Category: Festivals

3670 (Park Joon-ho, 2025)

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In recent years, indie films about North Koreans in the South have focused on the discrimination they face and how difficult it can be for them to integrate into South Korean society, not because of how different it is from everything they’ve known, but because the South doesn’t quite accept them. The problems of the hero of 3670 are, however, two-fold in that he is also gay and finding it difficult to straddle both communities while looking for companionship.

The opening scene finds him having sex with a guy from a dating app in a darkened room, but as soon as they’re finished, his partner gets up to shower and insists on leaving, refusing Cheol-jun’s (Cho You-hyun) invitations to get dinner and clearly uninterested either in friendship or romance. He asks him where he’s from, and on figuring out he’s from the North, rolls his eyes a little asking if he doesn’t have any gay friends yet. Cheol-jun doesn’t have any South Korean friends at all, let alone gay ones, and has never met any other gay people who left North Korea. He’s never disclosed the fact that he is gay to his North Korean friends or aunt living in the South who is his only familial link, which leads to moments of accidental insensitivity when his friends push him to date a North Korean girl they mistakenly think is interested in him, and his aunt tells him to settle down and get married in the South as his parents would have wanted him to.

The film seems a little ambivalent about Cheol-jun’s third community which is the Church. While it might be as Cheol-jun says helpful in a lot of ways in giving him something to belong to and helping with things like scholarship applications, it’s somewhat exploitative in that their help is obviously conditional on Cheol-jun accepting their religious beliefs which are otherwise in conflict with desire to find freedom as a gay man. Cheol-jun sometimes picks up extra money speaking at Church events in which he outlines how grateful he is to have been “saved” by the grace of God which brought him to the South away from the Godless North. Unlike other similarly themed films, 3670 doesn’t tread any further into how those from the North can be almost fetishised and exploited for their stories, but it is clear that that the Church is also using him to further their own aims. On the advice of his hookup date, Cheol-jun ends up attending a mixer for gay men which he keeps secret from his North Korean friends where he meets Yeong-jun (Kim Hyeon-mok), a gay man of the same age who lives in his area and shops at the convenience store where he has a part-time job, and later gets him a paying gig speaking about his salvation at his church.

Yeong-jun’s mother is a deaconess, and it seems that, in some ways, Yeong-jun is even less free that Cheol-jun who is beginning to discover a new kind of freedom as he introduces him to the gay scenes in Jogno and Itaewon. He views himself as inferior because he doesn’t believe himself to be conventionally attractive and has been having trouble passing the interview process to get a job (possibly those two things are somewhat connected in his mind). Yeong-jun also hasn’t said anything to his mother about being gay and sometimes goes to church to placate her even though he thinks there’s no place for him there as a gay man with the rather repressive religion that his mother practices. When he gets a job and is fully independent, he plans to stop attending church, making clear that for him, as a gay man in a capitalistic society, his freedom rests in financial security and achieving socially defined success by joining the workforce.

The fact that’s capitalism to which Cheol-jun must adjust himself is echoed in his advisor’s advice that he needs to market himself and give the university he’s trying to apply to a reason to choose him over another candidate. When he becomes a member of Yeong-jun’s friendship group, they also tell him that he needs a “selling point”, which they think should be his North Koreanness. But in an odd way, these ironic words of advice do lead to him becoming more at home with himself even if he’s also still caught between these two communities. With his North Korean friends, he dresses in a dowdier style, but puts on fashionable clothes and a university baseball cap to hang out in queer spaces with Yeong-jun. He tells his North Korean friends that he’s going to visit his aunt while occasionally blowing them off to see his gay friends, making it clear that he cannot exist simultaneously in both spaces as a North Korean and as a gay man.

But as much as Cheol-jun begins to find himself, Yeong-jun founders. Cheol-jun overhears some of his gay friends making fun of him for his North Koreanness and suggesting they only hung out with him out of pity, robbing him of this new community through spite and bitchiness rooted in a series of misunderstandings along with the social dynamics within the gay community and the friendship group itself. Nevertheless, when he does actually meet another North Korean man through the hook-up app, he helps him accept himself too by introducing him to these queer spaces in much the same way Yeong-jun did and showing him that it’s alright and it’s not as difficult or frightening to inhabit these spaces as he might have assumed it to be. 

Cheol-jun finds freedom here, at least much more freedom than he would have in the North. He’s not in the same kind of danger. But even many of the men in Yeong-jun’s friendship group are closeted and live as “straight” men, keeping quite about their private lives and restricting their authentic selves to Itaewon and Jogno, much as Cheol-jun keeps his North Korean and gay selves separate until he eventually decides to confide in some of his friends and finds them unexpectedly supportive because like him they too are here in search of happiness. The title of the film comes from a code Yeong-jun’s friends use to organise meetups hinting at their clandestine nature and desire to avoid inviting outsiders into their secure community. Cheol-jun, by contrast, is now free to wear his trendy clothes with his North Korean friends and to be open and unguarded in either community, effectively eliding the division between the two. Though his relationship with Yeong-jun who evidently meant a lot to him and changed his life in many ways may have been disrupted by the societal realities of the South from lookism not just in the gay community but the wider society to conventional definitions of success and entrenched homophobia along with the way they impact on a man like Yeong-jun, Cheol-jun has perhaps discovered a home for himself and a kind of freedom in his life as a gay North Korean man in the South.

