Category: Festivals

Drive (드라이브, Park Dong-hee, 2023)

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“Be sincere if you want other people’s money” an influencer is told during a contract negotiation, but as she’s forced to admit in Park Dong-hee’s tense kidnap thriller Drive (드라이브) her whole world is hollow. Even so, sincerity was it seems something people wanted from her and tragically did not get, though for others what undoubtedly sells is a fantasy life of “easy” money and total independence free from an oppressive work culture if not quite from the patriarchal society. 

An opening sequence charts the gradual evolution of Yuna (Park Ju-Hyun) from shy young woman venturing into streaming to rising star of the online world. As someone points out she’s good at negotiating though is prepared to screw over even those closest to her in the hope of advancement while indulging in underhanded tactics such as encouraging companies to break contracts with other streamers with the promise of covering their damages. She’s also secretly plotting to throw over her long time manager and join a large media conglomerate even if, as it turns out, the boss is about to make her an indecent proposal. 

Yet the truth she’s confronted with after being kidnapped is that none of it’s quite real. She doesn’t actually have vast wealth, nothing really belongs to her but is merely on loan to use as endorsements. Stuffing her in the boot of her own car, the kidnapper asks for a million won which Yuna can’t pay leading them to force her to livestream her own kidnapping and hopefully earn the remainder of the money from her adoring fans. The problem is that no one really believes she has actually been kidnapped. Everyone assumes it’s a publicity stunt while the kidnapper tells her if she doesn’t get the money she’ll be driven into a scrapyard and never seen again. 

Now dependent on her “fans” whom she had previously described as “creeps”, Yuna is repeatedly told to reveal her real self. The boot of the car becomes a kind of purgatorial space, Yuna later coming to the realisation that the reason she’s not been able to escape is that she has not yet succeeded embracing herself as she is. Her YouTube persona is constructed as much for herself as others, to protect herself from unpleasantness or the stigma of being unsuccessful. She invents a life for herself as the daughter of a businessman who took his own life after his business failed, but prides herself on being a good businesswoman even if that means some underhanded tactics but then she’s not the only one playing dirty in the influencer game.

Yuna certainly has a “drive” to succeed, but the paradox lies in the enigma of the degree to which people, including herself, expect or deflect sincerity. Some obviously crave it, desperate to believe that Yuna really is their friend who cares for them deeply while others want the exact opposite, a hollow figure onto which they can project their image of contemporary success and fantasy of living the high life. It seems that success has made Yuna less forgiving, adopting a haughty attitude and frequently dismissing those around her. If she wants to get out of the boot, she’s going to have to face her authentic self finally looking at her own reflection in the blank screen of a tablet long after the stream has ended. 

The kidnapper challenges her to debase herself, asking how far she’ll go to save her life but equally if her “fans” are willing to pay to save her while other streamers later get in on the action too, mainly getting in the way and willing to endanger Yuna’s survival for their own livelihood. In someways exposing the hollow artifice of influencer culture, the film eventually pulls back to ask if it isn’t a frustrated desire for connection fuelled by those who long to be seen and are in effect attempting to fill an emotional void with the quantifiable love of an online following. At the peak of her success, Yuna realises her time may be ending as young stars creep up behind her and she has to run to stay in the game but in the end can no longer run from herself or the hollowness of her life whether she really does end up on the scrap heap of contemporary culture or not. 

Drive screens in Chicago Oct.7 as part of the 17th season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema 

International trailer (English subtitles)

Tea Friends (茶飲友達, Bunji Sotoyama, 2023)

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Japan’s rapidly ageing society has provoked an epidemic of loneliness but also perhaps new business opportunities in Bunji Sotoyama’s empathetic social drama Tea Friends (茶飲友達, Chanomi Tomodachi). The phrase may sound innocuous enough, but given some potentially outdated cultural connotations the men who spot the advert cunningly placed in a newspaper to catch the eyes of older readers may have reason to assume that it’s more than just tea and chat on offer. Though as it turns out, it’s not just the old who are lonely as a younger generation in turn often in conflict with their parents also attempt to seek security and comfort in found family.

That said, there’s something a little cult-like about the way that Mana (Rei Okamoto), a former sex worker, talks about her organisation which aims to cure late life loneliness through what others might describe as an elderly sex ring. Employing a collection of older women, she accompanies them to meet new clients where they silently slide viagra over the table. The gentleman caller subscribes to a plan to purchase “tea” and anything that happens inside the hotel room they subsequently go to is just “free love” rather than “prostitution”. Mana sees herself as running a “community safety net” and helping elderly people who might otherwise have become isolated and depressed keep active as part of one big happy family along with the other members of staff who have, like her, become estranged from their parents and relatives. 

