underworld and the dubious paternity of the gang boss. Expressing his frustration through violence damns him further in leaving him with mounting debts he can only hope to satisfy through acts of criminality. It is really on this side of the bars that the “real” prison lies, and it’s from this world that Pua longs to be released to return to the prison utopia of his love with Mi-ji.

Still, he cannot really escape his destiny, as his mother keeps reminding having read his tragic gangster fortune and trying to get him to eat rice noodles for 100 days to change his fate only to get her heart broken realising salvation for her son might mean something quite different than she had imagined and also take him away from her. Gritty in its gangland setting and hinting at the connections between political corruption and organised crime Chu’s slow-burn drama makes a hell of the contemporary society in which men like Pua find themselves trapped by toxic masculinities and hierarchal violence under an intensely patriarchal social order that permits them little sense of possibility or the ability to be their authentic selves and true freedom is to be found only within the homosocial world of a more literal “prison”.

Silent Sparks screens at Rio Cinema 5th May as part of this year’s Queer East.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Come Dance With Me (来来, Liu Yunyi & Wei Bozhi, 2019)

Posted on by

“You need to fight for your place in society,” according to Jiaojiao, one of several regulars at the Lai Lai Ballroom interviewed as part of Liu Yunyi & Wei Bozhi’s documentary, Come Dance With Me (来来, lái lái). As several of them mention, the ballroom had been a refuge for the LGBTQ+ community, though times have now changed. These days, younger people prefer clubs and bars, while many of those who used to come are now elderly and don’t get out as much meaning that the ballrooms are mainly meeting places for the now middle-aged men who first frequented them 20 years earlier.

That they exist at all and this documentary could be made might be surprising given prevalent anti-LGBTQ+ attitudes from the censors’ board and wider community. It’s true enough that Lai Lai became a community hub and its partial closure for the 2016 G20 conference leaves them with no place to go. The various people that Liu & Wei interview come from various walks of life as they demonstrate in the opening sequence in which an old man visits a temple, a younger one visits a park, and Lai Lai’s manager Min walks through the neighbourhood and gets something to eat at a small cafe. 

The old man from the temple best expresses the inherent contradictions both of his religion and the wider society in which he relates that Buddhist monks are supposed to overcome their desires. Young monks are forbidden from taking wives and also from touching women, but technically speaking, the same prohibitions do not exist between men and homosexual acts are not unusual in the temple. Conversely, the young man who went to the park reveals that he has been living with HIV for the last seven years and that he lost his job because of it. In despair, he tried to take his own life only for his godmother to explain to him that people with high blood pressure also need to take medication for the rest of their life so it’s no different from that.

Still, he’s convinced himself of the impossibility of having a relationship sure that no one would stay with him after finding out. He says that he once told a close friend that he had AIDS and the friend quickly distanced himself from him and effectively disappeared from his life. The film later follows him on another day out with a young man, Li Yapeng, but an ill-fated decision to take a five-hour bus trip to go see him backfires when Yapeng not only fails to come and meet him but seems less than enthusiastic about his impromptu visit before abruptly breaking up with him. Another older man relates that he once had a lover who was diagnosed with HIV but told that he could not receive treatment in Shanghai and should return to his hometown. A Shanghai native, the older man resolved that, as he was already old and it would take several years for symptoms to emerge at which point he may be dead anyway, he would deliberately contract HIV and get medicine to give to him. What he didn’t realise is that the treatment isn’t the same for anyone and the medication he was prescribed was no good for his boyfriend, who then went back to his hometown and got treated there. Unfortunately, the treatment didn’t agree with him and he elected to stop taking it, passing away not long after.