3670 screens as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Hi-Five (하이파이브, Kang Hyoung-chul, 2025)

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If you suddenly developed super powers, what would you do with them? Would you start using them for good to save the people around you, or would you become obsessed with the power itself and try to amass more of it while your using abilities only for your own ends? Those at the centre of Kang Hyoung-chul’s superhero comedy Hi-Five (하이파이브) are firmly in the helping others camp, but they’ve seen enough movies to know that every hero needs a villain and there’s someone else out there who wants their power for themselves.

That would be ageing cult leader Eternal Young-chun (Shin Goo), New God Resurrected. Young-chun is just ripping his followers off and doesn’t believe in anything he preaches but has, on the other hand, started to believe in his own divinity. He’s been keeping himself in good health through frequent organ donations from less fortunate people to the extent that his body’s a kind of Ship of Theseus. His daughter’s fed up with his longevity and hoping he’ll finally snuff it so she can take over, which is why she’s after the five in the hope of taking them out before Young-chun can steal all of their transplanted organs too. It turns out that the pancreas he was given was taken from a superhero who took his own life and has not only rejuvenated his body but given him the ability to suck the life force out of other people to empower himself in a more literal way than he’s already feeding off his followers by exploiting their devotion to convince them to give up all their money and assets or else work themselves to death for free.

The other five commonly transplanted organs were given other people who are all marked with a tattoo and have been given powers of their own, though one of them hasn’t figured out what hers is yet. In contrast to Young-chun’s soullessness, each of the five seems to have had their own problems that are only impacted by their transplants rather than directly caused by them. Teenager Wan-seo (Lee Jae-in) received the heart and is frustrated by her overprotective father who constantly asks about her friends though she keeps saying she doesn’t have any because she was ill for so long and had to skip school for treatment which is why struggling to make any new ones. He won’t let her do taekwondo either, though that’s what she most wants to do and possibly why she ended up with the all powerful, super speedy fighter skills. Ji-sung (Ahn Jae-hong), meanwhile, is a struggling screenwriter with an interest in the superhero genre. He doesn’t have any friends either, which may be to do with a poor career decision that alienated him from his community. Though he’s the first one to want to get the group together, he’s soon consumed by cynicism. Ji-sung got the lungs and can blow things away, but struggles to convey his emotions with words and gets into an alpha male hissy fit with Ki-dong (Yoo Ah-in), a super-sharp guy who got the corneas and can manipulate electricity but is actually a bit of a loser with gambling issues and similar interpersonal issues to Ji-sung.

Middle-aged yogurt lady Seon-nyeo (Ra Mi-ran) got the kidneys and can’t figure out what her superpower is but becomes the force who holds the group together. Even so, she’s battling mental health issues and some guilt about something that happened in her past and caused unintended harm to another person. Factory foreman Heel-han (Kim Hee-won) is a devotee of the cult, but frustrated and conflicted by the obvious disregard for workers’ safety and wellbeing. He got the liver, and can heal minor wounds caused by recent accidents. The reason he has no friends is that he cut off all of his relationships when he joined the cult, which is one other reason he doesn’t want to make a fuss about the abuse of workers and is originally flattered by Young-chun’s attention.

Nevertheless, it’s becoming part of the group that allows them to save each other and themselves figuratively and literally in combining their strengths to battle Young-chun, who is after all also sort of a part of them and a member of their family as another recipient of organs from the same person. Kang imbues their somewhat clumsy heroism with a quirky humour, even giving the occasional use of CGI a comedic, comic book aesthetic to lean into what might otherwise be a minor liability though production design and values are top-notch. It’s a shame the film was held up for four years by Yoo Ah-in’s drug arrest which has severely hampered his career and led to most of his unreleased work being shelved at the time, otherwise this might have gone on to become a fun movie franchise with deepening lore led by a likeable cast of everypeople using their powers for good in small but important ways. Still, just this episode alone is plenty of warmhearted fun as the gang come together to expose Young-chun’s vain and selfish cult leader for the conman he is, saving themselves and freeing those like them who fell victim to his lies.

