Category: Festivals

My Favorite Season (最想念的季節, Chen Kun-Hou, 1985)

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After becoming pregnant by her married lover, an otherwise independent young woman decides she must find a husband so that her baby will be legitimised but plans to divorce him a year later in Chen Kun-Hou’s charming Taipei-set rom-com, My Favourite Season (最想念的季節, zuì xiǎngniàn de jìjié). These contradictions perhaps express those at the centre of a changing society as the heroine temporarily shackles herself to a weak-willed man but finds herself both bonding with him and resentful of his attempts to control her, while the relationship itself continually straddles an awkward line.

Pao-liang (Jonathan Lee Chung-shan) is a somewhat nerdy guy who runs a print shop and has become a guardian to his niece because his sister and her husband are struggling artists. Incredibly superstitious, he insists he won’t get married before the age of 30 because it would be bad luck, but is roped into Hsiang-mei’s (Sylvia Chang Ai-chia) scheme by a friend who turned her down. Pao-liang tries to turn her down too, but is also struck by her beauty, his own improbable luck, and a possibly genuine emotional connection the pair may share even though they are in other ways opposites. 

Hsiang-mei works as a journalist for a fashion magazine and has more sophisticated tastes as well as a looser connection to money than the penny-pinching Pao-liang who, as the saying goes, knows the cost of everything but the value of nothing. He doesn’t like it when Hsiang-mei spends her own money on things she wants and insists on keeping a running tally of mutual expenses. When his sister asks him for a loan to tide her over, he immediately refuses despite having a large amount in his bank account, partly because he’s mean with money and partly because he’s essentially selfish. Hsiang-mei gives it to her instead, which annoys Pao-liang on several levels because he realises it’s made him look bad while he is now further indebted to Hsiang-mei. 

She, meanwhile, is from a small town and came to Taipei for a better life. The only girl in her family, Hsiao-mei strives for independence and ironically wanted a husband to secure it so she could have her baby and raise it on her own. As her brother says, “she does what she wants,” but seemingly hadn’t really thought through her plan assuming it would all go smoothly and she and Pao-liang could essentially hang out for a year and then bring the arrangement to an end. She picks Pao-liang partly because they do seem to get on, and possibly because she thought he’d be easy to manage, but is lucky in her choice of man that he presents little danger to her.

He is, however, petty and patriarchal in his mindset. He’s both attracted to Hsiang-mei and resentful of her strong will and independence while also small-minded and incapable of direct communication. It’s obvious that he wants this arrangement to continue, but often acts in ways that endanger it and lashes out at Hsiang-mei rather than explaining how he feels. When Hsiang-mei returns upset having met up with her married lover, Pao-liang shouts at her and accuses her of embarrassing him by sleeping with another man. He does something similar when she encounters unexpected tragedy, blaming and berating her in place of offering comfort even if his cruelty is motivated by frustrated affection. 

But Hsiang-mei is in some ways the same. She doesn’t really say what she wants either or acknowledge that she has grown fond of Pao-liang and his niece. She’s fiercely independent, but felt she still needed to have a husband to have a baby after having an affair with a man who was already married so was to her the ideal boyfriend because he wouldn’t tie her down. She buys a lamp for Pao-liang’s place because lamps make a place a home, but Pao-liang doesn’t want it or approve of the expense while simultaneously insisting on paying for half of it because it’s for a “communal” area. He’s still intent on keeping score and isn’t ready to accept that he and Hsiang-mei live in the house together so everything belongs to them “communally” as a couple. On a baseline level, he won’t cede his space to her nor acknowledge that she still has the upper-hand in this relationship even as the pair inevitably draw closer. Chen’s vision of 80s Taipei is warm and sophisticated as Pao-liang spends his time dancing with the old ladies in the park and loses his keys at opportune moments or drives his car into a ditch but even despite his pettiness and ineffectuality, can still find love and the courage to chase it if somewhat passive aggressively.

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

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Autumn Tempest (落山風, Huang Yu-Shan, 1988)

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When the autumn tempest comes, it can launch a buffalo into the air, according to a middle-aged woman working at a remote mountain temple. Wen-Hsiang (Yang Ching-huang) is in the spring of his life, but the tempest is coming for him too as he finds himself consumed by the desires he’s supposed to be shaking off after becoming fixated on a lonely, young-ish novice at the temple in flight from a failed marriage.

Su-pi’s (Kang Soo-yeon) decision to become a nun is reflective of the repressive patriarchal social codes under which she was living. We’re told that she’s essentially been rejected because she was unable to produce a male heir. Her husband has since got his mistress pregnant, or so he thinks, and the mother-in-law, who is really the one in charge, has decided to move her in, telling Su-pi she can like it or lump it. Unsurprisingly, Su-pi chose to leave but the temple hasn’t really accepted her either. Su-pi wants to shave her head and be admitted as a nun, but the abbess says she’s not ready. 