Jiaojiao, meanwhile, has been with their partner Fei Er for 26 years, though Fei Er is now having health issues. Fei Er describes their relationship as rock solid and the same as that of any heterosexual couple in that now they’ve been together so long, 26 years is effectively forever and neither of them is ever going to abandon the other no matter what may come. Nevertheless, Jiaojiao also describes an additional layer of stigmatisation in that they have breasts, a fact which it seems they still hide from extended relatives having made the original decision to get them without telling anyone first. Done in a private clinic, the procedure also left them with ongoing medical issues caused by the failure to drain the wound properly. In a later conversation, they suggest that the primary motivation for getting breast surgery was financial. They now work as a dominatrix, but do not like doing it describing some of the men as “disgusting”. Their marginalised status prevents them from gaining more mainstream employment in a still conservative society. They have all found a place for themselves at Lai Lai, but as the press notes reveal, it abruptly closed its doors in 2018 with no one sure when or if it will reopen. Nevertheless, its legacy lives on as a space of warmth and acceptance that gave each of them a place to belong and be joyful no matter the difficulties of the world outside.

Come Dance With Me screens at Centre 151 3rd May as part of this year’s Queer East.

1 Girl Infinite (Lilly Hu, 2025)

Posted on by

There’s a moment in Lilly Hu’s gritty Changsha-set drama 1 Girl Infinite in which the heroine, Yinjia (Chen Xuanyu), watches as a fishmonger bashes a fish to death. He repeatedly smacks its head into the ground and, in a moment of foreshadowing, hits it with his meat cleaver while the fish flails around helplessly, gasping for air and twitching its tail. Yinjia winces and half looks away, but also sees something of herself in the way this poor creature is tossed around and eventually gutted in much the same way that she feels herself to be battered by her society.

Indeed, the film opens with her reading her suicide note in which she states that however she may die it has nothing to do with Xia Yutong (Lilly Hu), though in actuality it has everything to do with her. Abandoned by both of her parents, 19-year-old Yinjia has adopted a quasi-maternal role over Tong Tong who lives in her apartment and shares her bed, though the relationship, from Tong Tong’s perspective at least, remains curiously ill-defined. In the early light of morning, Yinjia silently gazes at her sleeping figure, but Tong Tong often rejects her gestures of intimacy. She won’t let Yinjia hug her in the street because she’s “too heavy,” and there is a clinginess to Yinjia that spills over into possessiveness and control that might be off-putting, but equally it seems that Tong Tong pushes her away because she herself doesn’t know how to process this relationship or her feelings for Yinjia. 

Then again, perhaps it is really about not having anywhere else to go as she unconvincingly tells her friends when they complain she’s brought “that girl,” again. Tong Tong tells them that Yinjia is just some girl who won’t stop following her around and acts like she’s a drag, but is at other times clingy herself and in rare moments of freedom expressing a silent affection for Yinjia. Nevertheless, there is a marked contrast between the more straight-laced Yinja and Tong Tong’s punkish friends who seem to represent two opposing worlds. Yinja glares at them constantly, resenting their indiscriminate use of drugs and the dangerous situations it could get them into, but appears to want to rescue Tong Tong who might not actually want to be rescued.

When Tong Tong gets involved in another ill-defined and possibly transactional relationship with local drug dealer Chen Wen (Bo Yang), it further disrupts their dynamic and pushes Yinjia towards the edge as she falls into a self-destructive obsession while convinced that she will lose Tong Tong. Tong Tong is convinced that Chen Wen will take her to America, which it seems clear that he has no real intention to do, where people live in big houses and everyone has a job. In this way, he represents a more literal kind of escape from the problems of contemporary China in which she is trapped in a dissatisfying socio-economic position from which she sees no way out. After she loses her virginity to Chen Wan, the camera cuts to a Burberry bag containing a designer dress that echoes Tong Tong’s need for consumerist affirmation. 

Tong Tong clearly aspires to his life of wealth and comfort, but it’s equally true that Chen Wen’s financial stability is rooted in illegality and moral dubiousness in his indifference to the harm his line of business causes. When the girls visit his apartment, there’s another woman there that is being fed drugs and is eventually manhandled out when her reaction to them begins to annoy Chen Wen and his henchman. She may be a harbinger of what may become of Tong Tong if she gives in to this bargain and a further provocation for Yinjia who is determined to prevent her from doing so by any means necessary. It’s never quite clear whether either relationship is any more than transactional from Tong Tong’s point of view, or whether she’s really aware of the realities of her relationship with Chen Wen which he clearly doesn’t view with much seriousness, though she continues to refer to herself as his girlfriend and evidently really believed he meant it when he said he’d take her to America. 

