Category: Festivals

Brave Citizen (용감한 시민, Park Jin-pyo, 2023) [Fantasia 2024]

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There’s an intentional irony in the mantra teacher Si-min (Shin Hae-Sun) is fond of repeating that “If you do nothing, nothing will happen,” in that on the one hand it means that until people decide to act a dissatisfying status quo will continue, but on the other it may also seem threatening implying that if only you keep quiet nothing will happen to you. The main thrust of Park Jin-pyo’s webtoon adaptation Brave Citizen (용감한 시민) does seem to be that abuses of power take place because so few people are willing to challenge them or indeed to stand up for those who cannot stand up for themselves.

That’s something Si-min discovers when a student comes to her and says he’s being harassed by notorious bully Su-kang (Lee Jun-Young). A former boxer/martial artist, Si-min is on a temp contract and evidently waited quite some time to be offered a position so takes it to heart when her boss, Mrs Lee (Cha Chung-Hwa), warns her not make waves and jeopardise her hopes of being hired full-time. Somewhat cynical she tries to talk herself out of standing up for him, talking herself into turning a blind eye to injustice as nothing to do with her but at the end of the day she isn’t someone who can just sit by and take it nor watch as others are harmed while Su-kang goes unchallenged. 

He’s unchallenged largely due to the socio-economic conditions of contemporary Korea in which the wealthy and well-connected are able to live above the law. When one of Su-kang’s victims tries to report him to the police, they are the ones who end up accused of making a false report while Su-kang gets off scot free because he counts judges and prosecutors among his relatives while his mother is a prominent lawyer. His family apparently also donate large amounts of money to the school, which has won a series of “anti-bullying awards,” which is why he can’t be expelled. Si-min’s predecessor took her own life because of Su-kang’s bullying while pretty much everyone is scared stiff of him.

It’s for these reasons that Si-min turns to violence in the hope of giving Su-kan a little “off-site education” and perhaps you can’t blame her when faced with such intransigence from compromised authority. Yet standing up for the students is also a way of learning to stand up for herself, not to succumb to turning a blind eye to injustice simply because it’s more convenient. It’s this wilful suppression of one’s rage towards the persistent injustices of society that ends up spreading them, a continuous chain of abuse in which people take out their frustrations on those unable to defend themselves like the drunk man who yells at Si-min in the street and comes to realise he’s picked on the wrong person. 

Then again, when questioned why he behaves this way Su-kang only answers that “it’s fun”. It’s difficult to believe he would be insecure in his status, yet he persistently mocks those he sees as socially inferior, “nobodies” and ”hobos”, as opposed to elites like himself. The suggestion is that he and his friends have become this way because of a lack of boundaries and a sense of invincibility, which is partly what annoys him so much about an intervention from an authoritarian figure such as Si-min over whom he has no authority because she has decided not to grant it to him. 

This might be what makes her a “brave citizen,” the name of an award granted to ordinary people working in favour of justice that her father had once won after otherwise ruining his life through unwisely guaranteeing a loan and being left on the hook for paying it back. Embracing the absurdity of the webtoon, Park goes big and bold painting the inequalities of the contemporary society in stark relief while injecting a sense of catharsis into Si-min’s attempts to smack some sense into the bullies while rediscovering her own desire to challenge injustice rather than remain complicit with it even if it is personally inconvenient. Her rebellion encourages others to do the same while robbing the bullies of their privileged position and exposing them to the consequences of their actions. Of course, fighting violence with violence may not be the best solution but does at least allow Si-min to make the most of what she has and to recover the self that had been beaten down and defeated but is now capable of fighting back both for herself and others.

Brave Citizen screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

The Sin (씬, Han Dong-seok, 2023)

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According to the opening title card of Han Dong-seok’s genre-hopping horror, sin is like a lost child that will one day come looking for its parents. The film’s ostensible heroine at times hears voices suggesting that someone or something will eventually come looking her, and later says that she is ready for their arrival, but before that we have to wonder what it is she means and what if anything that is happening is actually real or at least in keeping with our assumptions.

There are many reasons why we begin to feels we can’t trust Si-yeong’s (Kim Yoon-Hye) perspective. Not only is she already somewhat distant and preoccupied on her arrival at a disused university in the mountains but we also later learn that she’s taking a large amount of medication apparently for migraines and PTSD stemming from a barely remembered accident. She also seems less than pleased to encounter former colleague Chae-yoon (Song Yi-Jae) who brings up memories that seem unpleasant to her while there’s a kind of frostiness between them that’s only exacerbated by the fact Si-yeong was not even aware she’d have a co-star in this experimental dance movie directed by a man known for being “unkind” to actors. 

