Category: Festivals

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

Posted on by

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)

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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.

Where Is the Lie? (Marupok AF, Quark Henares, 2023)

Posted on by

What is it that motivates acts of seemingly pointless cruelty, why do people obsessively waste their own lives trying to make those of others miserable? Quark Henares’ inspired by real events (depending on who you ask) catfishing drama Where is the Lie? (Marupok AF) sees a trans woman fall victim to homophobic love fraud amid a climate of intense transphobia and subsequently make the decision to take a stand not as a petty act of revenge but to reclaim her dignity and protect her community while generously wishing her tormentor well. 

The catfisher, Beanie (Maris Racal), is given the right to reply through a series of confessional videos which slowly gain prominence towards the film’s conclusion. She admits that she knows what she did but does not really understand why she did it save justifying herself that she’s been “bullied” by members of the LGBTQ+ community in the past. She deliberately mangles the acronym and makes a point of using male pronouns to refer to the trans woman she’s currently targeting, Janzen (EJ Jallorina), but later starts to slip up instinctively using “she” after spending months talking to her normally over a dating app posing as buff model Theo (Royce Cabrera). Asked what the point of all this is, Beanie doesn’t have much of an answer beyond the cruelty itself explaining that the end goal is simply to ghost the target once they’ve made an emotional connection to cause them to feel hurt or humiliated. Perhaps these seem like low level consequences to Beanie who regards the catfishing as something like a weird hobby though one she expends an immense amount of time on seeing as she doesn’t appear to have anything else going on in her life aside from her actual job as a video director working in the fashion industry. 

The strange thing is though is Beanie describes Janzen as fun to talk to and they even seem to strike up a genuine connection over their shared interest in design. Beanie then finds herself in dilemma, simultaneously accelerating the plan to avoid having to deal with her complicated feelings but then restarting it after its natural end point by inserting herself into the conversation posing as Theo’s cousin and apologising on his behalf for his treatment of her in a moment of panic. The implication is that Beanie’s behaviour is motivated by an internalised homophobia in which she cannot bear to admit her desire for other women keeping her connection with Janzen because she is attracted to her but simultaneously denying it through a deliberate attempt to cause her pain and humiliation in returning her feelings vicariously through the fake Theo persona.

Some may feel that the film to too sympathetic towards outward transphobe Beanie or that once again implying the villain is closeted is unhelpful, but there may be something in her claims to be a kind of victim too in that her internalised homophobia is caused by societal conservatism in a largely Catholic, patriarchal culture. The film is clear on the dangers and discrimination Janzen faces daily both online and off as her friends remark on the case of a trans woman being arrested for using the ladies’ bathroom and later TV news footage shows president Duterte pardoning a US soldier who had been convicted of murdering a transgender sex worker. As the film begins, Janzen’s boyfriend breaks up with her over his discomfort about publicly dating a trans woman, implying that he is ashamed or embarrassed in his inability to explain the relationship to his older conservative parents. An online date then goes south when he realises she is trans. As her friends tell her Theo seems too good to be true especially as his social media only contains professionally taken photos and no personal posts or connections but Janzen is blinded by love and deeply wants to believe that the relationship is “real”.

That might go someway to explaining why she puts up with so much nonsense from Theo and continues to interact with him even after he calls her a series of slur words, leaves her waiting at the airport for a fake meeting, and then dumps her in a Jollibee after convincing her to travel all the way to Manila knowing she has no return ticket or place to stay. Playing out almost like an incredibly perverse Cyrano de Bergerac, the film at times pushes Janzen into the background in favour of exploring Beanie’s motivations for her seemingly senseless, sadistic cruelty, but subsequently allows her to reclaim centrestage in owning her own story by taking a stand against transphobic bullying on behalf of the other victims and her wider community while very much claiming the moral high ground by wishing Beanie nothing but peace though whether she’ll ever find it is anybody’s guess. 

