Category: Festivals

The Bride with White Hair (白髮魔女傳, Ronny Yu, 1993)

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“This is the so-called underworld rule. You have no choice.” the hero of Ronny Yu’s gothic fairytale The Bride White Hair (白髮魔女傳) is told, only to reflect “Yes, I do.” though the world will eventually prove him wrong. Tinged with handover anxiety, the film finds its star-crossed lovers longing to exercise their choice of exile, to be allowed to live quietly outside of the political turbulence that surrounds them. But in the end their love is not strong enough to overcome their difference and doubt becomes the ultimate act of emotional betrayal. 

This is a tale that signals its tragedy from its inception. The Ching emperor is deathly ill and only a flower growing on a distant mountain that blossoms only once every 20 years can save him. “This flower is not for you” the emissaries are told by man who appears to be frozen in more ways than one, relating that he has waited 10 years for a woman who may have forgotten him. As a young man, Yi-hang (Leslie Cheung) was the roguish heir to the Wu Tang clan whose recklessness sometimes caused him to behave in unorthodox ways in the name of justice. The eight clans of Chung Yuan are beset on both sides, caught between the conflict of Ching and Ming while fearful of an “Evil Cult” that otherwise destabilises their icy grip over the local area. 

It’s becoming clear to Yi-hang that he may not be on the right side. The people are oppressed and starving but their attempt to procure a little sustenance for themselves leads to a bloody raid with clan soldiers cutting down peasants until a mysterious woman in white (Brigitte Lin) arrives wielding a whip that can cut people in half. Interrupted by a tragic scene while napping in the forest, Yi-hang is immediately smitten with the female assassin whom he later realises is the same girl he saw as a child who saved him from wolves with the song of her flute. 

The woman is an orphan taken in by the cult and trained up as an assassin. She has only a surname, Lien, and is then symbolically “reborn” when Yi-hang gives her her name, Ni-chang. Having fallen in love, the pair vow to leave the underworld together and live in the pastoral paradise of the watering hole where they first made love. “This underworld doesn’t belong to us, let them fight for it” Yi-hang insists, attempting to exercise his choice to escape a system he sees as corrupt before it strains his integrity but as he’ll discover he’s not as much choice as he thought. 

In the shadow of the Handover, it might be tempting to read Lien and Yi-hang as ordinary people who just want to live quietly and resent the intrusion of politics into their lives, though they remain caught between two opposing powers with no neutral space for them to occupy. The same could be said of the cult’s leaders, a pair of crazed conjoined twins, one male one female, who are fused at the back in a potent symbol of duality. The twins were once members of the Wu Tang clan but were betrayed and exiled, driven mad by their banishment. At the film’s conclusion, Yi-hang symbolically frees the twins by splitting them apart but their separation leads only to their deaths. In the end, Yi-hang betrays his love because the underworld does not permit it to exist. He doubts Lien’s word and his rejection of her sparks her metamorphosis into the title’s Bride with White Hair, a vengeful spirit of hurt and rage now condemned to eternal wandering just as Yi-hang is condemned to life a waiting only to watch a flower wither and die knowing that he has damned himself. 

Yu’s world of melancholy romanticism is typical of that of early ‘90s wuxia though carries a touch of the gothic not least in the Bride’s cobweb-like hair which eventually becomes her finest weapon. The pervading sense of longing seems to hint at a future act of imperfect union, tinged with volatile ambivalence but perhaps finally suggesting that this romance is doomed to failure because the corruption of the world into which Yi-hang, the authority, was born is simply too great to be conquered by the innocence of his love. 

The Bride with White Hair screens screens at UltraStar Cinemas Mission Valley April 23 as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival Spring Showcase.

Trailer (English subtitles)

What Happened to the Wolf? (Na Gyi, 2021)

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Two terminally ill women slowly fall in love while circling the spectre of death in Na Gyi’s poignant queer romance, What Happened to the Wolf?. Homosexual activity is currently illegal in Myanmar and carries a 20-year prison term. The situation has only declined since the military coup which occurred in 2021. Director Na Gyi has since gone into exile along with his wife, actress Paing Phyo Thu, while her co-star Eaindra Kyaw Zin was herself arrested for protesting against the junta.