In any case, strange things do indeed begin befalling her from a body dropping right in front of her feet before she enters the building to the eventual murder and suicide of her colleagues who then return as zombie-like creatures. The film cycles rapidly through a series of genres beginning as a slasher with a Suspiria-like sense of eeriness as dancer Si-yeong’s mental state starts to unravel before drifting into the undead, cults, and shamanistic folk horror with the weird symbols dotted around the campus. 

Because things are very wrong on the outside too, Si-yeong even ends up running into a gang of murderous corrupt cops paranoid she’s found their stash of stolen drugs while otherwise pursued by riflemen apparently employed by a vengeful CEO. It’s true enough that we don’t know what’s going on for most of the film, and part of that may be that Si-yeong doesn’t know either because her mental state is unstable. We’re not even really sure if Chae-yoon is real or merely Si-yeong’s projection of her internal conflict, dressed as she is in the same outfit and with the same haircut to the point the two women are often barely distinguishable. Perhaps it’s this unpleasant memory that Si-yeong is trying to avoid, though it’s clear in very general terms that she’s running from something as much as she’s being chased and that her flight may be orchestrated to bring her to a specific location whether physical or spiritual.

What’s chasing her is the apparent “sin” of the title, though everyone might not see it as such or maybe believe their own sins were either justified or will be paid for later. For the purely evil, sin as a concept may not even exist if there’s no prospect of remorse though it’s hard to reconcile the docile, sweet and somewhat etherial Si-yeong with the fragmented memories of a past that may or may not be her own. “Thanks to you, we all became monsters,” she’s later told by someone about to something pretty monstrous but maybe they too were monstrous to begin with, or nobody was, and a well-meaning attempt to exorcise evil from the world has only produced more of it. 

Just when you think you have it all figured out, Han throws in a post-credits sequence pouring more fuel on the fire and hinting at even greater back story in a world ruled by dark and unseen supernatural forces. It doesn’t make sense, but wilfully so and frustrates in a positive way in our desperation to understand something that cannot be understood much as Si-yeong attempts to understand the rapidly disintegrating world around her. The concrete fact does seem to be that one must pay for ones sins, though those who do may not be the ones we’d expect. Gory and incredibly creepy, the film plays with our senses as much as Si-yeong’s, undermines our sense of reality, and finally leaves with the unsettling vision of a pervasive evil lurking in the mirror or the depths or the dark corners of a mind already shrouded in delusion. 

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

International trailer (English subtitles)

Kizumonogatari -Koyomi Vamp- (傷物語 -こよみヴァンプ-, Tatsuya Oishi, 2023) [Fantasia 2024]

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A young man walks into an empty subway station already ominously strewn with blood and finds there the corpse of a woman shorn of her limbs. The corpse rises and begs him to have her life by sacrificing his own in allowing her to suck his blood and surprisingly the young man agrees. He does not, however, die but is brought back as something else, not quite human and definitely subservient to the creature he has saved. 

Running 2.5 hours, Tatsuya Oishi’s Kizumonogatari -Koyomi Vamp- (傷物語 -こよみヴァンプ-) is in fact a compilation of three films released in 2016 and a part of the long running Kizumonogatari series which originated with Nisio Isin’s light novels and has gone to spawn an expansive universe of interconnecting spin-offs. This is technically a prequel, and in that sense begins with a black slate but also deliberately drops us into confusion with breakneck pace through the hero’s quest to recover himself and his place in the world after this rude awakening to the supernatural. 

Rude is in many ways a defining characteristic of Kiss-shot, the 500-year old vampire Araragi finds bleeding in the subway station at that point a blonde and alluring figure of forbidden desire. Araragi is drawn to her in an unconscious death wish linked with the sexual desire he struggles to understand, running into the subway minutes after buying a pornographic magazine from a convenience store after striking up a friendship with fellow student Hanekawa. But once he saves her life, Kiss-shot is transformed into a cheeky little girl who now tells him that he is her minion and he must recover her severed limbs from a trio of vampire in order to be restored to humanity even as the power dynamic between them becomes confused and distorted.