Where Is the Lie? screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © Anima Studios, Kroma Entertainment, December 2022.© 2022 Kroma Entertainment. All Rights Reserved

Harvest Moon (Эргэж ирэхгүй намар, Amarsaikhan Baljinnyam, 2022)

Posted on by

A young man who left for the city is forced to reckon with his childhood self and the nature of paternity when called back to his rural home in Amarsaikhan Baljinnyam’s touching directorial debut Harvest Moon (Эргэж ирэхгүй намар). The melancholy title may hint at the short-lived nature of the central relationship but also reflects the slowly disappearing traditional culture of the Mongolian Steppe and the loneliness of those who find themselves in one way or another orphaned amid its vast and empty landscapes.

Tulgaa’s (Amarsaikhan Baljinnyam) dilemma is that he’s just received a voice message from a woman he’s been seeing explaining that she has a son she had not previously disclosed and wants to know if it’s a dealbreaker before the relationship becomes more serious. Meanwhile, he receives a call from his home village letting him know that the man who raised him, but was not actually his biological father, has been taken ill and may be close to death. Though reluctant, Tulgaa begins the long journey to say goodbye and then finds himself agreeing to stay a little longer to finish his father’s last harvest. 

While there, he meets a little boy, Tuntuulei (Tenuun-Erdene Garamkhand), who is like he was a child without a father though currently living with elderly grandparents while his mother works in the city. Older than his years, Tuntuulei too is bullied and ostracised by the other villagers who gossip and disapprove of the manner of his birth which apparently occurred after a one night stand. Neither Tulgaa nor Tuntuulei ever knew their biological fathers and are each looking for something to soothe their loneliness, eventually developing paternal relationship even in the knowledge that Tulgaa will return to the city once the harvest is done whether or not he eventually decides to accept becoming a father to his girlfriend’s son. 

In many ways Tulgaa is bonding with his childhood self and processing his paternal anxieties through the lonely, abandoned child he once was which is perhaps a little unfair given that he essentially taking a test run with Tuntuulei in preparation for becoming another boy’s father. Tuntuulei’s grandparents meanwhile contemplate sending him to the city to be with his mother, conscious that he’s bored with only the elderly couple for company and takes no interest in schooling. Tulgaa’s discovery that the boy cannot read provokes a rift between them in his insensitive reaction though Tuntuulei has already taught him a series of essential life skills for living on the Steppe from fishing to how to salve the blisters on his hands from cutting grass with a scythe. Tulgaa’s father had finally accepted that there was nothing he could have done to prevent him from leaving, but Tuntuulei seems so perfectly in tune with this landscape that it may not be possible for him to find happiness in the city even as this way of life continues to decline with other youngsters increasingly choosing urban civility over nomadic freedom.

As Tulgaa is eventually told, the age of harvesting by hand may be over as his stay in the village is quite literally cut short leaving Tuntuulei all alone a tiny figure amid heaps of drying grass. The once verdant field now seems sad and empty, a sign that autumn has arrived and not only for the two men but for the village as a whole. The film had opened with a group of men desperately trying to get a phone signal by attaching a mobile to a pole and standing on a horse, shouting up at the receiver and barely able to understand the reply. Tuntuulei suggests building tower so people could climb up and make a call whenever they want which in part symbolises his own desire for connection along with the community’s isolation from the outside world. But when he tries to use it himself he discovers only disappointment. After all this effort, his mother is too busy to speak to him and blithely asks that he call back later cruelly crushing his fantasy of being able to contact someone any time he wants and reinforcing his sense of aloneness. Even so through his relationship with Tulgaa who is after all an older version of himself he is able to find another connection which may endure even in its absence. Beautifully lensed to take advantage of the majesty of the Mongolian landscape, Amarsaikhan Baljinnyam’s poetic debut is a quietly affecting affair in its own way melancholy but also filled with warmth and a sense of future possibility.

Harvest Moon screens in Chicago Sept. 23 as part of the 17th season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema where Pinnacle Career Achievement honouree Amarsaikhan Baljinnyam is scheduled to attend the award ceremony before the film and Q&A after.  