For Yoshiki, one of the men who escorts the ladies around, it’s that he views his father as a failure for leaving a well-paid corporate job to open a bakery which subsequently went bankrupt and has led to him living in his car. He thinks that in the end it’s better not to try at all than be left with the humiliation of things not working out. But then for Mana herself it’s more a sense of parental rejection. After a difficult childhood, her now terminally ill mother continues to reject her on the grounds of her history of sex work while she continues to crave the unconditional love of a family. Like a mother hen, she nestles those around her into the Tea Friends organisation which operates out of her own home and strives to create a place where everyone can feel they belong. 

Which is all to say she’s the loneliest one of all, but as someone else later cautions her you can’t cure your own loneliness with the loneliness of others. What she sees as a social enterprise others may see as a deliberate attempt to take advantage of vulnerable people who have admittedly been let down by an indifferent society and are in need of the money even more so than comfort or validation. At the other end of the spectrum, a young woman working at Tea Friends discovers that she is pregnant but her boyfriend immediately rejects her, insisting that he refuses to take responsibility and revealing that he is already married. Chika wants to have her baby, but everyone seems to be telling her that she shouldn’t. The doctors seem to look down on her after realising she isn’t married and the father most likely not in the picture, while an attempt to inquire about benefits at the town hall leads only to judgement as the clerk pithily tells her that they’re there for when you need them but she shouldn’t “depend” on them too much virtually calling her a scrounger and implying she’s been irresponsible in becoming a single mother. 

As another of the older women admits, being used was better than being ignored and at least being part of Tea Friends gave her a sense of purpose and acceptance if only for a time. In any case, Mana’s attempt to find unconditional love from her new “family” largely flounders as even those she’d come to believe herself close to desert her when the threat of legal proceedings enters the picture leaving her to face the music alone while she continues to protect them insisting that they’ve done nothing wrong even if it it was technically against the law. An old man’s devastation on picking up the phone and getting no answer suggests that Mana might have had a point when she said it was a social service seeing as no one else seems keen to tackle the problem of late life loneliness even if she did go about it in a problematic way. As Mana often says, righteousness does not equal happiness and it is often outdated social brainwashing that keeps people unhappy and not least herself as she struggles to find the unconditional love lacking in her life that would enable her to cure her own loneliness even in the prime of her youth.

Tea Friends screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Firing The Lighter Gun (ピストルライター の撃ち方, Kohei Sanada, 2022)

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“Whatever got you here, it can’t be any good” a resident of a flophouse reflects on their moribund circumstances suckered to into debt bondage by exploitative yakuza who force them to risk their lives doing clean up in a nuclear exclusion zone. Kohei Sanada’s bleak indie drama Firing the Lighter Gun (ピストルライター の撃ち方, Pistol Lighter no Uchikata) takes place after second nuclear disaster has left even more of the land unsurvivable. The heroes have been quite literally displaced, left without a place to return to or call a home, but are also emotionally alienated unable to envisage an escape for themselves from this otherwise hopeless existence.

Having recently been released from prison, Ryo (Yu Nakamura) remarks that the area has changed since he’s been away but his friend Tatsuya (Yuya Okutsu) counters that he doesn’t really think so. In any case, Tatsuya lives with a huge inferiority complex most evident on his attendance at a school reunion he didn’t want to go to where he sits sullen and dejected among those who’ve moved up in the world not least his ex, Shoko (Emi Okamura), who left him for a guy with a steady government job but still drops by to care for his ageing mother who suffers from dementia and the legacy of domestic abuse. Tatsuya is not a yakuza but his work is yakuza adjacent in that he drives a van full of equally hopeless men recruited for a dodgy operation offering cleanup services in the nuclear exclusion zone. 

Though the jobs are supposed to pay well with a bonus for the hazardous nature of the work, most of it is being skimmed by the yakuza bosses who deduct vast amounts from the men’s pay-packets for “expenses” such as the right to sleep in a communal flophouse where they charge them exorbitant amounts for snacks and drinks which they have to buy because they aren’t allowed to go out. Nor are they allowed to quit the job, trying to run incurs a 50,000 yen fine on top of any debts they’re supposed to be working off. An unexpected addition to Tatsuya’s van one day is Mari (Anju Kurosu), a sex worker, who’s been forced to work for the gang to pay off a debt incurred by an ex who’s since run off. 

As she later says, it’s a waste of time dreaming about a home, life is easier when you no longer expect one. But despite themselves a gentle bond soon arises among the trio of dispossessed youngsters who each feel trapped by their circumstances but are uncertain if they still have the strength to contemplate escape. Tatsuya’s sense of impotence is embodied by the cigarette lighter he carries around which is shaped like a pistol and realistic enough to cause a yakuza bodyguard a moment of concern but of course of no real use to him. As Ryo puts it, Tatsuya’s problem is that he still cares about those around him and is not heartless enough to treat the flophouse men like the “disposable tools” others regard them to be. He is constantly belittled by grinning boss Takiguchi (Ryoji Sugimoto) who blames him for everything that goes wrong and calls him useless and ineffectual, while the flophouse boss also regards him as soft for refusing to beat one of the men who had tried to escape. 