In his vampire state, Araragi becomes immortal, powerful and free of mortal jeopardy yet he remains uncertain and insecure while reliant on the support of Hanekawa who encourages him to reject his desire for death and remain alive. But this also presents a problem to Araragi who sees himself as self-sacrificing and is unwilling to accept the what he sees as a self-sacrifice from Hanekawa for whom he feels unworthy and inadequate. In some senses it’s a typically self-centred, adolescent male perspective that rejects any idea of her own agency and assumes Hanekawa performs these actions for him rather than considering that she performs them for herself and is simply doing what she wants to do which in the end is not really about him at all. He declares it a burden he’s too weak to carry, which might in some senses be fair but also again a mischaracterisation that is further evidence of his lack of self-worth.

It’s this sense of inadequacy that lies behind his desire to reclaim his humanity along with the concurrent disgust he feels in the degradations of vampirism. It genuinely comes as a surprise to him that Kiss-shot feeds on human beings and lost her own humanity so long ago that she no longer gives it a second thought. She is after all only being what she is, but like Araragi is drawn to death partly out of frustrated longing and lingering boredom with a relentless yet apparently uneventful 500 years behind her in which the only other highlight was her previous minion who rejected this life much more quickly than she ever expected.

Even so, Oishi lends their mutual dilemma a degree of absurdity in the expectedly comic sight of severed heads littering a sports filed or launching themselves in toothy attacks. Heavily inspired by the French New Wave, he breaks the action with sometimes barely legible title cards often reading a single world while his composition has a kind of jauntiness that is also bleak and melancholy. The world surrounding Araragi veers between the pristine entrance to the high school, and post apocalyptic devastation littered with crows emblematised by the depilated cram school in which Kiss-shot keeps him. Backgrounds often have a photo realistic quality that further sets the world at a kilter when matched with the more conventional character designs of the central players. The conclusion that Araragi is presented with amounts a sharing of the misery which is also akin the burden he didn’t want to carry but also perhaps symbolic of his path towards adulthood in acceptance of compromise and selflessness in being willing to carry a small part of others’ pain and despair and allowing them to carry a part of his own.

Kizumonogatari -Koyomi Vamp- screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Pierce (刺心切骨, Nelicia Low, 2023)

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What are the limits of unconditional love and is it always a good thing? The hero of Nelica Low’s intense fraternal drama Pierce (刺心切骨, cì xīnqiè gǔ) is desperate to believe that his older brother is innocent of a crime he’s been imprisoned for for the last seven years, but in another sense it seems like the fact itself doesn’t matter to him. What he wants is the emotional intimacy of authenticity which is something he doesn’t seem to get from his steely mother intent on crafting a protective bubble of fantasy that may be as much for herself as her son.

In any case, Ai Ling (Ding Ning) is convinced that Zihan (Tsao Yu-ning) was born bad. She needs no convincing that when he stabbed his opponent with a broken blade during a fencing competition he did so knowingly and it was an act of murder rather than an accident as he claims. Zijie (Liu Hsui-fu), her sensitive younger son, is not so sure and feels that his mother’s total rejection of his brother is unfair. He needs to believe in part that Zihan is innocent because he once saved him from drowning though according to his mother if she had not arrived when she did Zihan would happily have watched him die. Ai Ling also says that she suspected Zihan had harmed Zijie during their childhood, but if this is true then Zijie appears not to remember it or perhaps willingly suppresses his memories of cruelty because it would be too difficult for him to accept that his own brother tried to kill him. 

But objectively speaking, there is something not quite right about Zihan who seems to be a charmer with manipulative tendencies. He was once a three time national fencing champion, and as he says fencing is all about figuring out your opponent’s intentions without letting them see your own. Of course, the way he behaves could equally be because of the way his mother behaves towards him. In some senses he too is a broken blade, apparently craving his mother’s approval and affection and perhaps becoming what she believed him to be out of frustration and resentment. He lies all too easily, crashing a dinner party with Ai Ling’s wealthy suitor Zhuang and his family and leaning into her cover story that he had been away studying medicine in the US while adding a touch of his own in a tearful story of wanting to specialise in radiology having watched his father painfully pass away of cancer. 

Of course, even if he is a raging sociopath, that doesn’t necessarily mean he committed an apparently motiveless murder or that he has no feelings at all for his brother who dotes on and idolises him with almost incestuous intensity. Zihan instantly picks up on the fact his brother is gay and that a boy in the fencing club has a crush on him, offering nothing other than support and reassurance of the kind he’d never get from Ai Ling. When Zhuang tries to set Zijie up with a girl and he declines, he broaches the idea he might not be straight but Ai Ling immediately changes the subject implying that probably she already knows but it’s another thing she’s papered over perhaps afraid that it might damage her relationship with Zhuang who appears to come from a wealthy family though they may not be as conservative as she fears them to be. 