Su-pi does indeed have lingering attachments to this world and they seem to lead in two directions, firstly her unfilled and at the time taboo sexual desires, and her resentment towards her husband couple with the sense of righteous anger over her unfair dismissal. This desire to be desired is what draws her to Wen-Hsiang who is probably not all that much younger than her but is also a “kid” too young to know anything of real love. She asks him if she’s still young and pretty and if he loves her to which Wen-Hsiang readily agrees though it’s more that he becomes obsessed with her, drunk on his desire and his own need to be needed.

Wen-Hsiang’s parents’ marriage collapsed some years previously though they’ve never divorced because of the social stigma and now Wen-Hsiang’s mother has taken his sister to the US leaving him behind. Not getting along with his father, his doting grandmother sends him to the temple to help him study so he can fulfil his familial obligations, get into medical school, and follow in his father’s footsteps. No one seems to want Wen-Hsiang, not even the old girlfriend who wouldn’t stop calling when he first went to the temple but has since moved on. But even on decamping to the mountains, Wen-Hsiang can’t leave the city behind. He packs a series of coffee-related accoutrements as well as tapes of Western and Japanese pop music he listens to while he studies. When he finds the Buddha’s eyes intrusive, he simply throws his jacket over them.

But the transgressive sexual relationship they enter into also nearly kills the abbess who is struck down by some kind of psychic force that seems to emanate from it. Though the couple think they’ve kept it quiet, everyone appears to know, the abbess warning Su-pi that young men are impulsive, like bulls who can’t be tamed, and should be avoided. Struck by the weight of this spiritual transgression, Su-pi tries to end it but is both drawn by her own desire and by Wen-Hsiang’s obsession. The realisation that she is pregnant forces her hand, though we might also wonder if in the end her greatest desire was always for revenge or just to avenge herself by forcing her husband to realise the fault lies with him. She is fully capable of fulfilling the role society has forced on her though she may also reject it symbolically by becoming a nun while fulfilling her own desires by telling her husband where to go when he comes crawling back.

Though the film sets out to punish Wen-Hsiang for his transgressions, it cannot help but implicate Su-pi for his downfall, implying it’s is her fault rather than resolutely his own in his inability to overcome his desires. She meanwhile is equally punished by the film’s ambiguous ending in which she may have to live with the unintended consequences of embracing her sexuality as opposed to abandoning it by joining the temple. Even so, there’s something so classical about her features that they almost resemble the face of Buddha, not unlike that Wen-Hsiang’s grandmother prays to in the hope he’ll get into medical school. Huang frequently uses natural imagery to express the tumultuous emotions of the pair of lovers in contrast to the ordered and tranquil environment of the temple but also perhaps suggests that not even here can they really free themselves of the authoritarian oppressions of the city.

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

The Beetle Project (숙제, Jin Kwang-kyo, 2025)

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“Cousins should get along,” according to a North Korean soldier who’s just found out his son has been bullying his nephew, ironically by drawing a red line down the middle of their bedroom to make it clear that this interloper isn’t wanted in his territory. Red lines become a theme in Jim Kwang-kyo’s charming childhood drama The Beetle Project (숙제, Sugje) in which the pure-hearted goodness of a series of children knows no borders and sees only common ground between themselves and a North Korean boy who’s lost his pet beetle that he was keeping as a homework project.

Luckily, the beetle is discovered by best friends Ah-ram and Jae-hoon who decide to finish the boy’s homework for him in the hope that they will somehow be able to get the beetle back to him. Of course, that’s easier said than done given that Lee Chul-min lives in the North so it’s not like they can they just pay him a visit to give it back. The irony is that the beetle only came to them because of a flood that was partly caused by the North’s sudden opening of its floodgates prompting calls for greater co-operation across borders to prevent potential tragedies such as these. 

Meanwhile, we discover that Lee Chul-min is experiencing a degree of familial discord as his younger brother Chul-kyu is resentful of the fact he’s been sent to the city to study in a better school while he’s been kept at home and is forced to work in the fields with his mother. The film’s depiction of North Korea is largely utopian in which the repressiveness of the regime is barely felt aside from the occasional presence of soldiers and a degree of foreboding in the threat that the growing feud between the boys poses to a carefully balanced order. Chul-min’s cousin Chul-ju is also resentful that he now has to share everything including his room and has been bullying Chul-min because of it, though Chul-min is a stereotypically good boy who puts up with everything without making a fuss and makes sure to tell his mother what a good time he’s been having in the city where they get to eat ice cream every day when it’s hot.

Both sets of children deeply care about the fate of the beetle and what’s best for it, only to become a political football that’s picked up by a shady conglomerate Ah-ram’s journalist father Jin-kyu tried to expose for a food contamination scandal only to have to make a humiliating retraction on air when the station is ordered to back off. Hooked on the PR potential, they try to use the beetle, and Ah-ram, for their own ends, while the family simultaneously becomes the target of scammers promising they can help return the beetle for a small fee, and rightwing trolls who harass them for being North Korean collaborators. When one of the other kids damages the beetle’s enclosure. Ah-ram and Jae-hoon find themselves drawing another red line to keep them out only to later think better of it.