Ryo meanwhile swings in the opposite direction, giving in to a sense of hopelessness that sees him shift towards yakuza violence but perhaps eventually allows him to bounce back and take a chance on escape even if it maybe short-lived or spent in constant hiding. Tatsuya may feel trapped by responsibility to his mother, but is otherwise psychologically unable to move forward staking all his hopes on the rumour of a new power plant hoping it will ignite the town in the way the construction of the last one did despite knowing its attendant risks. Unlike Ryo, he says there’s no point in running, despite himself still yearning for a home. The flophouse men are no different, the few who escape are soon drawn back to other similar kinds of work because there is no other hope for them. Still, once the final shots have been fired there is a kind of clearing of the air and the light of a new dawn even if few seem to be able to see it. 

Firing The Lighter Gun screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Natchan’s Little Secret (ひみつのなっちゃん。, Yasujiro Tanaka, 2023)

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On learning that their friend and mentor has died, a trio of drag queens vows to do whatever it takes to fulfil her wishes and ensure her family never know about her sexuality in Yasujiro Tanaka’s road trip comedy Natchan’s Little Secret (ひみつのなっちゃん。, Himitsu no Natchan). In some ways it may seem old-fashioned, that rather than ensuring her family knew who she really was they decide to honour Natchan’s desire for secrecy but nevertheless meditate on the nature family while finally landing on a poignant sense of loss for all that secrecy entails.

Virgin (Kenichi Takito), an accountant by day and former drag queen who’s lost the taste for dancing, and Morilyn (Shu Watanabe) who works at the bar Natchan owned, are forced to confront the fact that in many ways they didn’t even know Natchan at all. They don’t know her address or hometown and have only the vague idea that she was estranged from her family. Virgin reflects that she was “secretive”, but in the end none of them really know what to do now that she’s gone. Another drag queen turned TV celebratory, Zubuko (Tomoya Maeno), laments that some take their secret to their grave realising that’s exactly what Natchan has done. That’s one reason why the trio become obsessed with the idea of cleaning out Natchan’s flat to make sure that her family don’t find anything they weren’t expecting. 

But then again, the trio frequently refer to the gay community as their family while claiming Natchan as their own. Without really thinking about it, Morilyn allowed hospital staff to assume he was family in a more legal sense and started making funeral arrangements. He also packs up some of Natchan’s property without realising he could be accused of theft while trying to tidy up her life. They may feel that the birth family are in a sense intruding, reasserting ownership over someone they never accepted in life and preventing those who truly loved them to honour their wishes. Yet Natchan’s mother (Chieko Matsubara) turns out to be sweet old lady who is in her way hurt that she and her son became estranged wishing that they could have been closer while he was alive.

It’s she who eventually invites them to Natchan’s rural hometown which is famous for a particular kind of festival dance. None of them are sure they want to go, partly because they fear accidentally blowing Natchan’s cover but also the social attitudes of what they imagine to be a more conservative, traditional area. Only it appears quite the reverse is true. Residents at the inn where they stay actually have a fierce curiosity about drag and enthusiastically enjoy a risqué routine performed by Morilyn and Zubuko while even a manly man later shrugs his shoulders and claims it’s not so different from Gujo Odori which also makes people sparkle. 

Maybe Natchan’s little secret is that she was a person who had learned to see the beautiful things in life and wanted others to see that they were beautiful too even if some told them that weren’t or they didn’t feel that they were. Virgin describes Morilyn’s straightforward living as a beautiful thing, especially as he recounts being made to do karate by conservative parents afraid of what the neighbours would think of their effeminate son, an experience he describes as emotionally destabilising and has led to a degree of repression as an adult. Virgin is out at work and well liked by a collection of female colleagues but now only dances alone at home and keeps it as her own kind of secret. Yet through their various adventures on the road the trio begin to come to new acceptances of themselves as they prepare to say goodbye to Natchan while comically affecting the tropes of conventional masculinity in an attempt not to give the game away. They wander through queer spaces in search of her and rediscover their own sense of family realising that they did know Natchan after all or at least all that was important to know as did others even if they pretended not to because that seemed to be how she wanted it. Finding liberation amid the Gujo Odori, the trio finally say goodbye but also discover a new sense of solidarity and self-acceptance joining the dance at which all truly are welcome. 

Natchan’s Little Secret screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Life of Mariko in Kabukicho (探偵マリコの生涯で一番悲惨な日, Eiji Uchida & Shinzo Katayama, 2022)

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It’s all go in Kabukicho in Eiji Uchida and Shinzo Katayama’s zany tale of aliens, serial killers, and secret assassins. The film’s Japanese title (探偵マリコの生涯で一番悲惨な日, Tantei Mariko no Shogai de ichiban Hisanna Hi), the most tragic day in the life of detective Mariko, may hint at the melancholy at the centre of the story in putting the titular investigator front and centre even while her success is fuelled by her position on the periphery but this is also very much the story of an area and community in a shrinking part of the city. 