In contract to the intimacy Zijie craves, beginning to confess himself, Ai Ling protects and distances herself from others through deliberate misrepresentation. Zhuang seems at least that he would be more upset about the deceit than that Ai Ling has a son who involved in a high profile, violent crime and also appears not to care that Zijie maybe gay while otherwise attempting to bond with him and be a sincere father figure. His love may in fact be unconditional in a way Ai Ling’s clearly is not whereas Zijie finds himself wavering, confronted by contradictory evidence that suggests his brother may not be so innocent after all. Deciding into a Grand Guignol fantasy in its final stretches, Low fills the screen with an ominous red, the billowing curtains creating an artificial dreamscape of ambiguous reality in which the brothers, each of them, discover at least their own truth and the answers they were seeking which may in its way be all they really needed.

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

Original trailer (English subtitles)

A Samurai in Time (侍タイムスリッパー, Junichi Yasuda, 2024) [Fantasia 2024]

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Is there something a little sad about being forced to reenact your reality as theatre, or is it something to be proud of in adapting to the times and bringing the essence of what you once were with you? Junichi Yasuda’s A Samurai in Time (侍タイムスリッパー, Samurai Time Slip) like A Boy and His Samurai sees an Edo-era retainer transported to the present day but is less about contrast with the feudal past than how to carry on or start again when your time has ended.

At least that’s how it is for Kosaka Shinzaemon (Makiya Yamaguchi), a member of the Aizu Clan loyal to the Tokugawa Shogunate in the twilight of the feudal era. In arriving in our present, he’s forced to admit that days of the samurai are long over, and finds himself a man with out a place, adrift in a classless society in which the only skill he possesses, swordsmanship, is all but obsolete. The irony is that, after being transported by a Terminator-style lightening strike, Shin arrives on the set of a jidaigeki, or samurai-themed television drama which is to say an artificial recreation of his reality. Thus he’s confused when he tries to ask passers-by for directions and they seem alarmed and ignore him while his attempt to intervene when a young lady is bullied by rogue samurai earns him a dressing down from a man in strange dress we obviously know is the director. When he’s knocked out from a bump on the head, everyone assumes he’s got amnesia and has become confused between his role as an extra on a samurai drama in which he may have overinvested and his “real” life, which in a way maybe true.

Just as he’d come from the end of the feudal era, so he’s arrived in the dying days of the jidaigeki. Once a mainstay of the entertainment industry in its heyday of the ’50s and ‘60s when historical dramas ruled the airwaves, the genre has long been in decline and somewhat out of favour with both filmmakers, seeing as they’re much more expensive to make, and audiences. In fact, the place where Shin arrives is a former shooting set that’s been turned into a theme park recreating the reality of the jidaigeki serial rather than that of the feudal era.

In an analogy which might prove slightly awkward, Shin’s fate is aligned with that of the jidageki itself but by accident of birth he is also on the wrong side of history both literally and metaphorically. As he later learns, his Aizu clan and the shogunate it served would not prevail. Yet ultimately he likes this new Japan, a place of prosperity where anyone and everyone is free to eat what to him seems like the food of the elite. Embarking on a career as a jidaigeki stuntman, a kiriyaku or extra who dies on screen, he becomes committed to protecting the jidaigeki in the same way he protected the shogunate even as everyone around him says he must be mad to take up this sort of work now when jobs are few and far between. 

To that extent, it’s really about learning to adapt to another reality preserving what you can (and wish to) about the past but continuing to move forward like a samurai living life fully in service of an ideal. In a sense, this is something the Aizu could not do for they were defeated during in the Boshin War which solidified the victory of progressive revolutionaries who believed that modernisation and Westernisation were the only ways to save Japan bringing the age of the samurai to a close. In strange ways, Shin finds himself re-enacting this internal dilemma through his meta performance, bringing a note of authenticity to the jidaigeki genre which as we can see from that being filmed is not always terribly serious or earnest about historical accuracy. 

There is though an earnest desire to preserve it, if also to modernise for a contemporary era accepting that the days of classic jidaigeki are over but the genre may live again if in different ways. Through roleplaying his internal conflict, Shin is able to overcome his lingering feelings of guilt towards the clan and attachment to the more destructive sides of the samurai code, rejecting his opportunity for revenge and deciding to live well instead in this brave new world seemingly filled with potential for reinvention and recreation in which the past need not be cast away or overwritten but carried forward into new futures of its own.