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Bear Man (웅남이, Park Sung-kwang, 2023)

Posted on by

According to an ancient legend, bears who eat garlic and mugwort can become human though it’s not exactly clear why they’d want to. The debut film from Park Sung-kwang, Bear Man (웅남이, Woongnami) as its name suggests follows a pair of bear cubs who decide to give things a go in the human world but with wildly differing results as one is adopted by the researcher who allowed them to escape and the other by a vicious gangster who exploits him for his violent capabilities and shows him little love. 

Love is something Woongnam (Park Sung-woong) got a lot of thanks to his devoted mother and though not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer had forged a promising career as a local policeman before he was let go after falling into a kind of funk on overhearing his father on the phone suggesting that the life expectancy for a regular bear is only 25 so he might not have much time left. Thanks to his nature as a bear man, Woongnam ages much faster than everyone else and already appears to be middle-aged though he is also blessed with immense strength and agility. After agreeing to bend the law by helping his feckless friend Malbong (Lee Yi-kyung) win in at illegal gambling Woognam comes to the attention of a group of police detectives investigating a shady gangster who notice a man looking just like Woongnam taking out a host of bad guys at the harbour. 

There is something quite poignant in the puppy-like existence of Woongbok (also Park Sung-woong) who keeps looking up to his boss as a father figure with a mixture of fear and longing. He gazes enviously at a family crossing the road in front of him and later visits Woognam’s home where Woongnam’s mother thinks that he’s Woognam and tries to feed him his favourite foods while he just looks on silently without expression. Where Woongnam is basically good, not too bright but heart in the right place, Woongbok has been raised as creature of violence by his intimidating father figure and carries a threatening aura with his slick haircut and tailored suit. 

The police want Woongnam to pose as Woongbok so they can take down the gangsters who have not only been trafficking drugs but also dabble in scientific research into viruses and their cures apparently about to unleash an epidemic in China to profit off the drug sales. It’s not all that clear what the scientists who released the bears were actually researching though there is a kind of parallel in the fact the other pair seemingly settled down, adjusted to their new environment and had a few cubs while Woongnam and Woongbok ended up becoming humans with bear-like abilities. Woongnam has to be prevented from entering hibernation and sleeps flat out like a bear but otherwise keeps his true nature secret even while covertly helping the townspeople out getting rid of beehives and freeing trucks stuck in the mud. 

That would be about the extent of “policing” in this kind of small-town where there’s nothing much to do but catch fish in the river and chat to wild boar. Park builds on the surreality of everyday rural life with mounting absurdities such as the parade of teenagers who troop through the convenience store where Woongnam’s live-streaming friend Malbong works each of whom he is largely able to unmask thanks to his keen sense of smell, and the polytunnel that doubles as a gambling den for down on their luck farmers. Woongnam’s biggest regret is losing his position as a police officer and it’s his desire to get it back to make things up to the people who raised him that encourages him to go along with the detectives’ crazy plan even if means he has to undergo weird martial arts training inspired by Drunken Master and take lessons from a strange movement coach in how to walk like a gangster. Yet in the end it’s Woongbok’s innocent desire for familial love that becomes a source of salvation, turning against his gangster brethren to protect the warmth of Woongnam’s family home. Quirky in the extreme and defiantly absurd, the film nevertheless has genuine heart in otherwise strange tale of wandering sons and bears of men.

Bear Man screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival. 

Images: © 2023 KIMCHI PICTURES PRODUCTION. ALL Rights Reserved.

Bad Education (黑的教育, Kai Ko, 2022)

Posted on by

According to a jaded policeman in Kai Ko’s directorial debut Bad Education (黑的教育, Hēi de Jiàoyù), only 10% of people are good and 10% bad with 80% somewhere in the middle depending on the circumstances. As another person puts, even bad people have principles and in an odd way it’s a sadistic gangster who becomes a moral authority teaching the trio at the film’s centre a few valuable lessons in just how far south something can go when you allow yourself to be swayed by peer pressure and adolescent bravado. 