It’s true enough that Mariko’s (Sairi Ito) karaoke bar seems to have become a local community hub filled with a series of regulars each of whom have stories of their own. Born and raised in Kabukicho, Mariko knows every inch of the area and thanks to the confessional quality of her work has her finger truly on the pulse which is what makes her such a good detective. Her case this time around is though a little more difficult as she’s been hired by the FBI to track down an escaped space alien because all aliens apparently belong to the US. This one’s been liberated by a mad scientist, Amamoto (Shohei Uno), who they say wants to team up with the alien for ill intent.

In what seems to be a nod to cult 1983 horror movie Basket Case, Amamoto carries the alien around in a picnic basket from which it occasionally irradiates people when frightened. Meanwhile, a serial killer is also stalking the area. One of Mariko’s regulars, Ayaka (Shiori Kubo), is keen to catch him though not for justice but the reward because she’s become obsessed with a bar host who’s been spending a lot of time with another customer because she can pay more. Mariko turns her offer down on the grounds that she doesn’t want to enable her romantic folly and otherwise seems rather uninterested in the serial killer case perhaps because no one’s hired her to solve it, but she also refuses a job from another regular who wants to track down his estranged daughter after being forced on a suicide mission by his former yakuza associates possibly because she suspects he won’t like the answer when she finds her. 

Home to the red light district, Kabukicho has a rather seedy reputation but here has a kind of homeliness in which the veneer of sleaze is of course perfectly normal and unremarkable. A yakuza intimidates a love hotel worker while standing directly in front of a rotating electric dildo in an S&M-themed room later visited by one of Mariko’s regulars with her nerdy film director crush who is so sensitive he can barely walk after exiting the cinema so moved is he by the cinematic expression. Most of the regulars are in their own way lovelorn and lonely, perhaps no less Mariko herself who has an attachment to a middle-aged ex-chef (Yutaka Takenouchi) who now runs a moribund dojo teaching ninja skills to anyone willing to learn. Despite the warmth of the community, life in Kabukicho can be hard as the host later echoes looking around his tiny apartment and sighing that he’s tired. It took so much out of him just to get this little and he barely has it in him anymore. 

Mariko too has her sorrow and buried trauma, hiding out in her bar but secretly imprisoned within the borders of Kabukicho as a kind of self-imposed punishment linked to her tragic past. The intersecting stories paint a vivid picture of an absurd world in which the innocuous civil servant next to you might be a secret assassin or you could turn a corner and run into a serial killer, not to mention a mad scientist with an alien in a basket. But for all its craziness it has a kind of integrity in which the strange is also perfectly normal and Mariko becomes a kind of anchor restoring order to an unruly world. As she’s fond of saying thing’s will work out and it’s difficult not to believe her or the defiantly upbeat spirit even among those depressed and downtrodden otherwise unable to escape the confines of a purgatorial Kabukicho.

Life of Mariko in Kabukicho screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Best is Yet to Come (不止不休, Wang Jing, 2020)

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A man denied a fair chance in life because of his impoverished background comes to identify with the plight of those carrying the hepatitis B virus in Wang Jing’s true life drama, The Best is Yet to Come (不止不休, bùzhǐ bùxiū). Inspired by the story of Han Fudong, a journalist who exposed the societal prejudice against those with a previous diagnosis of the disease, the film’s Chinese title “no pause no rest” makes clear how tirelessly he strived to reveal the truth even at the potential cost of destroying his dream of becoming a professional reporter. 

Han Dong (Bai-Ke) came to Beijing in 2003 in the hope of landing a job at a paper, but just like everywhere else journalism is a largely closed profession almost impossible to break into without elite qualifications and connections. At a jobs fair, Han Dong tries to pass off his reluctance to hand over a CV as a recruitment tactic to get people to remember him, circulating copies of his portfolio instead though recruiters quickly lose interest on realising they are all self-published articles posted online. Once he admits that he only finished middle school, it’s game over no matter how talented a writer and investigator he may turn out to be. 

It’s this sense of unfairness, of being turned away on the grounds of a few words on a piece of paper that eventually leads him to sympathise with those carrying the hepatitis B virus after investigating a company that claims it buys blood, discovering that they provide a service helping people to forge health certificates for job and school applications. Vox pop-style interviews recreated in the manner of the time feature several people describing the various ways their lives have been ruined simply because they happen to carry the virus, many of them infected since birth or early childhood. One man has been trying to apply for jobs and graduate schools for several years but finds the offers are always withdrawn after the health screening, while another woman recounts that her fiancé cancelled their engagement because his family could not accept someone with hepatitis B. 