A Samurai in Time screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Yin Yang Master Zero (陰陽師ゼロ, Shimako Sato, 2024)

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In the Heian era, who was it that kept the social order in check if not the onmyoji or “Yin Yang Master”? Shimako Sato’s big budget fantasy drama is technically a kind of prequel origin story adapted from Baku Yumemakura’s series of novels which were previously adapted as pair of movies in the early 2000s, and introducing the young Abe no Seimei (Kento Yamazaki), a Detective Dee-esque exorcist working as a state magician to protect the nation from supernatural threats such as demons and curses in an era in which ordinary people lived side-by-side with goblins and monsters.

That said, Seimei doesn’t really believe in that sort of thing, though in an ironic twist knows it to have a kind of truth at least, and is sick of being called out to look at a potential goblin infestation that turns out to be nothing more than a creaky old house settling amid the changeable weather. Which is all to say, he is both an earnest scientist looking for rational explanations to strange phenomena and an excellent diviner who can catch a dragon spirit in a bottle. In a touch of the Sherlock Holmes, he’s also gruff and aloof, distinctly uninterested in achieving high position and makes no secret of his contempt for his fellow alchemists insisting the Ying Yang Masters merely perpetuate superstitions to keep people frightened and themselves in employment.

When one of the other alchemists turns up dead of a suspected curse, the cat is set amongst the pigeons as the young apprentices respond to the offer of his higher status spot of they can solve the crime. This of course exposes their own greed and vanity as they each fall over each other desperate for a chance to get another foot on the ladder in a hierarchal system, a step that must be taken if they’re to make it all the way to the position of the emperor’s advisor on spiritual matters. Seimei’s disinterest further arouses suspicion against him with a fellow alchemist already 45 years old and stuck at the bottom rank directly accusing him of the crime perhaps less out of a genuine conviction than a desire to advance himself. 

In any case, Seimei investigates in a more modern, scientific way gaining access to crime scene and corpse ironically through a connection he’s made at court to an influential musician, Hiromasa (Shota Sometani), who hired him to sort out a problem the princess, Yoshiko (Nao Honda), was having with snapping strings on her harp. That turned out to be caused by a giant golden dragon spirit which Seimei later claims represented her feelings for Hiromasa, who is also quietly in love with her, which are somewhat forbidden because of the class difference between them. In this way, the spirits are merely a manifestation of the conflict between personal feelings and the social order as Yoshiko finds herself all but powerless, a princess in a golden cage to be sent wherever she is called with no real say over her fate. 

Fittingly, these feelings are resolved in a kind of artificial reality that Seimei believes to be a space of shared consciousness though he’s also fond of remarking on the malleability of “reality” and the ways in which vision and perspective can be manipulated. Then again, he also says all that matters is what they are seeing and experiencing in that very moment which is as good a benchmark for objective reality as anything else. There is something quite poignant about his developing relationship with Hiromasa which has its homoerotic qualities even as he becomes the “idiot” stand in for the audience, a kind of Watson figure that Seimei can explain everything to so that he can explain it to us. Even we can see the restrictions of the court and the irony in the eventual victory of “order” rather than personal freedom as volatile emotional forces must be put back in their bottles lest they create problems for everyone. Such conditions will doubtless create a series of cases of Seimei and Hiromasa to solve in a potential series starring the ace exorcist and his flautist friend in a Heian society beautifully brought to life by Sato’s sumptuous production design and flair for fantasy action.

The Yin Yang Master Zero screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival

Original trailer (English subtitles)

House of Sayuri (サユリ, Koji Shiraishi, 2024) [Fantasia 2024]

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An excited family discover the perils of buying a “used” home in Koji Shiraishi anarchic haunted house horror House of Sayuri (サユリ, Sayuri). Unlike many other nations, Japan does not really have a comparable housing market as, given changing building regulations etc, it’s common to demolish the original structure and build a bespoke home in its place rather than move into one someone else has vacated. That obviously means that opting for an existing property can be a little bit cheaper, which is presumably how the Kakimis have finally managed to move into what they describe as the dream home, escaping a cramped city apartment for a spacious rural mansion with room enough for grandma and grandpa too.

Of course, this particular home is probably cheaper because something untoward once happened there, though the Kamikis probably don’t know that, and everyone who’s lived there since has moved out a short time later. In a way referencing Shiraishi’s previous work, we can’t really tell whether the malevolent spirit wants the family out or is merely trapped in a loop of revenge on the family that badly betrayed them. In any case, it makes its way through the Kamiki family unit starting with daughter Keiko and causing all manner of strange events in the house. Sensibly, older son Norio begins to ask why they don’t just move but the parents are so committed to their dream of homeownership that they can’t bear the thought and remain determined to hang on to it at whatever cost. 