Given these conditions, the film may seem in a way coy or perhaps oblique but is also filled with a sense of melancholy longing that culminates in a well earned moment of emotional serenity. As the husband of heroine later suggests, they’ve been unhappy for a long time and only now that she’s been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and been given only a year at most to live does Myint Myat (Eaindra Kyaw Zin) begin to reflect on her life and regret its missed opportunities. The film opens with her attempting to take her own life, explaining that she did not want to be waiting around to die though has a few “things to take care of” that made her reconsider her decision. 

It’s in the hospital that she first encounters Way Way (Paing Phyo Thu), a rebellious young woman born with a hole in her heart who has had quite a tragic life but seems to Myint Myat to have come to an accommodation with the proximity of death. As she later begins to realise, Way Way’s vivacity is also an act of self-delusion to mask her fear of mortality but nevertheless her lust for life begins to reawaken something in Mying Myat who is beginning to wonder what her life which has largely been defined by ideas of conventional success has really been for. 

When she laments that she was raised with a “proper system”, it reads both as a mild rebuke against an authoritarian culture and a frustration directed at her own internalised repression. Na Gyi’s camera often shoots with lingering desire, a close up on Way Way’s neck pregnant with longing as a conflicted Mying Myat considers reaching out but cannot bring herself to do so. As she reveals to Way Way, she never saw the point in dancing only for the younger woman to try to teach her how which is really a way of trying to show her how to live. 

But Way Way also has her own troubles which have led her to push people away so they wouldn’t miss her when she’s gone, though most of all what she fears is being left behind alone. She rejects her brother out of a mix of guilt and love in feeling unworthy that he gave up his artistic desires of becoming a photographer to become a doctor in order to cure her disease. She takes pictures with his old-fashioned film camera and listens to cassette tapes on a classic walkman as if longing for a long lost past. With her retro sensibility it might seem as if the (slightly) older Myint Myat is falling for the embodiment of her own frustrated youth and she does indeed seem to meditate on the things she lost along the way much as her architect husband gave up painting to work for the father she resents while she poured everything into her business. 

The film’s title takes itself from a shadow play Way Way acts out while the pair are holed up in a “haunted” house hoping to see a ghost. A wolf comes across a peacock and is jealous of its beautiful feathers. The wolf pounces, but the peacock flies away unfurling its beautiful plumage as it goes. Myint Myat wonders what happened to the wolf after that, but Way Way doesn’t have an answer for her. In some ways it’s difficult to define which of them might be the wolf and the other peacock for each of them begins to rediscover a sense of beauty in their unexpected connection even while the spectre of death hangs over them both. The film might in a sense answer the question of its title though only in the most melancholy of senses even as the two women transcend themselves as they make their way towards a place beyond the clouds.

What Happened to the Wolf? screens at BFI Southbank 24th April as part of this year’s Queer East.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Red Lotus Asian Film Festival Announces 2023 Programme

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Vienna’s Red Lotus Asian Film Festival returns for its second edition 20th to 23rd April with another handpicked selection of recent hits from across the region. Here’s a rundown of the East Asian features screening in this year’s programme:

China

  • Art College 1994 – animated feature from Have a Nice Day’s Liu Jian revolving around a collection of art students in the rapidly changing society of mid-90s China.
  • Journey to the West – a UFO obsessive journeys west in search of the meaning of life in Kong Dashan’s hilariously deadpan, absurdist epic. Review.

Hong Kong

  • A Guilty Conscience – a previously cynical lawyer puts the law on trial while correcting a miscarriage of justice in Jack Ng Wai-Lun’s screwball courtroom dramedy. Review.
  • Let It Ghost – indie horror anthology from first time director Wong Hoi.

Indonesia

  • Like & Share – two young women seeking escape from a repressive social culture find themselves betrayed by the hypocrisies of the online society in an infinitely empathetic drama from Two Blue Stripes’ Gina S. Noer. Review.

Japan

  • Your Lovely Smile – film director Hirobumi Watanabe stars as a version of himself in Malaysian director Lim Kah Wa’s comic paean for indie filmmakers and the microcinema landscape in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Mongolia

  • The Sales Girl – a diffident student begins to open up after befriending an eccentric middle-aged woman who runs a sex shop in Janchivdorj Sengedorj’s quirky comedy. Review.

The Philippines

  • Insiang – Lino Brocka’s 1976 classic in which a young woman living in the slums of Manila decides to take revenge against her abusive mother and the step-father who raped her.

South Korea

  • Jeong-sun – a factory worker’s life is disrupted when a video of a sexual encounter with a colleague is leaked on the internet.