This is also in the immediate aftermath of the SARS epidemic which perhaps caused a preoccupation with infectious disease which may be largely unfounded in the relative difficulty of passing on the hepatitis B virus. After landing a golden opportunity of an unpaid internship compensated only with 50% article fees, Han Dong finds himself conflicted. He knows the forgery operation is illegal and a threat to public health, but also cannot blame the people who make use of it when their lives have been rendered so impossible that is difficult for them simply to live. An early assignment had seen him cover a mine collapse and witness a destraught mother bounced into accepting compensation for her son’s death while shouted at by the foreman (played by film director Jia Zhangke who also produced) for having the temerity to ask to see his body. Han Dong got a front-page byline as co-author with his mentor figure, Huang (Zhang Songwen), but wonders what the point is if nothing ever changes and the truth is not enough on its own. 

For obvious reasons, films about crusading journalists are rare in Chinese cinema given that whistleblowing is not regarded as a virtue and those who try to expose wrongdoing are often shouted down or hounded into silence as seen with the doctor who drew attention to the poor medical practices in rural blood clinics that caused an HIV epidemic in farming communities, and most recently with the physician who tried to raise awareness of the new respiratory illness that later developed into a global pandemic. Journalists who report problematic stories can also find themselves facing prosecution and imprisonment. Han Fudong’s writings did however lead to an eventual change in the law and the destigmatisation of hepatitis B while he himself overcame the educational elitism of the contemporary society to achieve his dreams of becoming a professional reporter. As such, Wang’s dramatisation of his life may be in a way subversive if subtly so in hinting at a greater role for a currently not so free press in the modern China while also embracing a central philosophy that one need not simply accept an unacceptable status quo but actively reject and challenge it and that by doing so something might actually change. 

The Best is Yet to Come screens in Chicago Sept. 30 as part of the 17th season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema 

International trailer (English subtitles)

Ripples (波紋, Naoko Ogigami, 2023)

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Sometimes it’s useful to feel like a rock in the stream and let it all flow past us, but our actions affect others in ways we barely understand reverberating and rebounding until ripples become waves and in their time small tsunamis. In Naoko Ogigami’s Ripples (波紋, Hamon), the effects of the 2011 earthquake and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster continue to radiate while some find themselves reeling unable to reorient themselves in a world which has become somehow threatening. 

Middle-aged salaryman Osamu (Ken Mitsuishi) suddenly disappears on his wife and teenage son after becoming intensely afraid of radiation only to return years later claiming that he has cancer. In his absence his wife, Yoriko (Mariko Tsutsui), has become a devotee of a strange cult, Green New Life, which peddles special purifying water and preaches otherwise wholesome virtues of solidarity and sacrifice. But even if Yoriko superficially agrees that it’s better to affect tolerance and put others before herself she’s secretly seething with frustration and resentment. She clearly does not want to take Osamu back, remembering how he left her to care for his bedridden father who knowingly or not made inappropriate sexual advances towards her. 

The cult’s anthem preaches that there is no fear if you have faith which might explain Yoriko’s devotion along with that of many others who similarly find themselves attracted to new religions in the wake of unsettling events such as natural disaster or global pandemic. But then can we really say that what the cult promises is any different to that of other organisations which at least portray themselves as scientific authorities. It transpires that the real reason Osamu has returned is that his doctor has recommended an experimental new treatment that is not covered by medical insurance and costs a significant amount of money but all Osamu has to go on is desperation and his faith in the medical establishment that the supposed cure is any more effective than Yoriko’s holy water (it turns out not to be). There is after all a lot of money in fear and people’s desire to be free of it. 

But Yoriko is afraid of many things. Her petty prejudices are exposed when her now grownup son returns home on a business trip with a hitherto undisclosed fiancée in tow who happens to be deaf. Yoriko probably would not have liked it anyway whoever Takuya (Hayato Isomura) had brought but resolutely fails to hide her disgust that he chosen a woman with a disability. She remarks that people at the church find inspiration in seeing disabled people “suffer and endure”, which is a fairly offensive thing to say in any case even if she later confesses his prejudice outright to a colleague at the supermarket where she works claiming that it’s different because it’s her son and she doesn’t see why he had to choose a woman “like that”. While the cult leader pushes her towards what are superficially at least more wholesome values of love and acceptance, Mizuki (Hana Kino) pulls her back towards her darker impulses but also a kind of liberation in her desire not to be bound by the old-fashioned conservative values that encourage her to fulfil the stereotype of the perfect wife over and above her own happiness or fulfilment. 