In any case, some wise words from grandma advance a more positive way of battling the ghost, that they should fight it with the force of their lives. They laugh in its face and shout vulgar phrases that send it scuttling away in outrage. The best way to fight the darkness, grandma says, is to live well. Like the house itself, it seems grandma has a well hidden secret that makes her the film’s key asset, a hilarious force of nature and eternal wise woman otherwise ignored because her dementia undermines her credibility. Meanwhile, Norio makes an unexpected friend at school who just happens to be a psychic and is keen to warn that a little girl ghost has latched on to him and it would obviously be better if he could just move out on account of all the evil emanations that appear to be coming from his home.

But as grandma says, it’s the grudges of the living they ought to be afraid of. The house of course holds its secrets and its labyrinthine, multilevel structure is perfect for concealing them. Unfortunately the Kamikis have bought into this poisoned legacy and slowly start seeing their familial bonds fracturing while the ghost takes advantage of their vulnerabilities, their negative emotions and insecurities. In a sense it becomes a question of whether they can endure a place of trauma to maintain their dreams of homeownership or are prepared to make the more sensible decision of ceding ground and moving somewhere less toxic while Norio tries to reclaim his place in his family and protect what remains of it. 

Truly heading in some unexpected directions particularly in its unpredictable send half, the film takes on an absurdist quality but also returns to classic genre tropes of the legacy of child abuse and the betrayal of a parent who saw and did nothing perhaps because, like the Kamikis, they were prepared to accept this this kind of toxicity to maintain a happy family home and be seen as a model upper-middle class family living in a country mansion. It turns out, the only way to exorcise this much more literal ghost is by directly confronting the traumatic past and attempting to find accommodation with it be that through violence or forgiveness. But as grandma had said, the best weapon is love and life, throwing back at the ghost what it no longer has in a defiant expression of being alive and that joy contains which is also of course as grandpa had said a way of honouring the dead resolving to make the most of one’s remaining time in their memory. In any case, Norio discovers that you do not have to continue living in a haunted house but unlike a ghost are in fact free to leave the scene of trauma and seek new happiness in a less upsetting place.

House of Sayuri screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

FAQ (막걸리가 알려줄거야, Kim Da-min 2024) [Fantasia 2024]

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The sad thing is that Dong-chun, the heroine of Kim Da-min’s charming if also searingly bleak exploration of a Korean education FAQ (막걸리가 알려줄거야), is full of questions the adults around her don’t want to answer. To be charitable, it could be because they want her to have the ability to solve problems on her own, but less so because in the adult world there really is only one correct answer and finding solutions that are entirely your own can make others uncomfortable. 

This is something Dong-chun starts to realise, remarking that she now understands why adults don’t like it when you ask questions when her two imaginary friends ask her how she’s going to explain that she got the winning lottery numbers from a bottle of makgeolli that communicates with her through morse code but in Persian. Even Dong-chun knows, she probably shouldn’t mention that part out loud but there’s something quite poignant about the fact that the makgeolli is her only real friend. Her tendency to ask questions, which is difficult for her because of he shyness, has already seen her labelled as weird as by several of her classmates including the obnoxious Na-young who pretends to get along with her because their mothers are friends but is really much more of a model child try hard already obsessed with being on the right track and getting in the best lane for the university application she won’t be writing for another decade.

That’s something else that’s difficult and inexplicable. The education system keeps changing so you can’t even try to game it because they constantly move the goalposts. The reason why the mothers enrol the girls in Persian classes is because they think top universities will be making special offers to people who speak Persian when they come to apply, but also they might not. Concerned that she’ll be disadvantaged by her short stature, Dong-chun’s mother Hae-jin starts injecting her with a growth serum and advises she go to bed earlier, but the girl points out that she needs to stay up to 11pm to finish all her homework. She has cram school and activities nearly every day including an art class that doesn’t even start until 9pm. No one seems to be asking what effects persistent sleep deprivation may have on her later life and mental health besides impacting her height. 