Yinjia meanwhile glares at the world around her and strikes back self-destructively. She scores a partial victory in seeming to have impressed Chen Wen in the depths of her devotion and the lengths that she would go to to maintain control over Tong Tong, though it’s also somewhat hollow and ironic given that he almost certainly never meant to take her to America anyway nor keep her around very long. Left with no parental input or societal safety net, the two women are each adrift and left with only each other to rely on. Though locked in a somewhat toxic embrace, the relationship between them is the only hint of purity in their otherwise impure world of betrayal and exploitation.

1 Girl Infinite screens at Rio Cinema 3rd May as part of this year’s Queer East.

Between Goodbyes (Jota Mun, 2024)

Posted on by

There’s a small irony at the centre of Jota Mun’s documentary Between Goodbyes in that she often cuts back to  contemporary stock footage of television items covering the subject of adoptions in Korea. Pundits are full of panic about the rapidly expanding baby boom of the post-war era and concerned about a growing lack of resources to care for them. Fast-forward 50 years and the problem has reversed as the news items are full of panic about the ageing population and record low birth rate. Still, it’s clear that the nation has not yet fully reckoned with its history of international adoptions which employed dubious practices to separate parents from children and essentially sold babies abroad in a business model more akin to human trafficking. 

Mieke’s mother Okgyun is wracked with guilt about the decision she made to give her up, which was motivated mostly by her poverty, but also a series of social stigmas including that towards large families. With three children already, they simply couldn’t afford another and Okgyun had planned on an abortion though was talked out of it and advised to put the baby up for adoption on the promise that it would have a much better quality of life in America. Of course, the reality was not always so rosy and Okgyun and her husband have spent every moment of their lives since thinking about their missing daughter. Twenty years later, Mieke’s father became determined to find her and eventually discovered she had been sent to the Netherlands. 

For Mieke, the knowledge that her parents had wanted to find her was a source of comfort but also awkward and as she puts it “overwhelming”. Though to them she was their long-lost daughter, to her they were strangers and as she had been raised abroad, she could not even speak their language. Mieke had also experienced a series of other losses including that of her adoptive parents. An uncle and aunt had taken her in, but it didn’t work out leading to a further sense of rejection and abandonment. She describes finding a surrogate family in community but also hints at a constant sense of displacement, never quite feeling at home anywhere.

For these reasons, she found it difficult to relate to her birth parents when they first approached her and struggled to accept the intensity of their emotion. Later, her partner along with the film’s director, ask Mieke if she isn’t afraid of losing them too, as if she’s trying to stave off another abandonment by keeping them at arms’ length while also struggling to balance her own sense of identity caught between an interest in her Korean heritage and sense of belonging, and her Dutch upbringing and life in the Netherlands. There’s an also an additional sense of poignancy in that had Mieke been raised by her birth parents in Korea, she may not have been as free to live as her authentic self in a much more conservative social culture. A secondary reason that she’d avoided keeping in touch with her parents when they first contacted her was that she knew she would have to come out to them and was unsure as to how they’d react. 

Her birth family have, however, fully accepted her wife Marit, and though some of them may say they don’t quite understand, are fully supportive and just happy that she’s happy. On the other hand, it’s true enough that every reunion entails another goodbye with a concurrent sense of abandonment on each side. Another woman from a society supporting parents who gave their children up for adoption remarks that it’s only really with the reunion that the grieving process begins with the intense sense of loss for all missing years, the time and memories that have been stolen for each of them. Incomplete family portraits coloured by a sense of absence symbolise the longing for something that cannot be restored, while Mieke and her mother seem to be divided by an invisible wall. Still in overcoming the language barrier and learning to communicate in a much more direct way, the relationship begins to reforge itself. Perhaps as Okgyun says, there’s no such thing as complete happiness, but there is perhaps warmth and forgiveness and new beginnings that might not quite make up for lost time but do perhaps have the potential to become something else.