The dryness of her life is echoed in the zen sand garden she meticulously rakes into the shape of waves each morning while the water many feared contaminated after the earthquake is really a symbol of the life and vitality she continues to deny herself. Yet in an odd way, it’s human connection that perhaps begins to awaken her in her devotion to Mizuki who reveals that she was so overwhelmed with despair that she became unable to fix the damage in her apartment after the quake struck and has been living amid the ruins ever since. Ogigami turns her quirky gaze to life’s absurdities, the ridiculous things we cling to in order not to be afraid, but eventually allows Yoriko to find the courage to dance in the rain rather than fear its arrival having blown straight through her various “faiths” to become something that is at least more resolutely herself. 

Ripples screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Seven Days in Heaven (父後七日, Essay Liu & Wang Yu-Lin, 2010)

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A young woman embarks on what she describes as the most ridiculous journey of her life after her father passes away and she must return to her hometown for a series of incredibly involved traditional funeral rites in Essay Liu and Wang Yu-Lin ’s lighthearted drama Seven Days in Heaven (父後七日, fù hòu qī rì). Perhaps the intent is more to keep the mourners occupied in a slow burn dissolve of their grief than it is to console a parting soul but in any case Mei finds herself meditating on the past and her already fading memories of her late father. 

The strangeness begins at the hospital where Mei (Wang Li-Wen) and her brother Da-zhi (Chen Cha-Shiang) are repeatedly asked to explain to their father, who has just died, that they are taking him home. In the transport ambulance they ask if the family is Buddhist or Christian, and then simplify the question to whether they use incense sticks when a confused Mei is uncertain how to answer though as it turns out the rites they will be performing are largely Taoist. Anyway, the driver accidentally puts in the wrong tape and they get a blast of the Hallelujah chorus before he switches over to a series of sutras instead. A similar confusion sets in once they arrive back at the house where the funeral is being managed by a distant relative who works as a Taoist priest performing rituals largely concerned with death. 

A running gag sees these familial relationships so tangled that they need lengthy explanations, Yi (Wu Peng-Fong) the priest explaining to Mei’s cousin Zhuang (Chen Tai-hua) that he should have been calling him “brother” and not “uncle” while as it turns out Yi still carries a torch for Zhuang’s mother, Feng (Angie Wang), who left him to work in another town and married a wealthy man. Currently in Paris, she does not return for her father’s funeral and sends her son instead who is equally mystified by these strange rituals and decides to film them as part of a university project. 

Yi consults some religious calendars and schedules the days of the funeral accordingly from when they close the coffin to when they conduct the final rites with Mei and Da-zhi merely expected to keep up. A detached Mei explains that as the daughter she’s explicitly instructed when to cry and when not to, forced to run in and wail by the coffin on cue. Yi’s partner, Chin (Chang Shih-Ying), herself works as a professional mourner wailing on the behalf of others merely altering the identity of the deceased but in this case the siblings are alternately bored and run ragged, possibly too exhausted by the process of mourning to fully process their grief. 

Zhuang’s film exposes the labour involved as he closes in Da-zhi explaining that he has to sweep up the ashes from the burning of ghost money. He asks him how he feels about his father’s death which might in itself be a little insensitive especially while pointing a camera in his face and he snaps back that he doesn’t know. Mei meanwhile is repeatedly drawn back to memories of her father, picking out a picture of him singing karaoke for the altar only to be told off by the older relatives. Zhuang eventually photoshops it to replace the mic with flowers and the background with a more appropriate scene of mountains and rivers. She doesn’t tell her friends her father passed away until months later and still finds herself forgetting, brought to tears on accidentally reminding herself to pick up some “longevity” cigarettes for him on a trip back from abroad only to realise there’s no need anymore. “Please stow your emotions” she imagines hearing the captain say in her father’s voice as she strives to accommodate her grief. 

Filled with a series of humorous digressions from Yi’s love life and their late father’s ability to charm his nurses even at death’s door, the film paints a warm and nostalgic portrait of small-town life and the various rituals that go along with it, including a small tangent on political corruption as a host of politicians are obliged to attend the funeral, because of the aforementioned ill-defined familial relationships, and send elaborate gifts including a large tower of beer cans that later collapses and requires even more tiding up. Finally the siblings must burn their mourning clothes as if symbolically moving on from their seven says in “heaven” and returning to their everyday lives but discover perhaps that grief is an ongoing process the rituals of which may continue long after the funeral is finished.

Seven Days in Heaven is available to stream in the US Sept. 25 to Oct.1 as part of the 17th season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Dry Spell (渇水, Masaya Takahashi, 2023)

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A literal drought becomes a metaphor for bureaucratic heartlessness in Masaya Takahashi’s empathetic social drama The Dry Spell (渇水, Kassui). Inspired by Mitsuru Kawabayashi’s 1990 novel, the film puts a contemporary spin on prejudice and poverty as a collection of officials from the waterboard point at airconditioners and mobile phones while asking why the residents have fallen into arrears with their water payments only to reflect that yes, water like air and sunlight should be free.