The Red Lotus Asian Film Festival runs in Vienna, Austria 20th to 23rd April. The full programme including films from India, Pakistan, and Iran is available on the official website along with ticketing links. All films screen in their original language with English subtitles. You can keep up with all the latest news by following the festival on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Switch (스위치, Ma Dae-yun, 2023)

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An egotistical actor is given an unexpected lesson in what it is that makes life worth living when he’s suddenly transported to a parallel world in Ma Dae-yun’s charming Christmas dramedy, Switch (스위치). Rather than the body swap comedy the title might suggest, Ma’s warmhearted morality tale is a more a meditation on what might have been and may be again while contemplating the emptiness of a life of fame and riches when there’s no one to share it with. 

“What matters more than money?” top star Park Kang (Kwon Sang-Woo) chuckles after telling his manager he’ll accept a job he just described in quite insulting terms after being informed it comes with a hefty paycheque. Kang is currently riding high. He’s become enormously successful and even a recent sex scandal involving his co-star in a TV drama has only boosted his profile. Yet he tells his analyst that he can’t sleep and attributes it to “depression and anxiety”. He treats those around him poorly and most particularly his long suffering best friend from his fringe theatre days, Joe Yoon (Oh Jung-Se) who now works as his manager, while struggling to accept his loneliness and meditating on lost love in the memory of the woman he broke up with in order to chase stardom. 

After getting into a weird taxi one Christmas Eve, he’s suddenly granted the “wish” of getting to find out what would have happened if he’d made a different choice. After waking up in an unfamiliar house he discovers that he’s married with two children and slumming it fringe theatre while Joe Yoon is now the superstar having aced the audition Kang ran out on to chase Soo-hyun (Lee Min-Jung) to the airport and convince her not to leave. Of course, Kang is originally quite unhappy about all of this. He doesn’t understand why no one recognises him anymore and resents that he’s suddenly subject to the rules of “ordinary” people again after a decade as a pampered star. In his acceptance speech after winning an award, he’d stated his intention to “forget” his roots as a humble actor and embrace his new role as a member of the showbiz elite fully demonstrating his sense of alienation and insecurity along with his intense loneliness. As the taxi driver had said, Kang has “everything”. He’s achieved his dreams and lives the high life he’d always dreamed of, yet he’s deeply unhappy.

But his “new” life immediately challenges his sense of masculinity in realising that he has little power without money and is in fact financially dependent on Soo-hyun whom he may also have robbed of a bright future by preventing her from studying abroad and achieving success as an artist. Meanwhile he looks down on himself for continuing to follow his artistic dreams in fringe theatre when his plays attract few audiences members and make little money. Just as Joe Yoon had become his manager, so he ends up getting a taste of what it’s like trying to manage a “star” while coming to appreciate that Joe Yoon may be feeling just as lonely and unfulfilled as he once had. 

Yet even as Kang settles into his new life as a husband and father while slowly rebuilding his acting career though a combination of talent, supportive friendship, and good luck, he fails to learn the right lessons continuing to yearn for external validation through material success. He spends money on fancy dinners and tries to move the family into a swanky apartment in Seoul without realising that he’s already got a “home” in the quaint little provincial house he and Soo-hyun set up together filled with memories (that admittedly he doesn’t actually have) of the children when they were small. Slowly, he begins to look beyond himself while developing a new sense of security that means he doesn’t need to chase status-based affirmation in empty materialism but now has a new sense of what’s really important. A charming season morality tale with a little more than a hint of A Christmas Carol, Ma’s gentle drama never suggests that success itself is wrong or that Kang must give up his movie star persona to become a happy everyman but only insists that true happiness is brokered by treating others well and being treated well in return much more than it is by consumerist success.

Switch screens at UltraStar Cinemas Mission Valley April 22/24 as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival Spring Showcase.

International trailer (English subtitles)

#Manhole (#マンホール, Kazuyoshi Kumakiri, 2023)

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“Who are you? Why are you here?” both questions that might occur to anyone at any point in their lives, but don’t seem to bother the hero of Kazuyoshi Kumakiri’s off the wall B-movie thriller #Manhole (#マンホール) until he’s been trapped underground long enough to realise that his literal fall from grace might not be an accident after all. An existential journey deep into the soul of a seemingly blessed salaryman, Kumakiri’s defiantly absurdist drama is part social satire revolving around fluctuating identity in the social media age and meditation on the inevitability of karmic retribution. 