Perhaps intended as a graduation prank, Chang (Berant Zhu) suggests he and his friends Han (Edison Song) and Wang (Kent Tsai) exchange otherwise unspeakable secrets to cement their ongoing friendship through the threat of blackmail and exposure. Chang tells a frankly disgusting story that he raped and impregnated a young woman with learning difficulties while Han claims that he bludgeoned a homeless man to death but no one noticed. The only one to be going on to university, Wang does not have any particularly dark secrets to share. All he can come up with is that he once read his father’s texts and found out he’s having an affair, while otherwise confessing to having stolen the answer sheet to a test. As expected, Chang and Han don’t like his answers and begin to threaten him, pushing Wang back towards the edge of the roof as if they meant to kill him so wouldn’t spill the beans. 

Chan and Han were of course bullshitting, they haven’t done anything of the sort, but they manage to persuade Wang that he’ll have to do something similar to complete the pact. They challenge him to throw paint at a gangster which turns out to be an incredibly bad mistake though to be fair to them, Chan and Han may not have expected Wang to actually do it. It’s only then that they start to realise they aren’t children any more. Actions will have consequences and even if, as Mr. Hsing (Leon Dai) the gangster boss later says, they haven’t done “anything wrong” they’ve gone about everything in the wrong way and will eventually have to pay. Chan looks up at him pleadingly and answers like a child that he’s sorry and won’t do it again, but Mr. Hsing points out that whether he does it again or not is of no interest to him. It’s not what this is about. 

What it’s about is perhaps a different kind of “graduation”, leaving the innocence and naivety of childhood behind for the cynicism of adulthood and the moral greyness of grownup society. Then again, they weren’t all that innocent to begin with that they could come up with heinous crimes to confess and imagine that their friendship would survive it. The policeman says that 80% of people could go either way in most situations, himself included it seems, painting a fairly bleak picture of the contemporary society. Chased through the city by Hsing’s foot soldiers, Chan and Wang end up stealing a taxi from a taxi driver who had just raped the young woman passed out drunk in his car though no one makes much of an effort to help her as each remains fixated on their personal goals such as escaping and fleeing the city. 

In the opening scenes, a lobster had been plucked from a tank and had its legs cut off in a moment of foreshadowing while customers in Mr Hsing’s seafood restaurant with greasy mouths suck on shrimp whose corpses they soon spit out and discard. Something quite similar happens to the boys as the cracks in their friendship are further exposed. Even back on the rooftop, they’d reflected on the class difference between them with Wang, whose father owns a factory he is expected to take over, the only one going to college, while Chan jokes about becoming his driver and Han remarks that he’d like to drive a Maserati (one stands across from him as he’s viciously beaten in his underwear by Hsing’s goons). 

Figuring out they have no underworld connections, Hsing asks for money and the boys immediately look to rich kid Wang only he refuses because it’s too embarrassing to ask his dad for that amount of cash. Engaged in some kind of sadistic power play, Hsing tries to get them to cut each other’s pinkies off with the guys each turning on and blaming each other. Chan too tries to argue that they came back to save Han so he owes them (only they didn’t), while later blaming Wang for going ahead with the dare rather than himself for setting up this stupid prank as a means of having something to remember in their old age. Later he admits his insecurity, uncertain of his own future and frightened that his friends will leave him behind but it’s already too late. Wang ironically fulfils the pact, his graduate rosette fluttering as he does so as if to remind us that he’s now “graduated” from childhood innocence, but ironically destroys rather than cements the boys’ friendship with one chaotic night of violence and terror. Incredibly dark with moments of bleak humour, Bad Education offers a lesson in retribution and the costs of peer pressure and bravado and leaves each of its heroes changed, if not slightly broken, by the realities of a duplicitous adulthood. 

Bad Education screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival. 

Teaser trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Faces of Anne (แอน, Kongdej Jaturanrasmee & Rasiguet Sookkarn, 2022)

Posted on by

A young woman wakes up in a grimy hotel room with floral wallpaper marked by damp stains. She discovers that the window is frosted over and won’t open while she has no idea of how she got there or who she is but otherwise instinctively knows that the face she sees in the mirror does not belong to her. She tries to call out and hears a voice from an adjacent room telling her to be quiet and that her name is “Anne”. Anne asks her how she knows if she can’t see her, but the voice just tells her that she knows her name is Anne with no further explanation. 