Hi-Five screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

What Does That Nature Say to You (그 자연이 네게 뭐라고 하니, Hong Sang-soo, 2025)

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“But you’ve got your father behind you,” Junhee’s (Kang So-yi) older sister Neunghee (Park Mi-so) points to her sister’s boyfriend, Donghwa (Ha Seong-guk), meeting her family for the first time despite dating Junhee seriously for three years. But that’s not the way Donghwa likes to think about it, preferring to deny his privilege and insist that, as he does not take accept anything from his famous father, he’s an “independent” man. This notion is quickly squashed by Junhee who otherwise seems to have accepted Donghwa’s way of life when she admits that it’s more like Donghwa doesn’t like accepting anything from him, but will ask for money when he’s truly desperate. Neunghee subtly tries to remind him that whatever he might say about it, his life is only possible because he has a safety net and to insist otherwise is superficial and childish. But superficial and childish is exactly what Donghwa slowly exposes himself to be in Hong Sang-soo’s latest lacerating character drama, What Does That Nature Say to You? (그 자연이 네게 뭐라고 하니, Geu Jayeoni Nege Mworago Hani)

Donghwa is also, apparently, a little vain in that he needs glasses but doesn’t wear them so to him the world is always a little fuzzy around the edges. This might also explain why Hong films in low grade digital, much like In Water, rendering this otherwise idyllic mountain setting somewhat ugly and ill-defined. Donghwa wasn’t even supposed to be meeting Junhee’s parents today, which is why they sat in his car round the corner for ages after he drove her from Seoul before accidentally bumping into her father so he had little choice other than to stay. He said he’d come two years ago, but for whatever reason didn’t. Neunghee thinks it’s odd they’ve been putting off marriage, cautioning her sister that the “right time” never really exists and you don’t necessarily need to overthink these things, though increasingly she seems to come to the conclusion that the relationship isn’t strong enough because of Donghwa’s insecurities and Junhee’s lack of certainty. Junhee describes her as “depressed”, though Neunghee seems quite upbeat and though you could argue is basically doing the same as Donghwa in relying on her parents while she figures things out, seems to have more of a direction and self-awareness about the way she’s living her life. 

Though the initial meeting seems to go well and Donghwa bonds with his father-in-law Oryeong (Kwon Hae-hyo), he has a minor falling out with Junhee after she objects to some of his philosophical ramblings complaining that sometimes she thinks he waxes on about the ineffability of the universe in order to escape his problems. Oryeong later says something similar, that he spends his life evading things, while Jun-hee’s mother Sun-hee (Cho Yun-hee) laments that he hasn’t yet collided with reality and that’s why his poetry lacks substance even though he claimed to be a “poet”. When he says he likes the simple life and is wary of materialism, it’s difficult to know whether it’s a real position or merely an attempt to gloss over his lack of financial standing.

A now irritated Oreyong criticises him for not having his life more in order at the age of 35. Son of a famous TV lawyer or not, he doubts Junhee will be happy with a man still working part time at a wedding venue and as an ad hoc photographer on the weekends. Everyone keeps needling Donghwa about his old banger of a car, a Kia Pride from 1996 for which Oreyong thinks he paid too much seeing as it’s not old enough to be a “classic” car nor reliable enough for use as an everyday vehicle. Donghwa says he just likes it, before admitting that he doesn’t have the money for a new one anyway. The same goes for his recent adoption of facial hair with Oreyong criticising him for only doing it half-heartedly rather than going for the full bohemian poet aesthetic, though he’s likely done it to look a bit more manly and distinguished to gloss over his increasing insecurities about being the only son of a successful man who can’t escape his father’s shadow and still doesn’t seem to have figured himself out as an independent person.

Asking Donghwa what he likes about Junhee might not be entirely fair. It’s not as if love needs a reason. But his characterisation of her as an “angel” is also superficial, even if her family’s constant remarking on her upright character might be the same. Yet for all that, this awkward meeting filled with social niceties, and the wisdom of Junhee’s parents who think this relationship is not likely to last but know it’s better to let Junhee figure that out for herself, might be the collision with reality that Donghwa has been needing in showing him how childish and superficial his behaviour and lifestyle and have really been. Or at least, he’s beginning to realise they’re right about the car and maybe it’s time he set himself up straight if he is actually serious about his future with Junhee.

What Does That Nature Say to You screens as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Frosted Window (흐린 창문 너머의 누군가, Kim Jong-kwan, 2025)

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The title Frosted Window (흐린 창문 너머의 누군가, heulin changmun neomeoui nugunga) refers to the film’s final segment, a meta meditation on grief and loss, but, on the other hand, it’s true enough that we sometimes look at the world through a blurred lens and meet each other through an imperfect abstraction. A three-part portmanteau film, each of the segments takes place in a different season, with the opening titles perhaps standing in for an otherwise unseen spring, and reflect the director’s flights of fancy in imagining the lives of those living in the quiet backstreets of Seochon in Seoul, which is known for its literary associations and historical architecture.

It may be its maze-like quality that gives rise to so many differing tales, but in the first segment, at least, it stands in as another place as a lovelorn artist tries to pick up various women by bothering them while they are minding their own business in public places. The first is in a German coffee shop, where he speaks to a woman in English assuming her to be a foreigner because she has international vibes and is reading a book in German, but she is actually Korean, if having lived abroad for many years, which is awkward. Nevertheless, he carries on trying to chat her up while she tolerates him. Eventually he gets the message and leaves, trying to pick up another foreign woman in the street before backing off when she’s joined by a foreign man. The artist seems to a romantic who finds inspiration in these quests for love and advises his friend, a blocked writer, to go for a walk in search of romance in order to reawaken his creativity.