Between Goodbyes screens May 1 as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival Spring Showcase.

Trailer

Blue Sun Palace (藍色太陽宮, Constance Tsang, 2024)

Posted on by

“It’s funny how  quickly people you love become strangers,” a middle-aged man muses while talking about more than one thing at the same time. Those at the centre of Constance Tsang’s New York-set drama Blue Sun Palace (藍色太陽宮, lánsè tàiyang gōng) are all in a sense displaced and some of them by several levels while they try to accommodate themselves with the lives they’re living now along with their hopes and expectations for the future.

Didi (Xu Haipeng) and Amy (Wu Ke-xi) are old friends working in a massage parlour which has a large sign on the door stating that they do not provide sexual services. The two women huddle on a stairway, finding a private space of isolation that reduces the world to them alone. Didi and her sort of boyfriend Cheung (Lee Kang-sheng) do something similar as they dine in a restaurant and then retreat to a karaoke booth before Didi takes him back to the massage parlour where Amy absents herself to give them some room until awkwardly spotting Cheung leaving in the morning. It’s clear that the massage parlour is itself an isolated world where Mandarin is the only spoken language inhabited only by the female staff members who are all migrants from China. Didi appears to be the lynchpin of this community, keeping the parlour running and looking after the other women while they all seem to look to her for dependability and solidarity. 

Yet there’s a hovering tension between Didi and Amy who seems wary of Cheung, or perhaps merely jealous in an unspoken attachment to her friend, and also reminds her that they’re not supposed to have guests in their room. The exclusively male clients who are mainly though not exclusively non-Chinese men are also intruders in this space and as Didi tries to warn Amy pose a latent threat to them. A very tall man shortchanges them, but Didi stops Amy when she tries to chase after him. She tells her that it’s not worth it and she’ll just make the money up herself. It’s better to be safe, though it’s advice she doesn’t quite take to heart or perhaps lets her guard down at the wrong moment. The men treat them with thinly veiled contempt, perhaps believing they don’t really deserve to be paid in full or to be treated as fully human beings. A customer of Amy’s bullies her into giving him a happy ending and then refuses to pay, becoming violent when challenged but then apologising before running from the room. 

As an escape from the grimness of the Blue Sun massage parlour, Didi has a dream of moving to Baltimore to open a restaurant with Amy and be closer to her daughter who is currently being raised by her aunt. Cheung hadn’t known about the daughter when he idly fantasised about living in a little house by the sea with Didi and a big dog, though she knew about the wife and daughter who have now become strangers to Cheung. In any case, their fantasy was just that and so perhaps it didn’t really matter if neither of them was telling the whole truth. Baltimore seems to have taken on a mythical quality for each of them as a kind of longed for but unreachable paradise in which they might find happiness if only they could get there. 

But in the end, even these bonds are fragile and the community fractured by tragedy and economic realities. In Didi’s absence, Amy and Cheung develop a surrogate bond in their shared grief and loneliness but also remain at odds with each other, ultimately heading in opposing directions in which it seems as if Amy may be able to find new directions while Cheung is bound only for the blue sun of a shoreline in winter and a solitary cigarette. He says he doesn’t want to go back to Taiwan because he wouldn’t know who to be, though as Amy points out none of them know who they are here either. She at least may have found an answer, or if not, reaccommodated herself to a new reality but for others there’s only sadness and inertia along with the cold comfort of lost love and impossible dreams in a world of constant displacement.

Blue Sun Palace screens April 28 as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival Spring Showcase.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Sunshine (Antoinette Jadaone, 2024)

Posted on by

“Don’t drag me into this,” a boy says after hearing that his girlfriend is pregnant, having already questioned if the baby’s really his. Miggy signals his lack of responsibility by directly asking Sunshine what “her” plan is, making it plain that she’s on her own and he does not see himself playing an active role in a predicament he essentially sees as nothing to do with him. Aside from Miggy’s father Jaime, who happens to be a protestant pastor, men are largely absent from Antoinette Jadaone’s Sunshine and even when they appear rigid figures of patriarchal control. 