Disappointed by the adults around them, including Jin-kyu who is still struggling to deal with the death of his wife and his changed relationship with Ah-ram whom he sent to live with her grandmother in the country, the kids decide they want to send the beetle back by themselves and hand it straight to Chul-min. Jin-kyu ends up getting involved with an online insect enthusiast group who unbeknownst to him are all children and strangely led by a little girl who for some reason talks like a middle-aged farmer’s wife. In any case, it’s very much children doing it for themselves and realising that they have a lot in common despite the border between them. Ah-ram is worried that Chul-min will get into trouble for losing his homework and probably misses his beetle while she herself is also still processing her mother’s death for which she blames herself and adjusting to her new life in the country where she’s supported by her forthright schoolteacher who can’t resist resorting to colourful language whenever she encounters “injustice”. In its way, the beetle becomes a kind of symbol for Korea itself with the children promising to meet again as adults so they can find out what happened to it while wishing the best for “Beety” and vowing to look after it together. Charming and wholesome, the film is a gentle advocation for a spiritual, if not necessarily literal, reunification and a sense of solidarity among the younger generation dedicated to doing the right thing in a world in which adults call lies “flexibility” and think one beetle is no better than another.

The Beetle Project screened in Chicago as part of the 19th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Out of the Blue (小爸爸的天空, Chen Kun-Hou, 1984)

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A young man begins to dream after discovering he has become a father in Chen Kun-Hou’s poignant coming of age drama Out of the Blue (小爸爸的天空, xiǎo bàba de tiānkōng). Though it could perhaps be argued that the heroine suffers unduly, the film is remarkably unjudgemental about unplanned teenage pregnancy and at heart is rooting for the young couple. But the real world is not so kind, and it seems impossible that their love could survive in the liberalising but still oppressive late martial law society.

Long is a boy from an ordinary family with a crush on a wealthy young who goes to his school, Mi. Mi gets picked up by a chauffeured car every day, while Long watches her afar from his bicycle. Eventually, the pair get together and bond over their shared sense of dissatisfaction with their families by whom they are each trapped in opposing ways. Long complains that his former policeman father beats and berates him for not living up to his expectations, while Mi alternately implies her parents don’t really care about her because they’re always working and let her do as she pleases, and that she has no free will because she’s duty-bound by the expectations of filiality.

Perhaps bearing this out, Mi rarely speaks during her courtship with Long and only later is able to talk plainly to her mother, though her mother doesn’t listen. When she becomes pregnant after sleeping with Long when he stays out all night after a beating from his father, Mi can’t bring herself to tell anyone but stays at home alone while her parents head to LA. For unstated reasons, she can’t bring herself to tell Long, either. She ignores his calls and drops out of school, instructing the servants not to answer the phone when he calls. But when her mother finally finds out, she’s unexpectedly supportive. At least, she doesn’t disown her, force her to give up the child, to marry someone else or to stop seeing Long (though she does so anyway), all of which adds an additional layer to Mi’s sense of filial obligation feeling as if she cannot disobey her mother because she has been so kind and understanding of her “scandalous” behaviour.

When Mi abruptly disappears and he’s told she’s gone abroad, Long tries to talk to his father but in the end he doesn’t say anything. He simply refills his father’s ink pot while he continues to practice calligraphy. The only really time that Long’s father actually speaks to him is on hearing that he’s got the grades to get into his chosen university. It’s at this point that his father considers him “a man,” having his first drink with him and treating him as an adult rather than a naughty boy he can beat with a belt. In a sense, Long has conformed with his father’s authoritarianism in following the conventional path and is no longer trying to resist it, but on being unexpectedly reunited with his own son, Weiwei, is a more compassionate and empathetic presence, in love with the idea of having a family, though it is currently out of his reach. When he runs into Mi and realises the toddler she’s got in a pushchair is his, he’s still a student financially unable to support a wife and child let alone keep them in comfort.

As such, Long might be the unexpectedly good man who would have married and taken care of Mi if he knew but as they each say several times, everything’s different now. After their separation, both describe themselves as having grown up. Though he didn’t know he had become a father, Long feels as if he’s now older than his friends. He’s no longer interested in playing pool with them and is bored by their teenage pastimes. It’s ironically this sense of growing up that sets him on a more conventional path by knuckling down to study. But Mi perhaps feels trapped. Her parents have accepted her, but they have also more or less adopted Weiwei as their own and refuse to see her as a grown woman. When she tries to stand up to her mother about going to LA, her mother refuses to allow her to stay behind with Weiwei because she doesn’t believe she can look after herself let alone a child. Mi snaps back that could marry Long, but her mother doesn’t take it seriously. In the end, Mi is unable to break free of her filial obligations and defy her mother by leaving to make a new family with Long.