But a man who is also a blocked writer played by the same actor turns up in the second part where he is both an observer and an object. A woman calls a man to an upscale bar and drinks expensive whisky with him. The man is clearly interested in her, though he has a girlfriend he’s become tired of but won’t break up with, but she seems uninterested in him even as she continues to behave flirtatiously. There’s obviously something else going on, but it’s not originally clear if she wanted to toy with him a while, is making fun of him by exploiting his attraction to her to get him to make a fool of himself (to which he gladly obliges), or has something against his unseen girlfriend, on whom this is all very unfair no matter which way you look at it. It is, however, a performance for the barman, who watches silently until the woman comes back later to ask him what he thought.

The woman, a local beautician, along with another from the florist’s who reunites with the artist in the October-set first tale, reappear in the last one echoing the sense of a fictional world that begins to take over as one story gives way to another. This time we have two artists, an actress who has been taking some time out, and a female film director she has worked with previously, who meet by chance in a cafe of which this area seems to have a lot considering its size. As the director outlines the story, we see the actress playing her role blurring the lines between the layers of “reality” present in this segment and the film as a whole. We have been, in some ways, like the barman passive observers with each of these tales performed for our benefit, but this last meta segment allows the actress to begin processing the weight of a loss which may be her own.

She is saved, in a way, by the friendly atmosphere of Seochon and the kindness of strangers that restore her sense of self-worth, both as an actress and person. The actress tells the director that though she had taken only a small break, people had already forgotten her and so her return to acting has been more difficult than anticipated with no offers of major roles, only smallish, walk-on parts. The encounter with a fan shows her that she had been missed and there are those who are waiting to see her again on screen, so her life and career had not been pointless and there is a path forward for her in the wake of her loss. This is perhaps testament to the frosty window of Seochon, home to a thousand stories, and a gentle warmth that seems to emanate even in the depths of winter. 

Frosted Window screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Blind Love (失明, Julian Chou, 2025)

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There’s none so blind as those who refuse to see, as the old saying would have it. Though in Julian Chou’s Blind Love (失明, shīmíng) the problem is often more an obsession with the gaze of others that prevents its lonely protagonists from looking within and coming to an acceptance of themselves along with what it is they really want out of life. Set before Taiwan’s legalisation of same sex marriage, the film positions patriarchal heteronormativity as the cage in which the heroine willingly imprisons herself in fear and shame.

It’s telling that on being discovered with her girlfriend Xue-jin (Wu Ke-xi) when they were university students, Shu-yi (Ariel Lin) immediately jumps to the shame she feels in having done this to her mother. When the two women are together, it’s a bubble of perfect happiness, but on gazing at herself from the outside, Shu-yi feels only disgust in her feelings for Xue-jin and at some point evidently chose “properness” and conformity. Years later, when her mother has lost her sight and is living in a nursing home, she snaps at the nurse not to call her daughter because she’s married to a doctor and therefore very busy. Though it’s an odd moment, she says this with pride as if her own life were fulfilled by her daughter’s “successful” transition to wife to a professional man and mother to his sons. But it also seems as if this continual unseeing as manifested in her mother’s literal blindness is what later leads her to take her own life when forced to look inside herself while otherwise rendered dependent on Shu-yi and her unsympathetic husband Feng (Frederick Lee).

Feng is a selfish and unkind man who rules his home with an authoritarian iron fist. When Shu-yi tentatively hints that it might be better for her mother to live with them, he doesn’t answer but then immediately needles her, asking if she’s put on weight and whether the dress she’s supposed to wear to an important dinner will still fit. The domestic environment is rendered as a prison in which there is no natural light. The furnishings are cold and grey, as if there were no love or warmth here, and Shu-yi is under constant observation to ensure she plays her roles effectively. Feng sees his family only as tools or extensions of himself. He paints the picture of a perfect family to smooth his path to career success by ingratiating himself with the influential Doctor Gu and though Mrs Gu later sees through Shu-yi and is aware of the cracks within her marriage, chooses to unsee them and encourages Shu-yi to do the same by reaccepting her duty to dissolve herself within her husband’s ambitions even if her heart lies elsewhere. 

Feng exerts the same pressures on his teenage son, Han (Jimmy Liu Jing), by insisting that he study medicine though Han is now too old to submit himself to his father’s authority. You can’t let others decide for you, he tells a friend, and is told the same by Xue-jin whom he meets by chance and unwittingly falls for not knowing that she is his mother’s long-lost love. Xue-jin might seem like a more liberated soul having divorced her husband and accepted her sexuality while pursing her art as a photographer, which is of course the art of seeing, but her drink problem also hints at her loneliness and unresolved longing for Shu-yi. “You think what we do is wrong,” she tells Shu-yix with frustration, but Shu-yi can only answer, “How could be right?” before returning to her conformist life with all of its misery.