Sunshine implies that she’s only in this mess because Miggy pressured her into unprotected sex, but she’s left to deal with the fallout on her own. Still in school, she’s about to take her last shot at getting onto the Olympic rhythmic gymnastic team but risks losing everything she’s worked so hard for if her pregnancy is discovered. Even when she goes to buy a pregnancy test, she’s asked for ID and judged by the woman behind the counter while it’s otherwise true that abortion is illegal in all circumstances in the Philippines, meaning Sunshine’s only options are finding and paying a wise woman for medicine to provoke a miscarriage. 

It’s the reactions of other women that Sunshine most fears from her otherwise supportive coach, whose ambitions also rest on her performance, to her best friend who does in fact shun her on her mother’s insistence, and her older sister who is caring for the whole family and seems to be a single mother herself having had a baby at a young age. Like a grim siren, Sunshine’s niece won’t stop crying as if echoing the alarm of her impending maternity and her own discomfort with it. It’s a network of women that she turns to for solutions if not for advice. There’s no one Sunshine can ask for that, because what she’s looking for is illegal. All she can do is stand outside the church and pray that God take mercy on her by allowing her to wake up from this nightmare. There’s something quite ironic when she’s told to ask forgiveness from God “the father” by a religious and judgemental female doctor as if laying bare the patriarchal and oppressive underpinnings of the entire society. 

Yet cast onto a surreal odyssey through Manila in search of solutions, Sunshine finds herself becoming the supportive presence she herself doesn’t have. While pursued by a very judgmental little girl who echoes her inner confusion by branding her a “murderer” and questions her decision making, Sunshine is approached by another little girl who appears to be heavily pregnant and is begging for money to see a faith healer whom she hopes will help her end her pregnancy. Despite her own experience, Sunshine asks her why she doesn’t ask her boyfriend for help but the girl explains that he’s not her boyfriend, he’s her uncle, so she’s even more powerless and alone than Sunshine is. No one’s going to do anything about the Uncle Bobots of the world, but they’re only too happy to criminalise and abandon a little with no one else to turn to. 

Realising that the girl was trying to abort her child, the male doctor at the hospital refuses to treat her knowing full well there is a possibility she may die. Only a sympathetic female doctor is later willing to help. Sunshine too almost dies after her first attempt at taking an abortion pill which she does all alone at a love hotel where the woman on the counter didn’t want to give her a room because people who go to hotels on their own are a high risk for suicide. When she does eventually find out, Sunshine’s sister is actually sympathetic and stands up to Jaime on her behalf when he makes a bid to take over her life and force her into maternity by getting Miggy to apologise and unconvincingly insist that he actually loves her and their baby while leveraging his wealth and privilege against her by recommending that she be cared for by his family doctor and the best hospitals at his expense. It does however provoke a degree of clarity in Sunshine’s insistence that she doesn’t want to be a mother and has no intention of becoming one while rediscovering herself in rhythmic gymnastics and making peace with her younger self. A sometimes bleak picture of young womanhood in the contemporary Philippines, the film nevertheless finds relief in pockets of female solidarity and the conviction that it doesn’t have to be this way for the younger generation who should be free to pursue their dreams and make their own choices about what they do with their bodies.

Sunshine screens April 26 & 30 as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival Spring Showcase.

Strawman (稻草人, Wang Tung, 1987)

Posted on by

The literal “strawman” at the centre of Wang Tung’s colonial era satire is a scarecrow who occasionally narrates the events of this small village where, he laments, almost all the young men have been sent off to die in small corners of South East Asia in the name of the Japanese emperor. All of this sounds quite absurd to A Fa (Chang Po-Chou) and Big Mouth (Cho Sheng-Li), two brothers who’ve evaded the draft because their mother cleverly smears cow dung in their eyes while they sleep so they won’t get taken by the Japanese like everything else in the village.