Mi’s mother stands in the way of progress, though she is in other ways a good and compassionate person who never tries to punish her daughter for her sexual transgression and only wanted to care for her and the baby. The baby has, however, now become part of her family to which Mi is merely an accessory, so he cannot now form a new family with Long. Long is unable to assume his paternity because of his financial status, but is otherwise good with the boy and in some ways better than Mi who becomes frustrated when he fails to settle in an unfamiliar environment. She admits that her mother usually tucks him in and is otherwise lost for what to do, leaving Long quite literally holding the baby.

But on the other hand, perhaps he’s only experiencing an idealised vision of fatherhood while spared the really difficult things like the anxiety of keeping food on the table and roof over his head. His friend at university is married with a child and is constantly late because of childcare issues. He recounts having to stay up all night because his son got enteritis from eating something he shouldn’t have when he wasn’t looking and now has a serious case of the runs. Long appears to want all of this too, but is prevented from having it as the older generation won’t surrender it to him or give Mi and Long the chance to figure it out. The closing scenes have a genuine sense of tragedy as Long watches his family ride away from him while Mi looks back with sadness and an expression that suggests she knows she will likely never see Long again. With minimal dialogue and elegant, expressive composition, Chen charts the course of a love too innocent to survive in a world of oppression and conformity but has only infinite sympathy for the young couple whose simple dreams are denied by generational authoritarianism.

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

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Brush of the God (カミノフデ ～怪獣たちのいる島～, Keizo Murase, 2024)

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High schooler Akari (Rio Suzuki) couldn’t care less about something as “uncool” as tokusatsu movies and the fact her recently deceased grandfather once made them makes it even worse. Though they had once been close, Akari harbours a degree of resentment towards her grandfather, Kenzo (Shiro Sano), whose behaviour even in earlier years could be somewhat intimidating. Holding Kenzo responsible for the scar on her mother’s arm, Akari wonders out loud why a public memorial event is even necessary when they’ve already had a funeral, and why her mother isn’t just throwing all this useless rubbish out rather than hold an exhibition honouring a man she believes harmed her.

“Useless rubbish” is largely what Akari thinks of Kenzo’s legacy, embarrassed by his connection to otaku culture which has a social stigma attached to it that a teenage girl in particular would find embarrassing. Sullen and grumpy, she looks on with sadness mixed with irritation when some of her classmates charge off without her to go look at make-up and is rude to a young man from her class who’s come to attend her grandfather’s memorial event because she wouldn’t be caught dead talking to a nerd. In a way, it’s some of these social attitudes that Keizo Murase’s Brush of the God (カミノフデ ～怪獣たちのいる島～, Kami no Fude ~Kaijutachi no iru Shima) wants to deconstruct, recovering a memory of the classics of the genre as a world of boundless creativity and goodness that was as much about overcoming obstacles as it was creating visions of marauding dragons wreaking havoc on the modern world. 

This is Murase’s first, and sadly only film as he passed away at the age of 89 in 2024 and was already in his late 80s when the film was made. Prior to that, he’d been a legendary figure in the tokusatsu industry working as a suit sculptor, prop maker, and stunt man. His self-cameo laying flowers at his own stand-in’s memorial service echoes the meta-quality of the film which he’d first come up with while working on Mighty Peking Man (in the movie Revenge of the Might Primate) in Hong Kong and subsequently reworked to take place in Japan just as Kenzo does in the film. At heart, it’s a tribute to classic kids special effects adventure movies in which Akari must reclaim the fond memories of her grandfather in order to save his interior universe and legacy which is now in danger of being forgotten while even she herself wanted to junk the whole thing. 

She does so in the company of Takuya (Takeru Narahara), the classmate she’d hardly even noticed because of his nerdiness but is also primed to be another kind of inheritor of Kenzo’s mantle as represented by the Brush of the God, a magical paintbrush that allows the wielder to create in reality anything that they can imagine much as Kenzo and Murase had done when they created their monsters and the means to beat them. Reminiscent of that of Nobuhiko Obayashi, Keizo’s world has a retro aesthetic that is at once both artificial and fantastical making it clear that the children have been sucked into a world of imagination on the invitation of the mysterious Mr Hozumi (Takumi Saito) who offers them a copy of Keizo’s unproduced script and asks them to save his universe from destruction at the jaws of a mystical dragon. 

There is real love and affection for this era which has now all but passed that valued practical effects and rejoiced in finding unexpected solutions to practical problems and creating a world which was often simpler than expected in which there were monsters who were bad but could be beaten or otherwise were good and could never be vanquished. Along with recovering more positive memories of her grandfather whom she realises to have misunderstood, a tortured artist who loved them in his own way, she regains a sense joy and creativity that had otherwise been lost to her with Takuya remarking that she seems much more lively in the midst of their adventure than she ever had at school. He meanwhile is very much in his element, but though he’d dreamed of becoming a tokusatu hero is effectively reduced to a damsel in distress whom Akari must then save by reawakening her imagination. Warmhearted and wholesome, the film is an advocation for this world of lost charm and childhood adventures powered by egg boxes, garden hoses, and the boundless potential of creativity. 