When she tells her younger son Rui that all that matters is how other people view you and asks him why he can’t just be “normal”, it’s as if she’s talking to herself. As the three of them pass through the pride parade and Rui asks what’s going on, Feng tells him that there are two kinds of people, the “normal” and the “abnormal” and that the people parading want to be seen as “normal” though they are not. Shu-yi pushes hard on the accelerator in anger and frustration, but it’s a divide she’s internalised within herself and remains unable to see that her love for Xue-jin is normal and natural. A woman in the bathroom at Feng’s dinner suggestively offers her her lipstick, explaining that it’s “the best form of camouflage for people like us,” before kissing her and leaving having rewakened Shu-yi’s latent desire. Hiding within this world of traditional femininity is the way Shu-yi has chosen to sublimate her desires and the concurrent self-loathing, but is also, in its way, an act of self-harm and means of punishing herself that amounts to a kind of suicide.

Only while making love with Xue-jin does she become fully herself before the self-recrimination finally kicks back in. Their connection is raw and honest, filled with tenderness and yearning, yet Shu-yi struggles to embrace happiness or accept her authentic self by escaping from the patriarchal superstructure represented by her mother and her husband’s authoritarianism. Chou ends on an ambiguous note in which Shu-yi is perhaps learning to see the truth of herself, but her world still appears cold and grey as if suggesting that, in the end, this kind of happiness and fulfilment is still not permitted to her even if she has finally accepted what kind of life it is that she wants.

Blind Love screens as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

The System (行規, Peter Yung Wai-Chuen, 1979)

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“How else can people like me survive?” a unwilling informant ironically asks in Peter Yung Wai-Chuen’s New Wave cops and robbers thriller The System (行規), while Inspector Chan (Pai Ying) is already far too aware of the ironic symbiosis of law enforcement and crime. He’s dependent on informants to be able to do his job and catch the kingpins, but that means the informants continue to perpetuate crime. Even when they manage to make an arrest, they have to let the suspect go because it turns out that they’re already cooperating with another officer. The police aren’t so much solving crimes as, at best, managing, if not actually enabling them.

Director Peter Yung drew on research he’d done for a documentary to depict police work and the realities of drugs in late British Colonial Hong Kong in a more authentic way, often using held camera and shooting on location out in the streets. Chan is seen as something of a zealot, an idealistic cop too pure-hearted to understand his colleagues’ dirty jokes and with a penchant for retreating to Lantau Island to go bird-watching, even if his address to his officers is a little on the crude side. Nevertheless, even if he hates police corruption, he’s not above playing this game and is keen to recruit exclusive informants of his own, essentially by blackmailing them, finding evidence of crimes they’ve committed and promising to overlook it if they agree to feed him information. 

That’s how he recruits Tam (Sek Kin), a drug user with a gambling problem working for a syndicate run by Hung (Nick Lam Wai-Kei), the kingpin Chan has been trying to catch for a decade. But at the same time, Tam appears to keep his life of crime separate from that as a family man with two children and an ailing mother. He doesn’t really want to help Chan because he fears retribution from Hung, but he doesn’t want to go to prison for 36 years and leave his family destitute, either. Tam may be carrying on with underworld figure Third Auntie (Lisa Chiao Chiao) who runs the domino parlour which acts as a hub for the gang, but he’s not necessarily bad or dangerous, just someone trying to live under this oppressive system.

For those reasons, the relationship between the two men is tense and fraught with danger and resentment. The first operation ends up going wrong when Customs interferes, arresting Third Auntie which is a huge problem for Tam as is the fact they seized the drugs, which is a problem for Hung. But even Hung knows how this game works. He knows Tam betrayed him by working with the police, but he doesn’t necessarily blame him. He just asks for the money he assumes the police paid him in exchange for the lost drugs, and also has Tam beaten up for good measure. The beating in particular causes Tam to resent Chan and plot revenge by framing him as corrupt. That doesn’t go to plan either, but even though Tam constantly betrays him, Chan remains loyal and defends Tam to his increasingly irate bosses in the hope he’ll finally lead them to Hung.

It’s this aspect of police corruption that really hangs over the film. Even Customs take a position of the drugs they seize for themselves, which is how Chan is able to convince them to release Third Auntie. The operation is nearly derailed by a corrupt cop who frequents Third Auntie’s domino parlour, trying to bet with his gun when he runs out of money and then following her to demand a payoff for not reporting the drugs. Chan makes reference to the fact that the drug dealers think nothing of paying off police because the profits they can make selling drugs in Hong Kong are so vast, but, thankfully, it doesn’t happen so much any more because of the institution of ICAC. ICAC is held up as a kind of threat even if Chan suggests that it’s already cleaned up the police force and ushered in a new culture of earnest policing, though even he says that it’s caused a drop in morale that might be improved if they can catch a big fish like Hung.

Chan’s bosses are British, while he later ends up working with an American DEA officer who gives them even more new technology like radio mics, though Chan was already keen to show off their modern policing methods, which include things like hidden cameras, secret recordings, and a massive telephoto lens. “We’re just using each other,” the corrupt cop says when his partner asks him if he’s not pushing his luck by going back to ask Third Auntie for more money after noticing how big her haul is knowing that she can’t really do anything about it without exposing herself. In the end, they are all trapped by this ridiculous system of symbiotic crime that leads only to destruction.