The argument that one of Iwakiri’s (Toma Ikuta) colleagues makes, is that they have a right and a duty to charge for the water supply to support the nation’s infrustructure along with their advanced purifcation system which keeps people safe. Iwakiri isn’t so sure about that, but as others later say of him he’s a man who’s made of water himself. He doesn’t like his job but he doesn’t really dislike it either and justifies himself that it’s not him turning people’s water off so much as it’s a natural consequence of them not paying their bills and all they need to do to get it turned back on is settle them. But then as another colleague who eventually refuses to continue cutting people off suggests, every time you do it you lose a little piece of your soul. 

Iwakiri may not have had much of a soul to begin with. He’s as dried up as the town in the middle of a recordbreaking drought and heatwave. Having endured a difficult childhood, he’s become alienated from his wife and son who have decamped to her hometown with no clear indication of when or if they’ll return. That may be one reason he finds himself empathsithig with a pair of sisters who have been abandoned by both parents and are living alone in a house that has already had its gas and electricity supplies cut off. Iwakiri turns off their water supply because it’s the rules, but begins to hate himself for doing it and develops a desire to go against the flow for the first time in his life.

Keiko (Nanami Yamazaki) and Kumiko (Yuzuho) are a pair of water babies who have a yearning for the sea and the father who was apparently once a sailor but seemingly disappeared a year previously while their disappointed mother does her best to support the family through sex work which is as she points out the only line of work open to a single mother with limited qualifications. Iwakiri advises her to apply for benefits but she refuses on the grounds that she doesn’t want them poking around in what she describes as a complicated family situation which makes plain her predicament. But even as Iwakiri begins to meditate on his own paternal failures, his partner Kida (Hayato Isomura) flows in the opposite direction keener to hold onto his job after he learns he’s a baby on the way and unwilling to rock the boat despite how much he may also feel that water should be free. 

In any case, Iwakiri is trying to un-dam himself, waiting for the great big rain that Kumiko says will make everything go back to normal. Except it won’t, at least not literally  though it will in some senses open the flood gates liberating Iwakiri from his emotional repression and the girls from their illusions accepting that they are now alone but will always have each other. As he points out, they are just watermen and there’s not much they can do for the struggling people whose supplies they’ve cut off. It wouldn’t help to pay their bills for them even if they could, and in a better world water should indeed be free though it becomes much harder for them to justify their complicity with a heartless system that can arbitrarily remove access to something so essential for life. Takahashi flits between cheerful scenes of ice lollies in the sun to the cruel realities of the lives of Keiko and Kumiko who continue to long for the sea as does Iwakiri in struggling to repair his relationships with his wife and son while trying to escape the legacies of own traumatic upbringing. The film doesn’t offer any easy answers, but does perhaps suggest that the rain will bring change and the promise of a better future.

The Dry Spell screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Camera Japan Announces Complete Programme for 2023

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Camera Japan returns for its 18th edition in Rotterdam 21st to 24th September and in Amsterdam 28th September to 1st October bringing with it another fantastic selection of the best in recent and not so recent Japanese cinema.