Brush of the God screens in Chicago 13th April as part of the 19th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Uniform (夜校女生, Chuang Ching-Shen, 2024)

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The problem for Ai (Buffy Chen Yan-fei) is that a minor difference in her uniform causes her to be treated differently. Set in the late ‘90s, Chuang Ching-Shen’s The Uniform (夜校女生, yèxiào nǚshēng) uses the school to examine the stratified nature of the contemporary Taiwanese society and the elitism that governs it. Having failed the main exam, Ai has won a place at a prestigious girls academy but been relegated to the “night school”. To maximise its efficiency, the school operates on a shift system with day pupils attending classes until 4.30pm and the night students taking over until 9. Though there isn’t supposed to be any difference between the two, the night students are treated as a kind of overflow intake and looked down on by the day pupils while some complain that they’re unfairly using up resources which should be theirs by right. 

Despite the differences between them, Ai strikes up an unexpected friendship with a day student with whom she shares a desk, Min (Chloe Xiang Jie-ru). Shy and somewhat timid, Ai is taken by Min’s free spiritedness and often skips out on her classes to do fun things with her like going to a club to see Mayday before they were famous. Min, obviously, never misses out on her education and though she later reveals her own sense of insecurity in not feeling that she fits in at the school nor really deserves to be there, does not really understand Ai’s situation nor her own feelings of frustration and futility. Ai, meanwhile, is attracted by the upper-middle class atmosphere of the day pupils and increasingly embarrassed by her own more humble home life.

Ai’s father died in an accident and her mother runs a cram school out of their home. Ai’s mother (Chi Chin) is always trying to save money and picking up mismatched furniture for free, much to Ai’s annoyance, while Ai also does a series of part-time jobs including working at a ping pong club at the weekend though her mother doesn’t really want her doing sports because they’re unladylike and not all that useful for landing a place at a top university. The reason she sent her to the academy was to give her a leg up into what she sees as a conventionally successful life by getting a degree and finding a man with a professional job to marry. Ai’s resentment is partly provoked by this sense of being railroaded towards a future she might not want while at the same time facing tremendous pressure and afraid that in the end she won’t be able to measure up to her mother’s expectations. 

It’s at the ping pong club that she first meets Luke (Chiu Yi-tai), a handsome student from the elite boys’ school, and begins to strike up a relationship with him before Min tells her she likes him too. This ordinary teenage love triangle is coloured be class conflict in which Ai doubts she has the right to go after Luke because he is from a wealthy family, lying to him to cover up the fact that she and Min skip school by swapping their shirts which are embroidered in different colours for day and night students by claiming to be a pupil in the elite advanced class while hiding from him that she’s actually a night pupil. After beginning to suspect that Luke might actually like Ai, Min too begins to look down on her as if she thought that Ai were forgetting her place and has no right to date him because, unlike her, she is not his social equal. 

As for Luke himself, he’s actually rather bland and in part because his own life seems so easy because of his family’s wealth though he too later lets slip that he feels embarrassed by his parent’s apparently secret divorce and has only just begun to let go of the idea of them getting back together. For much of the film, it seems like he’s merely in the way of the relationship between the two girls which more successfully overcomes the barrier of class. After vicariously enjoying living Min’s lifestyle, Ai eventually comes to realisation that she and Luke are “not the same” and come from different worlds. He doesn’t really care about that, and seems to have become aware of his privilege abandoning a plan to get into university by competing in the maths olympiad and take the exam instead in the interests of “equality,” which is a well-meaning gesture but not really the bold act of egalitarianism he thinks it is even if also emphases his commitment to Ai in his willingness to break down class barriers that might otherwise work to his advantage.

As a means of denying her reality, Ai escapes through writing letters to Nicole Kidman with the help of a young man who speaks English and works in her aunt’s video store but is eventually jolted into adulthood by a more literal earthquake that reminds her how precious each of her relationships is and fragile the world around her. Through her various friendships, Ai comes to understand that almost everyone she knows also suffers with feelings of inferiority or a lack of confidence, weighed down by the pressure to achieve social success which might not be what they want anyway, but that they can overcome them together through understanding and mutual support that crosses class boundaries. Charmingly nostalgic, the film has a sense of hope for the future that it is indeed possible to achieve success on your own terms while prioritising your friendships and taking care of those around you.

The Uniform screens in Chicago 12th April as part of the 19th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Teki Cometh (敵, Daihachi Yoshida, 2024)

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“So, reality or literature, which is more important?” an unexpected guest asks a retired professor in Daihachi Yoshida’s Teki Cometh (敵, Teki). Adapted from the novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui, the film is not exactly about encroaching dementia but rather the gradual embrace of fantasy as the hero finds himself inhabiting the shifting realities of age in which his carefully curated persona of the refined professor begins to crack under the weight of its impending end.