The System screens as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Kokuho (国宝, Lee Sang-il, 2025)

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What does it mean to commit yourself so entirely to your art that you become it and effectively cease to exist? Playing the role of Ohatsu in Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s Love Suicides at Sonezaki, Kikuo (Ryo Yoshizawa) asks if Ohatsu’s lover Tokubei is really resolved to die for their love. The scene is intercut with his brother and rival Shunsuke leaving the theatre, led away by Kikuo’s girlfriend Harue (Mitsuki Takahata), just as Ohatsu leads Tokubei towards their mutual fate, as if Shunsuke were agreeing that he is not resolved to give his all to art in the way Kikuo evidently feels himself to be, at least in this moment.

The roles between them are reversed several times before they eventually perform the play again, but each of them are, in effect, in a love suicide with the art of kabuki, though kabuki itself is destined to live on. In any case, the “kokuho” of the title is a living national treasure and one who has indeed embodied their art. We’re introduced to one early on, Mangiku (Min Tanaka), an ageless onnagata, or player of female roles, who has a quasi-spiritual quality and warns the young Kikuo that though his face maybe beautiful, it could also be a barrier to his art and, in the end, consume him. It is said of Mangiku that all he will leave behind him is his art. The words are spoken with pity, but this is really what it means to be a kokuho and the highest compliment that might be paid to an artist. Mangiku himself would likely approve, casting an eye around his spartan room and declaring himself unburdened. 

But Kikuo is only half-joking when he says he cut a deal with the devil to make him the best kabuki actor in Japan. As a woman he abandoned later scolds him, all his sacrifices were made by others. Actors are greedy, another laments, and it’s true enough that Kikuo feared little in his need for success. The irony is that he too was an heir, only to a yakuza dynasty to which he could not succeed. His was father was gunned down in front of him while preparing to draw his sword, while Kikuo’s rebound tattoo does him no favours in the end and his attempt to avenge his father’s death apparently fails. Nevertheless, he vies for the approval of his surrogate father and kabuki master Hanjiro (Ken Watanabe) who values his skills above those of his biological son Shunsuke (Ryusei Yokohama) who alternately resents having his birthright stolen from under from him and acknowledges that Kiku has an innate talent with which his bloodline can’t compete.

Nevertheless, there’s a genuine and enduring brotherhood between the two men that never quite slips into hate or acrimony even as circumstances conspire against them. They both want what the other has. In the kabuki world, bloodline is everything and Kikuo is viewed as a interloper usurping Shunsuke’s rightful position, while Shunsuke wants the raw talent he knows he lacks and no amount of training and commitment can buy. Yet it is in a way about resolve, or at least the willingness to give your life to the stage and die in the pursuit of art. Kikuo’s signature piece is the Heron Maiden, in which a heron falls in love with a young man and becomes a young woman. But her love is unrequited. She goes mad, and can only show her love for him by dancing until she dies. This is, in effect, Kikuo’s dance with kabuki, a waltz to the death as he yearns for the “scenery” he as been searching for and eventually finds the apotheosis of his art in the moment of the heron’s demise.

Like Lee Sang-il’s previous films Villain and Rage based on a novel by Shuichi Yoshida, the film is a poetic meditation on the price of the pursuit of art that revels in its sumptuous production design and the intricacies of the kabuki world. With shades of Farewell, My Concubine, it frames its central dynamic not quite one of straightforward rivalry but a brotherhood between two halves of one whole who each know that neither of them can really win, while becoming a kokuho is an endless pursuit of artistic perfection in which one must be resolved to kill the self and die on stage in a lover’s suicide with a forever elusive kabuki.

Kokuho screened as part of this year’s LEAFF.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Girl (女孩, Shu Qi, 2025)

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Taiwan may be emerging from martial law, but the cycles of patriarchal violence and oppression prove much harder to escape in Shu Qi’s touching directorial debut and portrait of a disrupted childhood, Girl (女孩, Nǚhái). Inspired by her own memories and set in the late ’80s, the film is unflinching in its depiction of mundane, domestic horror, but equally even-handed in extending understanding even to the most flawed of its protagonists who are themselves locked into a cycle of violence and self-loathing.

Hsiao-lee (Bai Xiao-Ying) doesn’t quite understand how her sister can be so cheerful even the other children at school make fun of her. Hsiao-lee is often criticised for looking “sullen,” and even her new friend Li-li (Lin Pin-Tung) jokes that on the rare occasion she smiles, she still looks “bitter”. But Hsiao-lee has plenty of reasons to be sorrowful and has perhaps already internalised the idea that there is no escape from her dismal circumstances. Finding a hole in the wall behind the school quite literally shows her another world, one that she later passes into in the company of Li-li who convinces her to ditch her classes and hang out with her at a sleazy video booth that is not really an age-appropriate environment for the two young girls. 

Li-li is Taiwanese-American and has recently moved to the island following her parents’ divorce. The fact that Li-li’s parents’ marriage has ended, even if she wistfully wonders if her father will suddenly jet in to repair the family, shows Hsiao-lee that the prison that is her family home has a door that could be unlocked. It’s clear that Hsaio-lee is terrified of her father (Roy Chiu) who is a violent drunk and may also be sexually abusing her. She zips herself up in a tent at night and cowers in terror as his hand presses down on the canvas, though he doesn’t like closed doors and flies into rages when he encounters them, which explains the large dent next to the handle to the door of her room. Hsiao-lee’s mother, Chuan (9m88), seems to take most of her frustrations out on her even if she tries to intervene and distract her father from further harming her.