In short, it’s not surprising if her mind’s begun to crack under the constant pressure of being forced to conform to a very rigid sense of social success which begins in early childhood and largely disregards everything that makes Dong-chun interesting from her insatiable curiosity to her empathetic nature and bashful friendliness. We can also get a glimpse ahead by looking at the life of her mother, Hae-jin, who reveals that she suffers from depression in part because she won a full scholarship to a good university and had a high paying corporate job she was pressured to give up to become a housewife and mother. A therapist perhaps problematically told her that she had the wrong attitude because she was now doing the most important thing in the world by raising a child which is why she begins pinning all her vicarious hopes on Dong-chun as a vessel for her own success as a mother in submitting herself to the nation’s relentlessly patriarchal social codes. 

Dong-chun’s parents aren’t bad people, they love her and are actively supportive. They aren’t angry when she experiences stage fright at a speech competition and later tell her she can sit the next one out if she feels uncomfortable (genuinely, not out of a desire to avoid their own embarrassment). But they’re so focussed on her future they’re missing her present, which is why it takes Hae-jin so long to realise she’s fermenting makgeolli in her room. Later she reflects that perhaps they should move to another country, one where Dong-chun would be free to be herself but it may already be too late. In any case, we can see Hae-jin’s contempt for those who choose to live outside of Korea’s rigid ideas of social success in her reaction on finally finding her long lost brother who graduated from Seoul University and had a big corporate job but dropped out to be hippy living off grid. He doesn’t know it and neither does she, but he ends up forming an unexpected connection with his neice Dong-chun being one of the few people who actually listens to her. 

When it finally speaks, the makgeolli has the voice of her science teacher who was the only person who did actually answer one of her questions if only to explain that know one knows yet but he’ll be sure to pass on the information when they do. In a way, getting this cosmic message and focussing how to solve this great mystery at the centre of her life help Dong-chun find her direction even if it’s leading towards “fermentation” in the great black hole of adulthood. The ambiguity of the ending restores a kind of darkness to Kim’s quirky tale but in any case allows Dong-chun to escape through the imagination and free herself from the constraints of a rigid society in which asking questions, let alone answering them, is very much not the done thing. 

FAQ screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Breaking and Re-entering (還錢, Wang Ding-Lin, 2024)

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You go to the trouble of planning a massive heist, and then it turns out you have to put it all back again. The gang of theives at the centre of Wang Ding-Lin’s hugely entertaining crime caper Breaking and Re-entering (還錢, huán qián) brand themselves modern day Robin Hoods, pausing for a laugh when they claim to help the poor, “yeah, us”. Yet there is something a little suggestive about this particular gig as they find themselves hired for an inside job by an obnoxious bank chief who claims the most important thing in life is yourself and those around you are merely passengers to be jettisoned at will..

Chen (Wu Kang-ren) is a rich kid who inherited the family bank and thinks he’s hot stuff after studying abroad, speaking Mandarin like foreigner and peppering his speech with English. His big idea is a cryptocurrency called BST and his tagline is “Peace, Love, and Money” while ironically enough he is also claiming to run a charity to help the poor. It’s obvious he’s running some kind of scam and not altogether surprising that he’d plot to rob his own back and then have the thieves bumped off to keep them quiet along with the two employees he’s decided to frame for the crime. Unfortunately for everyone, one of his scapegoats, Shen Shu-wen (Cecilia Choi), is the long lost flame of chief crook Po-chun (Chen Bo-lin) who, having realised Chen plans to bump her off, comes to the conclusion his only option is to mess up Chen’s plan by putting the money back in the vault.  

Of course, Chen is a kind of gang leader too complete with his own chief minion, Hu, though at one point he simply shoots one of his guys in the back of the head after he complains that Chen that doesn’t really value him. By contrast, Po-chun’s gang is a close-knit family, a brotherhood of thieves founded on mutual solidarity and infinite loyalty. Chen’s philosophy maybe that the individual is all, but these men live and die for each other. Nevertheless, Po-chun has a problematic hero complex that sees him, as others put it, aways trying to “take responsibility alone”, sacrificing himself for the group rather than allow his fellow gang members to shoulder some of the burden. That’s presumably one reason he (un)intentionally ghosted Shu-wen after getting arrested and going to prison, convincing himself he was doing the noble thing by avoiding getting Shu-wen mixed up with crime but perhaps also ashamed and insecure unwilling to let her know he met her as part of a heist and his cover personality wasn’t real while never giving much thought to her feelings. Shu-wen spent the last five years looking for him which was apparently a primary motivation for changing her career to work in the bank.