Then again, objective “reality” is clearly a strain for Gisuke Watanabe (Kyozo Nagatsuka). It’s probably not a coincidence that Gisuke shares his surname with the hero of Kurosawa’s Ikiru as he too begins to ponder the meaning of his life along with the apparently meaninglessness of his twilight years. He reveals to his friend that he’s well aware his pension won’t cover his expenses for the rest of his projected lifespan and that he’s already calculated what he calls “X-Day” which will be the day the money (and implicitly his life) will simply run out. This day is continually postponed as Gisuke acquires extra money through giving lectures on French literature or writing articles for magazines, but the early part of the film at least is all about money and its relative values. Gisuke says that he does not really contemplate the price of the newspaper because the newspaper is something he wants so he simply buys it while taking out half the amount he’d usually charge for a lecture from an ATM machine. His friend advises him to drop his fees and get more work, but Gisuke explains that his 100,000 yen boundary is carefully maintained as a kind of bulwark against a sense of obsolescence as in he thinks they’ll keep haggling him down until he’s grateful just to get anything at all.

But obsolescence is clearly something he already feels given that interest in his chosen field has already declined and perhaps there no longer is much of an audience for his views on Racine and the development of the French language. Like the professor at the centre of Kurosawa’s Madadayo, Gisuke is surrounded by former students most of whom do not work in fields related to their studies but continue to hold him up as great scholar and influential figure in their lives. Yet as the film goes on and realities begin to blur, we might begin to wonder if any of these visitors are actually real or merely spectres leaking out from Gisuke’s fracturing memory to express his own anxieties about past and present. Former student Yasuko (Kumi Takiuchi) appears to be flirting with him, but on the other perhaps she’s merely reflecting the buried desires for which he continues to feel guilt and shame. He recalls times in which they attended the theatre together and then went for meals and drinks as if they were quasi-paternal or at least platonic, but Yasuko asks him if it wasn’t sexual harassment while at the same time directly stating that the desire is mutual (and there’s 15 minutes left before her train leaves). 

From this point on, Gisuke begins having strange dreams perhaps inspired by weird messages he’s receiving about an “enemy” that’s “coming from the north”. The “north” in a Japanese context would most likely be Russia and the messages reflecting a fear of invasion but also perhaps implying that in Gisuke’s case, the enemy lies within and it’s his own brain that is attacking itself. The illicit desires that he hints at to another former student while discussing his brief foray into and eventual boredom with voyeurism begin to come to the fore in his surreal dreams including one where he is subjected to a colonoscopy that is heavily influenced by BDSM imagery. His surprise visitor asks him if he remembers the war and Gisuke says that he’s told he experienced it in the womb, implying that he carries a degree of trauma from a time before he was even born. The ghost of the grandfather he never met haunts his well-appointed Japanese-style home that speaks of his traditionalism, while Gisuke himself tenderly takes out his late wife’s old coat and deeply breathes in her scent before hanging the coat up in his office so that it too floats like a ghost.

Yoshida structures the film through a series of vignettes ordered by season, yet there’s nothing necessarily to say that the seasons are consecutive or occur within the same year. Time is becoming abstract to Gisuke, even as he’s pursued by his invisible “enemy” that attacks his respectable facade and the very image of himself as he too embraces fantasy as a means of liberation from an otherwise monotonous if also serene life of awaiting the inevitable. The monochrome photography and static composition add to the air of deadpan humour in Gisuke’s increasingly surreal world. Teki cometh for us all, but in the end teki is us and we are teki. Our own fears, regrets, and insecurities will indeed return to torment us and show us who we are. Likely as not will not like what we see.

Teki Cometh screens in Chicago 11th April as part of the 19th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Silent City Driver (Чимээгүй хотын жолооч, Sengedorj Janchivdorj, 2024)

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Myagmar (Tuvshinbayar Amartuvshin) asks a teenage monk if he thinks atonement is possible. The monk, Sodoo, tells him that he thinks it is, but that it’s difficult and not many people can achieve it. The irony of Myagmar’s life is that he becomes a kind of ferryman, delivering the deceased to a kind of liberation he will never find while trapped in the eternal hell of Ulaanbaatar. Much less upbeat than his previous film, The Sales Girl, Sengedorj Janchivdorj’s melancholy character study finds its solitary hero consumed alternately by guilt and rage while trapped within a world of constant unfairness and inequality.

As Myagmar tries to explain, he’s not disabled, merely nervous though his stammer turns out to stem from extensive beatings during the 14 years he spent in “Dad’s house”, or prison, that have left him with brain damage and the melancholy stillness of one already dead. As he tells the friendly coffin maker at the funeral home where he is eventually employed as a hearse driver, he applied for countless other jobs but no one would give him one because of his criminal record and outsider status. Having lost his only living relative in his mother who died while he was inside, Myagmar lives alone with a pack of stray dogs that he’s taken in and cares for. He explains to the coffin maker’s daughter Saruul (Narantsetseg Ganbaatar) that some of them probably had families, but were abandoned because they got old or they were sick and it costs too much to care for a sick dog. Mostly though, they’re strays, like him, with no home or place to belong.