Hsiao-lee doesn’t understand why her mother seems to resent her while doting on her sister, though we soon come to wonder if she blames her for condemning her to this kind of life. Shots of Chuan’s adolescence in rural Taiwan hint at a still more patriarchal world in which her father told her there was no need to study and if she had free time to hang out with friends she should spend it helping her grandmother instead. It’s implied that Chuan may have been assaulted while finally embracing the simple freedom of spending time with other people her age, while her father disowned her on her pregnancy declaring himself ashamed and telling her to leave and never return. Even now, she earns a meagre living as a hairdresser’s assistant and is groped by the male customers which the salon otherwise has little option other than to court. Her boss fusses over the air conditioning whenever they come in, and though Chuan may have taken a liking to Mr Chen, he is already married and only ever a symbol of the life that has eluded her. 

Chuan’s boss also tells her of a woman in Taipei who left an abusive husband and is now living happily with someone who treats her better, but Chuan continues to stick with Chiang possibly as an act of self-harm in her deep-seated self-loathing. Chiang doesn’t always seem to have been that way, but he’s otherwise someone who can’t fit into the contemporary society and is only employed thanks to a very understanding friend of his late father. Having gone too far and realised that Chuan may leave him if he continues to beat and rape her, he tries to reform, but it doesn’t last long and he’s soon back to drunkenly riding his scooter through town in the middle of the night. He too may feel hard done by, but it can’t excuse his behaviour nor the authoritarian terror of his home in which he takes out the frustrations of his fractured manhood on Chuan and Hsiao-lee. 

Chuan is imprisoned within the house and can find no escape from it, even when Hsiao-lee directly asks her to divorce him. Hsaio-lee might, however, be able to get out but only be accepting exile from her family and leaving her mother and sister behind at her father’s mercy. Given the omnipresence of male failure, there’s something quite heartening about the female solidarity that arises between Hsiao-lee and Li-li even if their circumstances are quite different from each other. Li-li is mired in the collapse of her family and longs for its repair with her father’s return while resentful of the unfairness of being exiled to an unfamiliar country where she’s looked after by her grandmother whom she can’t understand, presumably because she speaks Taiwanese rather than the Mandarin her mother made her keep up in America, while Hsiao-lee is trapped and looking for a way to free herself from her father. On a trip to the local shop, she ominously eyes up the rat poison while Li-li buys some sweets.

But even as Taiwan emerges from the authoritarian superstructure of the martial law era, patriarchal violence refuses to die and it’s only through an act of maternal sacrifice, framed as rejection and a continuation of that same cycle of violence now enacted by her mother, that Hsaio-lee finds a more literal kind of escape. Only once her father is gone does light return to the house and the possibility of healing the disrupted relationship with her mother become a reality. Beautifully written and elegantly directed, the film has a very genuine sense of place with its busy alleyways and bustling streets. The kids at school might cheerfully sing that there’s no place like home, but for Hsiao-lee home might be the scariest place of all and the one it’s the most difficult to escape.

Girl screened as part of this year’s LEAFF.

Yakushima’s Illusion (たしかにあった幻, Naomi Kawase, 2025)

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When is it that you can say someone is really dead? Grief-stricken paediatric organ transplant co-ordinator Corry (Vicky Krieps) finds herself pondering just this question while in Japan exploring differing attitudes to transplant surgery in Naomi Kawase’s latest, Yakushima’s Illusion (たしかにあった幻, Tashika ni Atta Maboroshi). Returning to her roots, Kawase includes several documentary-style sequences in which Japanese medical staff discuss traditional notions of life and death along with those relating to organ transplantation which remains taboo even in an otherwise advanced medical society.

One doctor relates that his own child had a transplant and they were plagued with harassment for “stealing” people’s organs. There’s a kind of ghoulishness in play, as if this practice were unholy in some way or were taking on a debt that can never be repaid. But from the perspective of the parents of children waiting for matches, there is indeed an undeniable sense of guilt involved given the knowledge that for their child to survive, another must have died and another parent just like them has suffered a loss. When a match finally comes up for one little boy, his mother feels conflicted knowing that a little girl that was ahead of them in the queue didn’t make it  and now it’s like they’ve taken her slot. Meanwhile the parents of the child that died battle their grief and confusion but decide to allow his organs to be made made available so that he will in some sense at least on. 

In this case, it was a heart transplant which presents the most complicated of existential questions given that traditionally death is marked by the cessation of the heart beating. Even when brain death has occurred, the body is considered to be living which obviously makes something like organ harvesting difficult if the patient is still considered to be “alive”. But on the other hand, it also means that death is infinitely postponed when the cessation of the heartbeat cannot be confirmed. Corry is haunted by the memory of an lover who disappeared without a trace and later discovers his family are trying to have him declared dead to smooth over an inheritance issue, though she objects because to her Jin is still alive even he’s not around.