As it turns out in Kongdej Jaturanrasmee & Rasiguet Sookkarn’s Faces of Anne (แอน) every girl in the place has the same name and as gradually becomes apparent are all reflections of a single personality. The key Anne discovers that her face seems to change seemingly at random leaving her uncertain even within the bounds of her fractured identity. A psychiatrist tells her that a name is “not as important as who you are” while encouraging her to learn to accept the face she sees as her own, but she remains confused, abstracted from herself, and unable to reconcile her selfhood with its reflection. Meanwhile, she is stalked by a violent demon in the guise of a deer name Vitigo who wanders the hospital corridors taking out any Annes that it finds. 

What seems to be going on is an attempt to reintegrate the shards of a fractured personality into a coherent whole only it’s manifesting as a massacre of the self as the demon bumps off each of the multiple Annes insisting that only one, the “real” Anne, can be allowed to leave. But then no one is really only one person but presents a series of personas to the outside world all of whom can be said to be “real” even if otherwise inauthentic. In an illuminating flashback, high school girl Anne chats with another couple of girls about fake online profiles where they can share their “real” selves each of which of course have a completely different profile photo much as the serial Annes have a different face. What we can assume to be the key Anne expresses that she just wants to find a place where she can be completely herself and thinks she has one in a relationship with a boyfriend whose face we never see but had shades both of a man who might be her father and the hero of a video game the atmosphere of which seems to have coloured the aesthestics of her eerie mindscape. 

Some might find it easy to dismiss her identity crisis as teenage angst or to suggest that what she’s suffering from is a broken heart though Kongdej Jaturanrasmee & Rasiguet Sookkarn also make reference to a number of problems faced by young people in contemporary Thailand such as online harassment and bullying, sexual harrassment at school and the bad student movement protesting an oppressive educational environment laying bare the pressures on key Anne’s mind that might cause her to become estranged from herself. Asking probing questions about identity, the film wonders if Anne can learn to find herself as distinct from all of these images or if in the end identity and image are inextricably linked to the extent that they can no longer exist distinctly and Anne has no power to identify herself but must rely on the identification of others. Then again, the voice from the other room knows she is Anne without seeing her precisely as she is also Anne, identifying herself in the absence of image. 

Eerie and filled with a Lynchian dread in its hellish lightning and grimy hotel room setting, the film turns Anne’s psychodrama into an existential slasher in which she awaits the arrival of the Final Girl. Retracing her steps, she seeks escape in a pattern of trial and error unwittingly at war with herself even as tussles over identity and authenticity while trying to reconstruct a shattered identity by reclaiming the images of the past or perhaps as simply as the psychiatrist had put it learning to accept the face she now wears as her own. Haunting and empathetic, the film has only sympathy for the wandering ghosts of a fractured mind and the vague hope that together they can put Anne together again. 

Faces of Anne screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © M Pictures Entertainment Public Company Limited.

Stand Up Story (說笑之人, Amen Au Cheuk-man, 2023)

Posted on by

A lost young man tries to turn his grief into laughter while realising he might have more in common with his ageing father than he first assumed in Amen Au Cheuk-man’s poignant drama, Stand Up Story (說笑之人). Partially an exploration of the marginalisation of those with disabilities, the film is also a gentle tale of learning to stand up for one’s self and one’s family while gaining the courage to follow your dreams rather than holding back in fear of failure. 

Manny’s (Ng Siu-Hin) dreams lie in stand up comedy, but he struggles to convince his father, who has learning difficulties due to a childhood illness, that telling jokes can be a real job. Wah (Ben Yuen Foo-Wa) raised him alone after the woman he married left the family once her Hong Kong residency was confirmed leaving them both with a sense of absence and lingering feeling of lonely abandonment. Though his father was very excited his son has graduated university, Manny is working as a delivery driver while floundering for direction half-heartedly pursuing standup but lacking the confidence to jump in and try it full-time while also unwilling to look for a steadier job because it would mean giving up on comedy.