Myagmar extends this same kindness to Saruul having become captivated by her on seeing her come to collect her father from work. Coffin maker Sodnom thinks she’s a medical student, but Myagmar soon discovers that she works in the seedy underbelly of Ulaanbataar’s sex industry and is also at the centre of a political scandal involving a leaked tape of a politician said to have been uploaded by the woman herself as a last resort and means of revenge with a personal rather than political motivation. Myagmar follows Saruul around in a way which might seem creepy, but is emblematic of his shyness and lack of confidence in himself. Though Saruul eventually responds to his kindness and begins to return some of his affection, it’s largely because they recognise each other as two people who are trapped in this unending hell, he in his sense of futility and the trauma of his incarceration, and she within sex work and abuse. 

At a particularly low point, Saruul tells Myagmar that she wants to go to “that place”, the hell that haunts him though he no longer dreams. He tells her that it is not somewhere she wants to go, that there is no light there, no day and no night. It is a living death in which even his name was taken from him and replaced by a number, as Suruul’s will also be in a moment of grim irony. But all it seems to do is reinforce the fact that this is not so different from the life Saruul lives now. They already live in hell and there is only one means of escape. The monk, Sodoo, tells Myagmar that the best revenge is forgiveness and seeking vengeance won’t change anything, but he cannot overcome his sense of rage towards an unjust society. Still, Sodoo tells him that he did the right thing even if offers little sense of comfort to the melancholy hearse driver charged with transporting souls from this world to the next.

Sengedorj Janchivdorj lends the contemporary city a melancholy quality, a dark and lonely place peopled by the abandoned and downtrodden. Even Sodoo doesn’t quite know how old he is and marks his years by the day in which he was found. The more Myagmar begins to rebuild his life, the more he has to lose and the less it looks like he will be allowed to find happiness or the atonement he seeks for his crime. A gentle soul consumed by rage, he nevertheless has “capable hands” to which to entrust this justice and is capable of creating great beauty such as the stone lions he begins carving for the funeral home, but otherwise maintains a purgatorial existence unable to make a home for himself in a world of such constant cruelties.

Silent City Driver screens in Chicago 6th April as part of the 19th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Like A Rolling Stone (出走的决心, Yin Lichuan, 2024)

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A middle-aged woman’s decision to walk out on her abusive marriage and pursue a life of ultimate freedom on the road went viral in 2022 making her an accidental feminist icon in an overwhelmingly traditionalist and patriarchal culture. Yin Lichuan’s dramatisation of Su Min’s life, Like a Rolling Stone (出走的决心, chūzǒu de juéxīn), makes plain the various ways in which her life has been shaped by patriarchal forces that also continue to shape that of her daughter who is sympathetic to her mother’s plight but also perhaps still feeling herself entitled to her mother’s sacrifice while wary of making such a sacrifice herself.

As she says, Hong (Yong Mei) has been waiting a long time. A flashback to 1982 finds her as a fresh-faced teenager with hopes and dreams who wanted to go to university and travel the world. But her father pulls her out of school and forces her to work in a factory to support the family while devoting all their resources to her brother. She marries Dayong (Jiang Wu) to get away from her father’s oppression, chasing another kind of freedom but soon finding herself disappointed. In the present day we can see that Dayong is cruel and abusive. He continually runs Hong down, calls her stupid and lazy, and becomes violent when challenged. 

Hong has long wanted to leave but is prevented firstly by a sense of shame in going against conventional wisdom. When she’d tried to leave him before, her family refused to help her and in fact encouraged her to return to Dayong and put up with her mistreatment. Dayong had also frustrated her attempts to work so that she would have nowhere to go and no way of supporting herself if she left him while simultaneously taking advantage of her financially. The couple had separate finances since early in their marriage, but while Dayong doesn’t like Hong spending on things that make her happy, he often helps himself to her possessions declaring that everything belongs to the family. 

But Hong bites her tongue and does as she’s told because that’s what she’s been taught she’s supposed to do. She’s sacrificed all of herself for her family and has even been working unpaid for her brother for over three years only to see him become surly when she eventually asks for her backpay. Her daughter, Xiaoxue (Wu Qian) resents her father for the way he’s treated Hong and is supportive of her liberation but at the same time she also over relies on her asking her to cancel a trip to see her old friends to be around during her pregnancy and then again when first loses and then gains a better job but is afraid to ask for time off in case it ruins her chances of being kept on.