It’s on Yakushima that Corry first meets Jin (Kanichiro), and one could say that he’s the illusion of the title. Indeed the Japanese title hints at his ethereal quality in translating as something like “the apparition that was really there”. He has an otherworldly quality and seems to exist outside of time with his old-fashioned camera and impish personality. Part of the film is set around Tanabata which is rooted in the tale of the Cowherd and the Weaver, Orihime and Hikiboshi, who were separated by a river and permitted to meet only on one day a year. This mythical quality adds to the sense that perhaps Jin was more ghost than man, a figment of Corry’s memory or a manifestation of her desires who was nevertheless himself consumed by loneliness. In a phenomenon known as “johatsu” in which people suddenly disappear without warning, Jin leaves her life as abruptly as he entered it leaving her with a series of regrets and lingering questions. 

It’s this shifting sense of dislocation with which the film plays in moving, as Jin describes it, through the shifting moments of the heart exchanging linear time for emotional chronology. Having lost her mother in childbirth, Corry is consumed by a fear of abandonment and incurable loneliness that is compounded by the fact that people really do disappear from her life with alarming frequency which is perhaps why she is so invested in saving the lives of these young children. Bonding with a couple who lost their son to illness and now operate a bento stand supporting other parents, she searches for a way to let go without letting go which she perhaps finds in the serenity of nature now captured with sweeping drone shots such as that which takes us inside a tree in search of the self. Frequent cameos from former Kawase collaborators such as Machiko Ono and Masatoshi Nagase in small roles add to the elegiac feeling even if the final message seems to be that life goes on in the image of a still beating heart giving new life and new hope even in the midst of death and loss.

Yakushima’s Illusion screened as part of this year’s LEAFF.

96 Minutes (96分鐘, Hung Tzu-Hsuan, 2025)

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The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, as the famous goes. Prioritising saving lives where you can rather than risk spreading yourself too thin and not helping anyone as a result may be a sensible decision. But what if you or a loved are among those who’ve been deprioritised? Like many things, now it’s not just theory but here right in front of you and victims are real people not just anonymous numbers, it looks quite different.

At least, that’s how it is for A-Ren (Austin Lin), a brash bomb disposal expert. Though he disarmed a bomb in a cinema, another one went off across the road in a department store. The bomber had warned them that might happen, but A-Ren’s commanding officer Liu (Wang Bo-Chieh) convinced him they were probably bluffing. They were told there were two more bombs, one located in their command centre, and the other in the department store, and given a choice. Save the people in the department store by heroically blowing themselves up, or choose to save themselves even though this time they’re in the minority. 

Three years later, A-Ren has never forgiven himself, or Liu, for the bomb going off. He’s quit the police and though he’s married fellow officer Huang Xin (Vivian Sung), they never had a wedding and still haven’t been on honeymoon. His guilt is compounded by the fact that he’s been feted as a hero even though he knows he’s directly responsible for everyone who died in the department store. He gets a shot at redemption when the train he’s travelling on returning home after a memorial service for victims of the bombing receives a bomb threat, but at the same time he fears the eventual exposure of what really happened three years ago and is too ashamed to get his mind fully on the job.

On the other hand, it’s true that, ironically, no one on the train has been able to move on from the incident. All of them are mired in their grief and confusion, while looking for someone to blame. Needing to solve the case quickly, the police named a random victim with a criminal past as the bomber rather than admit they didn’t know who did it, making the police themselves a legitimate target for the resentment of the victims’ families given their cavalier attitude to life and death. Liu reminded A-Ren that the policemen in the command centre had families too, as if the people in the department store didn’t or that having a family made their lives weigh more, while Huang Xin was there too further influencing their decision and feeding into A-Ren’s guilt wondering if he was just selfish and made a choice to save her at the expense of the lives of a large number of people he didn’t know.

The bomber essentially gives him the same choice again, putting two bombs on two trains and leaving A-Ren with a binary choice of choosing to sacrifice one or the other to see if he will make the same hypocritical decision again in opting to save the minority because he is among them. Of course, they try a number of other high-risk strategies to disarm both bombs and/or evacuate passengers, but the bomber leaves them with little choice other than to accept the fact that one of the bombs has to go off. A-Ren and Liu can either blow themselves up figuratively by admitting that they chose to sacrifice the lives of the department store victims, or they can save themselves by blowing up the other train.

During a train derailment incident, Liu had cited his greater good philosophy in prioritising passengers who remained outside the tunnel rather than those trapped in the carriages inside, but he perhaps he was wrong to do so and should either have made more of an effort to help everyone or refrained from announcing his decision to let some of the victims die live on television. But then again, the victims’ families are also torn now they are directly involved with some leaning towards saving themselves rather the passengers on the other train whom they don’t after all even know. A-Ren, meanwhile, is in a race against time to restore his sense of integrity by disarming the bombs inside his mind to cure the lingering trauma of the department store bombing as the train rockets forward with only him between it and certain destruction.

96 Minutes screened as part of this year’s LEAFF.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)