The brothers are caught in a clash of imperial powers and changing times yet are busy just trying to live their ordinary lives. They each have several children, so many the scarecrow quips that they can’t remember all their names, which might be why the most recognisable two are nicknamed “doo-doo” and “stinky head,” and struggle to support themselves by farming sweet potatoes on the land that turns out to be owned by their pro-Japanese brother-in-law. Not really wanting to admit that the war is all but lost, the brother-in-law is planning to sell the farm and move his family to Japan, meaning the brothers will be displaced from their land and lose their livelihood with few other prospects for making a living. 

Though things carry on as normal in the village, it’s clear that the Japanese are essentially looting and exploiting them. Not only do they take the young to die for the emperor, but later come for the brothers’ cows too, insisting that they need them for “taxes” because men are starving at the front. This clash of cultures is obvious in the opening scenes as a Japanese soldier returns the ashes of men who fell in battle to their families while reading out a formal speech in his own language that the villagers do not really understand. While their brass band plays the ironically Westernised sounds of militarism, the villagers drown them out with their traditional instruments as they start their own set of death rituals. These two communities are essentially incompatible and effectively living separately. The soldiers turn around and walk in one direction, while the villagers walk in the other releasing the tension born of this oppositional meeting.

Indeed, the villagers all speak Taiwanese (though Wang was ironically, and anachronistically forced to use Mandarin at the time of release) and exist in a slightly different world to the Japanese-speaking soldiers. A Fa is annoyed with Doo-doo for asking if he should take a Japanese name but subsequently asks if he can have one too on learning that he’ll get better sugar rations. The brother-in-law mixes Japanese and Taiwanese in the same sentence while his wife mainly answers in Taiwanese when her children exclusively speak Japanese. The sight of the children’s traditional Japanese geta wooden sandals scandalises and confuses the brothers’ children, while the cousins mock them in Japanese knowing they won’t understand. Only the slightly bumbling local Japanese official straddles the two worlds by conversing mostly in Taiwanese with the villagers and Japanese with his bosses.

As good citizens of the empire, the children are asked to participate in metals collection and are given rewards for their finds. Doo-doo gets extra again when he picks up shrapnel from an American bomb which sets up a more complex relationship with American imperialism that will arrive after the war when the island is essentially recolonised by the arrival of the KMT and a large influx of mainlanders fleeing the communist take over. When a bomb lands on the brothers’ land but doesn’t go off, they think it’s manna from heaven and determine to take it to the main police station in the town in the hope of a large reward, while the official is convinced he’s going to get a big promotion for this tremendous find. 

Everyone is so fixated on the economic potential that they’ve forgotten this is a bomb and even if it seems like a dud, there’s still a chance it could go off any second and this could all quite literally blow up in their faces. In this, the film seems to be satirising an over dependence on America who were the main backers of the KMT regime. The film was released shortly after the end of martial law during which there had been an attempt to rewrite the history of the island, preventing open discussion of the fact that Taiwanese men had died fighting for Japan and that the island had been bombed by the Americans. So impressed with themselves are they that the brothers and the official have their photo taken with bomb in-between and Mount Fuji backdrop behind as if signalling this complex network of relationships.

Still, even after the prize turns out not to be great riches after all but a hefty supply of fish, the Doo-doo and his grandmother cheer on the bombings hoping for more of the same in the future. The kids even put buckets out in the field waiting for the next raid hoping they can catch some of the shrapnel while forgetting that bombings are actually dangerous, rather than just lucrative, until being caught in one. Small moments of terror and sadness such as the brothers’ finding a frightened deserter hiding in their shed who doesn’t want to go to war because his wife’s pregnant and his family’s economically dependent on him, interrupt what is otherwise a warm and humorous depiction of rural life. A Fa and Big Mouth might be strawmen too, living their lives knowing little of the geopolitical situation but just trying to keep the crows off the grass long enough to get a little to eat before that too is taken away from them.

Strawman screened as part of the BFI’s Myriad Voices: Reframing Taiwan New Cinema.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)