Hong asks her own mother why she treats her the way she does and continues to prioritise her brother while telling her must allow herself to be exploited to serve the family but she doesn’t have an answer for her. There’s certainly a greater understanding between Hong and Xiaoxue about the patriarchal structures in which they are both trapped. When she loses her job, Xiaoxue’s husband encourages her to stay home with the children just as Dayong had discouraged Hong from looking for work. Xiaoxue wants a job to avoid her mother’s fate of becoming trapped within the domestic environment with no time for herself. While her husband seems nicer and treats her better than Dayong has treated Hong, he is not necessarily that much better and still operates on a patriarchal mindset. He praises women for being superhuman, but in doing so suggests that the domestic sphere is a woman’s concern alone. It does not seem to occur to him that he could do his fair share or that the division of their labour could be more equal. 

Things may be better for Xiaoxue which was all that Hong wanted, but they are far from perfect and when push comes to shove she too just expects that her mother will sacrifice her own desires to suit Xiaoxue’s needs. Everyone keeps telling her to wait, but Hong waited to escape her father, to meet a “decent” man, for Xiaoxue to grow up, get married, and have children of her own, then for the children to start kindergarten. If she doesn’t leave now, there’ll be another reason why shouldn’t. There is something quite empowering about Hong’s gentle progression towards achieving her freedom beginning with getting her driving license in her 50s despite the misogynistic banter of the instructors. When she gets her car, Dayong immediately gets into the driver’s seat and it takes a little longer for her to assume her space, but as she says no one can stop her now. She won’t be bullied or belittled anymore, nor will she allow herself to be taken for granted or guilted into sacrificing herself for others who rarely sacrifice anything for her. One of a recent series of films addressing ongoing patriarchal oppression, Lin’s film is itself a way of fighting back against the idea that unhappiness is something you just have to accept as a woman as Hong begins living her best life out on the road, finally free and very much in the driving seat of her own life.

Like A Rolling Stone screened as part of the 19th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Hunter Brothers (獵人兄弟, Su Hung-en, 2024)

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Two brothers find themselves on opposite sides of tradition and modernity as they descend into a state of warfare over the future of the ancestral hunting grounds in Su Hung-en’s familial drama, Hunter Brothers (獵人兄弟). Exploring the complicated position of the indigenous community marginalised by an increasingly capitalistic urbanity the film also critiques contemporary visions of masculinity in the wider society as the brothers each try to find new ways of defining themselves amid changing notions of manly success.

In the opening scenes of the film, Teymu celebrates the fact that his son, Yuci, has become a doctor because now he will never have to do manual labour and will have a more comfortable standard of living. But in private, Teymu seems upset. He feels as if he has failed the ancestors because in the eyes of their community, Yuci is not a proper man. Many people tell him that he is “not cut out to be a hunter,” and he has no desire to be one anyway, but still suffers from a serious inferiority complex and wounded male pride. To find some kind of answer, Teymu forces Yuci against the wishes of his mother to accompany him to the mountains for one last hunting trip to prove himself by killing a wild boar and finally validating Teymu’s own fractured sense of masculinity that his son is indeed a “proper man.”

It’s during this trip that Teymu is killed in mysterious circumstances. Yuci’s brother Siring ends up going to prison for the crime, but unlike him had been more of the son his father wanted. Yuci had been clever and studious, but Siring is more of a traditional mountain man who lives for the hunt and has a very unreconstructed sense of masculinity. But he also loved and understood his brother, knowing this life wasn’t for him and trying to protect him from their father who was in other ways a failure. Teymu drank and was violent, objecting to his wife’s attempts to stop him taking Yuci to the mountain by threatening her and using incredibly offensive language. Yuci’s reaction against this traditional society is also towards his father and everything he represented. But this traditional world is the only one a man like Siring can live in. He has no real qualifications or other skills and cannot survive outside of their community. On his release from prison, Yuci is keen for him to get a job and against his return to hunting, but it soon becomes clear that isn’t a way that Siring can live.

In that respect, they represent opposing polls. Yuci is the modern man of science, a doctor, while Siring is a man of the forests and mountains, Then again, Yuci is a devout Christian and his religion also seemingly a challenge to traditional indigenous practices though also alien to the mainstream society. The boys’ mother is living with dementia and those around them tell Siring that she has most likely been cursed by the ancestors who are angry with them for doing something “dishonest” which might be why she starts insisting Yuci go to the police and that they made a bad decision that should be put right. Yuci, for his part, does not appear to feel guilt for the role he may have played but is anxious that the life he’s built for himself in which is accorded a man by his career success, marriage, and fathering a son, may now crumble if Siring will not fall into line.

Tensions come to a head when Yuci decides to sell their ancestral hunting grounds which are earmarked for a development that would destroy the mountain altogether. Siring obviously objects, this world is the only one he can live in, but can do little about it. He resists his brother’s modernity and becomes estranged from him, but they are both in their way exiles and neither of them can fully live in this society. The natural affection they hold for each other as brothers is not enough to bridge this divide and merely leaves each of them lonely and alone, mired in futility and unable to move forward in any meaningful way. The ebb and flow of their lives is reflected in the way they are alternately called by their indigenous names and Mandarin equivalents, each of them living in two worlds but never really at home in either while fever divided from themselves.

Hunter Brothers screens in Chicago 29th March as part of the 19th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)