Feature Films

  • #Manhole – a salaryman’s moment of triumph is disrupted when he falls down a manhole the night before his wedding in Kazuyoshi Kumakiri’s unhinged B-movie thriller. Review.
  • Baby Assassins 2 Babies – the Baby Assassins are back and continuing to struggle with the demands of adulting in Yugo Sakamoto’s sequel to the hugely popular slacker action comedy. Review.
  • Bad Lands -fast paced crime thriller from Masato Harada starring Sakura Ando as a conwoman in over her head.
  • Baian the Assassin, M.D. 1 – period drama starring Etsushi Toyokawa as the famous acupuncturist hitman.
  • Cafune – a pair of teenagers with differing priorities struggle to deal with the discovery of an unplanned pregnancy in Haruki Kinemura’s evenhanded indie drama. Review.
  • December – bereaved parents are confronted by the unresolved past when the woman who killed their daughter appeals her sentence in Anshul Chauhan’s empathetic courtroom drama. Review.
  • The Dry Spell – drama starring Toma Ikuta as a municipal worker charged with turning off the water supply at homes that haven’t paid their bills.
  • Egoist – a fashion editor reflects on the nature of love after falling for a personal trainer in Daishi Matsunaga’s deeply moving romantic drama. Review.
  • Firing the Lighter Gun – indie drama set after a nuclear disaster.
  • I Am What I Am – a young woman uninterested in sexual relationships struggles to find acceptance in a conservative society defined by marriage in Shinya Tamada’s empathetic drama. Review.
  • Is this Heaven? – a middle-aged couple ponder loss and regret on a surreal odyssey into the afterlife , or something like it at least, in Shinji Imaoka’s cheerfully absurdist dramedy. Review.
  • Life of Mariko in Kabukicho – surreal drama from Eiji Uchida & Shinzo Katayama starring Sairi Ito as a bar owner/detective charged with hunting down a missing alien.
  • Love Will Tear Us Apart – eccentric indie slasher scripted by Hirobumi Watanabe and directed by Kenichi Ugana.
  • MAYHEM GIRLs – pandemic-era drama in which a group of high school girls suddenly develop superpowers.
  • Mondays: See You ‘This’ Week! – harried office workers must get through to their dejected salaryman boss if they’re to escape a workplace time loop in Ryo Takebayashi’s zany corporate comedy. Review.
  • Mountain Woman – a young woman walks into the mountains to die but unexpectedly discovers what it is to feel truly human in Takeshi Fukunaga’s bleak folk tale. Review.
  • A Mother’s Touch – real life drama inspired by the life of Satoshi Fukushima who became the world’s first deaf-blind university professor.
  • Natchan’s Little Secret – comedic road trip drama in which three drag queens travel to their friend’s funeral.
  • New Religion – supernatural horror in which a woman struggles to deal with her grief following the death of her daughter.
  • Ninja vs Shark – B-movie action drama from Koichi Sakamoto ini which a small feudal town is bothered by a giant shark and a gang of satan-worshipping bandits.
  • People Who Talk to Plushies Are Kind – A collection of sensitive uni students pour out their worries to cuddly toys to avoid burdening others with their fears in Yurina Kaneko’s charmingly empathetic drama. Review.
  • Perfect Days – Tokyo-set tale from Wim Wenders starring Koji Yakusho as cleaner living a simple but soulful life.
  • Remembering Every Night – a series of women wander around Tama New Town each searching for something in Yui Kiyohara’s wistful drama. Review.
  • The Rest of Our Lives – drama following three elderly people who become friends at a swimming club.
  • Ripples – latest from Naoko Ogigami starring Mariko Tsutsui as a housewife who joins a weird water-themed cult after her husband leaves her in the wake of natural disaster.
  • Sabakan – heartwarming nostalgia drama in which a struggling writer looks back to the summer of 1986.
  • Suncream and Windchimes – whimsical drama in which a paranoid husband begins spying on his wife.
  • Tea Friends – empathetic drama from Bunji Sotoyama in which a collection of elderly people are drawn into a sex ring in order to stave off loneliness and poverty.
  • Tocka – a trio of lost souls battle despair in northernmost Hokkaido in Yoshitaka Kamada’s bleak social drama. Review.
  • Tsugaru Lacquer Girl – a young woman encounters resistance in her desire to take over the family lacquerware business.
  • Your Lovely Smile – Hirobumi Watanabe stars as a version of himself but this time for Lim Kah-Wai as the pair come together in shared sensibly and frustration with the indie way of life. Review.
  • Yudo – Toma Ikuta stars as a failed Tokyo architect returning to his home town with the intention of getting control of the family bathhouse currently run by his brother (Gaku Hamada) to tear it down and build an apartment block in this warmhearted celebration of traditional bathhouse culture.

Animation

  • Blue Thermal – a young woman ends up in the university gliding club but discovers a new passion.
  • Gold Kingdom and Water Kingdom – after centuries of conflict, two feuding countries finally begin to put the past behind them to work for a common future in Kotono Watanabe’s animated fantasy romance. Review.
  • Komada: A Whisky Family – a young woman takes over the family whisky business after her father’s death.
  • Macross Plus – classic 1995 mecha anime.

Documentary

  • Origami – documentary following artist Atsushi Suwa as he creates a portrait of a deceased young man.
  • Polan – documentary charting the final days of a second-hand bookshop.
  • The Night Before Upheaval – documentary exploring the difficulties faced by indie filmmakers in Japan.
  • UMUI – Guardians of Traditions – documentary focussing on traditional music and dance in Okinawa.

Special Screenings

  • The Oldest Profession – 1974 Roman Porno from Noboru Tanaka.
  • Priest of Darkness – a feckless gambler brings trouble on himself by accidentally stealing a samurai’s knife and hides out in a tavern run by a “priest” while his sister (a young Setsuko Hara) desperately searches for him.
  • Spaghetti Ramen – avant-garde live action/animation hybrid in which a restauranteur lusts after his wife who has become a sex worker to make ends meet.
  • Tange Sazen and the Pot Worth a Million Ryo – a priceless pot containing a treasure map is accidentally given away and later used as a goldfish bowl by a child who is taken in by a tavern frequented by one-eyed, one-armed swordsman Tange Sazen while seemingly everyone else is desperately trying to find it.
  • Tokyo Pop – 1988 classic following a young American woman in Tokyo.

Camera Japan 2023 takes place in Rotterdam 21st to 24th September and Amsterdam 28th September to 1st October. Full information on all the films as well as ticketing links can be found on the official website and you can also keep up to date with all the latest news via Camera Japan’s official Facebook page, X (formerly known as Twitter) account, and Instagram channel.