As the former headmaster who employs him at his restaurant after he retires from his job as a high school janitor suggests Wah is also lacking in confidence and afraid to try new things in part because of his insecurity as someone with learning difficulties who may have encountered impatience and anger in the past. Though he manages well enough on his own, Wah has experienced prejudice and discrimination all his life and has made himself smaller because of it. Always cheerful he does his best to be useful and help others where he can even if they sometimes take advantage of him accidentally or otherwise like the thoughtless Fourth Auntie who gets him to do a lot her work for her and place bets on her behalf pledging to chip in with her share of the money if they win. 

Manny is quick to warn him about such people, but as the master suggests may also be guilty of underestimating his father while insensitive to his fear of loneliness. As a teenager, Manny had also been somewhat embarrassed by his father and did little to defend him when the other kids at school made of him. He also doesn’t invite him to his university graduation despite the excitement that has already seen Wah buy a new suit for the occasion. In a moment of anger he expresses his resentment, exclaiming that he feels trapped in their claustrophobic apartment and is fearful that he’ll stuck there forever but of course regrets it realising how much he’s hurt Wah’s feelings in the knowledge of how difficult his life has been raising him as a single father on a janitor’s salary. 

The irony is that Wah had wanted his son to become a teacher, a respectable, steady job he has a particular respect for because of the support he received from the headmaster, but becomes a kind of teacher himself albeit wordlessly. Manny can only progress his comedy career by wrestling with his life even if some of his routines feel as if the may be crossing a line between laughing at and with his father. Wah’s discomfort is evident on watching Manny telling jokes about him on stage, but so is his relief and thankfulness that people seem to be laughing and he might be able to make a career out of it after all. 

One of Manny’s colleagues suggests that stand up might just save Hong Kong, that now more than ever people need to find a way to channel their anxiety into comedy to able to carry on. That anxiety is only deepened by the pandemic in which even the headmaster’s restaurant is threatened by the economic reality and Wah’s world becomes even smaller. Warmhearted though also honest in Manny’s inner conflict and ambivalence towards his relationship with his father the film is essentially about giving things a proper chance while there’s time rather than giving up because it seems difficult or awkward be it in relationships or finding the courage to chase happiness doing something you love.

Stand Up Story screens in Chicago Sept. 16 as part of the 17th season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema. Pinnacle Career Achievement honoree Ben Yuen and Bright Star Award recipients Ng Siu Hin and Rachel Leung are scheduled to attend the award ceremony before the film and Q&A after

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Motherhood (母性, Ryuichi Hiroki, 2022)

Posted on by

Is love ever really unconditional or are we all just chasing a sense of parental approval even after we become parents ourselves? According to a reporter late into Ryuichi Hiroki’s adaptation of the Kanae Minato novel Motherhood (母性, Bosei), there are only two types of women, mothers and daughters, and it is in some ways a confusion of roles that frustrates the relationship between two women who are never fully able to form a maternal connection. 

Asked by a colleague if she felt her parents loved her, the reporter answers that they were the kind who made her wear a frilly blouse with a big collar for the school play and got her new shoes for Sports Day suggesting that their love was in its way performative and they cared more about how other parents would judge them than they did about her feelings seeing as she actively hated filly blouses with big collars. Alternatively, it may have been another kind of misunderstanding in they got her these things because they thought they should make her happy and took her rejection of them as resistance. 

The little girl at the film’s centre, Sayaka whose name is only spoken in the film’s closing scenes, encounters something similar when she asks her grandmother for a Hello Kitty bag having been presented with one featuring a beautifully embroidered bird. Her mother, Rumiko (Erika Toda), finds this highly offensive thinking that Sayaka has rejected her grandmother’s lovingly handmade gift in asking for something shop bought featuring a popular character, but Sayaka treasured her grandmother’s embroidery and just wanted her to sew Hello Kitty instead. 