Po-chun’s quest is really one of maturity, to stop being the lone hero and fully integrate into the group by sharing responsibility with the others rather than jump straight to self-sacrifice. As he says through the medium of a montage sequence, their secret weapon is teamwork which is how they’re able to fight back against the well equipped Chen and his minions when the reason Chen flounders is his arrogance and the indifference of his men. That is not to say there isn’t tension in the team, such as the unrequited attraction bruiser Wen-hao has for Po-chun that is quite definitely antagonised by the resurfacing of Shu-wen who seems to have figured out the group dynamics pretty quickly in addition to seeing through Po-chun’s strong man act. 

It’s the warm-hearted, lived-in relationships between the team members that give the film it’s charm along with the quirkiness of the elaborately planned reverse heist and its mild dig at corporate tyranny along with class-based inequality. But most of all what it seems to advocate for is a collective spirit and the triumph of the intellect over the pampered authority of rich kid Chen as Po-chun strategises a way out of his grasp while ending his influence and getting the girl. Wholesome and charming, the film makes the most of its surreal humour along with some hilariously placed reality gags such the infuriating slowness of a “high end automatic door” that ironically prevents a wealthy crook from fleeing the scene.

Breaking and Re-entering screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival and is also screening as part of the Taiwan Film Festival in Australia

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Umbrella Fairy (伞少女, Shen Jie, 2024) [Fantasia 2024]

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Should you be bound by the past or try to forge your own destiny? It might be an odd question seeing as the central thesis of Shen Jie’s gorgeously detailed animation The Umbrella Fairy (伞少女, sǎn shàonǚ) is that every object has a soul which has developed over its lifetime and often bound to whoever originally owned it. Though what these fairies, perhaps subversively, learn is that they have will of their and should not be bound by the desires of their former masters but are free to decide their destinies for themselves.

In typical folktale fashion, a block of black jade is split in two and used to create an umbrella, which implies protection, and sword which is itself somewhat cursed wreaking death and destruction where it is found. In our world, it seems that peace has prevailed but the princess has had to abdicate her kingdom meaning that she no longer feels fit to carry her most treasured possession, The Imperial Umbrella, and places it in a repository for relics along with the Sword. There a heartbroken Qingdai tries to get used to her new life among the similarly discarded fairies while fulfilling her former mistress’ orders that she should try to look after her sister Wanggui, spirit of the Black Sword. But Wanggui is hurt and vengeful. She resents the death of her former owner and vows revenge, threatening to plunge the nation back into chaos. 

Of course, the point of the sword and the umbrella is balance and the idea is they should work in work in harmony with neither in the ascendent. The vision of the outside world we get when Qingdai ventures off in search of the escaped Wanggui is of a wounded nation still trying to repair itself in much the same way as craftsmen Mo Yang attempts to repair the objects in the archive not so much restoring them to their former glory as adapting them for a new life. Yet we can see that objects are also a way for the living to mediate their sense of loss while embracing something that is permanent but not perhaps unchanging. Thus Qingdai and Mo Yang find themselves repairing a damaged flute the sound of which only brought pain to the Governor for it belonged to a musician who, again a little subversively, seems like he may have been more than a friend and gave his life in service of the Governor at the end of the war. Once repaired the flute has a different yet familiar sound and is passed on to a new owner to make with it what they will while accepting its legacy. 

In many ways it’s about taking the past with you, but also learning to let it go. The fairies think that they’re powerless. They can’t touch any solid objects and humans, even the ones they care so much about, cannot see them. But they do in fact have power and there are things they can do to shift the world, Qingdai’s unusual strength not withstanding. Under the guidance of Mo Yang, who becomes not quite a love interest but a kindred spirit, she begins to realise that she does have agency and is free to make her own decisions rathe than remain slavishly devoted to the desires of her former mistress. Wanggui perhaps learns something similar, rediscovering and redefining her purpose to determine to fight for something rather than flailing around in hurt and anger sowing the seeds of chaos wherever she goes. 

The again, the mystery villain is a cursed mirror who has centuries of pain in ironically being forever unseen for when people look into it they only wish to see themselves. Yet as Wanggui later says, there is something powerful in Qingdai’s surrounding herself with love while protecting all with her umbrella even if some in the outside world would be content to strip it for parts. Beautifully animated, the character design and aesthetic leans closer to Japanese anime than many recent Chinese animations which otherwise rooted themselves in cultural traditions such as ink painting and established mythology but otherwise spins a tale of learning to find oneself again in the wake of loss as a free spirit free from petty tyrannies and wider oppressions forever on your own journey fixing things as you go. 

The Umbrella Fairy screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)