In her voiceover, Rumiko implies that her annoyance is also born of shame in that Sayaka has forgotten everything she taught her about consideration for the feelings of others, while in her own the pain in Sayaka’s eyes is clear. She feels slighted, almost threatened by her mother’s hushed reaction advising her that it’s better to stick with birds because then people will realise that’s what she likes and go out of their way to give her bird-themed presents. The irony is that, at least in the way Rumiko tells it, her mother Hanae (Mao Daichi) believed they were such a happy family because she accepted their love “straightforwardly” when really it was anything but. Fixated on Hanae, Rumiko lives her entire life to make her mother happy even down to her choice of husband despite warnings from all sides that they are otherwise not particularly well suited. 

The reporter makes a point of commenting on another diner’s poor table manners in a restaurant with the result that he gets up and leaves, feeling uncomfortable in the wake of her rude intrusion. She explains that she was brought up to feel as if she always had to get everything right as if being loved depended on being good much as Rumiko had felt. Little Sayaka is more or less the same, constantly chasing maternal affection though receiving little in return as Rumiko struggles to transition from the role of daughter to mother and continues to fixate on Hanae caring little for anything else. When the family are forced to vacate their cute forest cabin of a home to move in with father Satoshi’s (Masaki Miura) harridan of a mother (Atsuko Takahata), Rumiko tries the same tactic believing that if she can become “good” in her mother-in-law’s eyes then she will eventually accept her little realising that she is simply a difficult woman who will never be like her own mother and only finally embraces her as a daughter as she lovingly mothers her long after she has become bedridden and appears to be suffering from dementia. 

Then again, perhaps the constant nagging, a tendency to run people down and push them away, are also frustrated ways of showing love and ironically what the mother-in-law might have wanted was someone to fight back as Sayaka tried to do much to Rumiko’s chagrin as she accused her of ruining her attempt to curry favour. Sayaka finds a diary belonging to her father, Satoshi, which recounts memories of domestic violence which he rebelled against indirectly through taking part in the student protests little caring about the cause only channeling his rage and disillusionment into something that didn’t really matter to him so would make no difference if it failed. She calls him a weak man who hides behind women, forcing Rumiko to take care of his mother while otherwise unwilling to stand up for himself or take responsibility for his family. 

Perhaps men are only fathers or sons too and this one had little idea what to do with a daughter. Naively proposing on the third date, he said he wanted to build a “beautiful home” presumably to escape the one he grew up in attracted as much the genial atmosphere of Hanae’s upper middle class mansion as to Rumiko herself. Hiroki paints the forest-bound “dream home” in nostalgic shades of pastel, lending it almost an uncanny sense of fairytale bliss that the family can never live up to despite Rumiko’s Stepford-esque attempts to become the perfect housewife by essentially becoming her mother. Offering her version of events mainly through a confession to a priest, it’s clear that Rumiko has not been entirely honest before God, but neither of our narrators are really all that reliable even if relating how they felt something happened at the time leaving us less with one concrete version of the truth than a tragic tale of love frustrated by the codified roles of mother and daughter along with maternal jealously and anxiety. 

Nevertheless, they are united by a maternal legacy and the act of ensuring the line will continue connecting all of them to the future through the chain of motherhood. The reporter’s thinking may have a degree of internalised misogyny as she remarks on the societal prejudice that regards an unmotherly woman as hardly a woman at all while giving no recognition to women who are neither mother nor daughter in her contemplation of the maternal instinct which she otherwise regards as learned rather than innate. Asking for definitions, she comes up with the need to protect one’s child which is perhaps something her mother may have lacked when it counted but did not necessarily mean she had no love for her at all despite her fits of resentment. Shot with a degree of eeriness that dissipates in favour of a darkening realism in the later stages, Hiroki’s heightened drama nevertheless suggests that an equilibrium can be found in the maternal relationship even if it is painfully won.

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

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Images: ©2022 “MOTHERHOOD” FILM PARTNERS