Shunsuke (Yuto Nakajima) does indeed seem to have it all. A successful estate agent, he’s about to get married and even has a baby on the way, only on his way home from a “surprise” party hosted by his work colleagues the night before his wedding he somehow manages to fall down an open manhole in the middle of Shibuya and becomes trapped there. His attempts to simply climb out are frustrated by a nasty gash on his thigh and a broken ladder while no one seems to be able to hear his cries for help. Though his phone still works, the only person who picks up when he calls is a former girlfriend, Mai (Nao), whom he threw over to court the boss’ daughter five years previously which makes it somewhat awkward to ask for help. 

As we can gradually gather, Shunsuke is not really a great guy and is in part in a hole of his own making. Even so, you can’t really confine someone to a hole just for being one. To begin with he busies himself with trying to solve various hole-related problems such as a leaking gas pipe with the salaryman tools at his disposal like the tiny of roll of sellotape in his pencil case or the cigarette lighter he was gifted by suspiciously aloof colleague Kase (Kento Nagayama) as a wedding present though there’s not much he can do about the weird foam or various animal corpses that surround him. 

It’s at this point he decides to enlist the help of the internet in setting up a profile on Twitter-like social media app Pecker where he identifies himself as “Manhole Girl” under the rationale that people are more likely to rush to the rescue of a pretty young woman than a 30-year-old salaryman who had too much to drink and fell in a hole. His readiness to do this hints at his internal duplicity and a confident sense of entitlement. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that whoever comes to his rescue might decide not to bother on discovering the truth. In any case, he soon becomes Pecker’s main character with engaged netizens keen to help him figure out where he is and, once it becomes clear it might not be an accident, who put him there. But claiming to be his own sister he’s also confronted with sordid speculation about his personal life and character that reveal there might be quite a few people who privately hoped he’d someday disappear down a hole in the ground and never come back up again.

Even before his ordeal, Kumakiri often frames Shunsuke looking at his own reflection hinting at a lack of self-recognition in the images that he sees of himself. Of course, he doesn’t know who any of the helpful netizens are either because most of them don’t use their “real” names or profile pictures that are actually of “themselves” just as he pulled a picture of a cute girl off the internet to create the Manhole Girl persona. He can’t even be sure of the identity of the people he speaks to on the phone, and wonders if Mai really did come to look for him when she says she’s been all over Shibuya and couldn’t find any open manholes. 

For a while it really does seem like he’s in “a completely different place”, some alternate dimension of existential purgatory. The sense of eeriness is only deepened by the strong blue-green lighting and ominous clouds above the hole that obscure the image of the full moon which, in the urban absence of stars and the disruption of his GPS seemingly caused by an unknown force, are all he has to go on in trying to figure out where exactly he is. Few will be prepared for the answer, though as some may expect Shunsuke knew all along for as much as it’s a “real” place it’s also a part of himself he sought to deny. Kumakiri excels in capturing the claustrophobic otherworldliness of Shunsuke’s near literal hell hole while mining a deep seam of cynical dark humour and anarchic absurdity culminating in an incredibly ironic and deliciously wry use of cheerful 1960s hit Sukiyaki. 

#Manhole screens at UltraStar Cinemas Mission Valley April 20/21 as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival Spring Showcase.

International trailer (English subtitles)

I Love You, Beksman (Mahal Kita, Beksman, Percival M. Intalan, 2022)

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“What is the essence of being a real man?” The hero of Percival M. Intalan’s reverse coming out drama I Love You, Beksman (Mahal Kita, Beksman) finds himself questioning his own identity when confronted with the weight of social expectation and prejudice yet discovering that the question is meaningless when the key to happiness lies in self-acceptance and authenticity. Scripted by Fatrick Tabada (Chedeng and Apple), the film tears apart conventional notions of gender and sexuality in a hyper-masculine patriarchal culture while allowing its hero to gain the courage to define himself in order to chase his romantic destiny. 

Everyone just assumes flamboyant hairdresser Dali (Christian Bables) is gay. He dyes his hair red, dresses in a less masculine fashion than other men his age, and has an effeminate manner. Yet Dali has a secret he doesn’t even really realise is one in that he is actually straight as he is forced to reveal after falling for beauty queen Angel (Iana Bernardez) at a pageant. The more he tries to explain to people that he isn’t gay and is serious about romantically pursuing Angel, the less they seem to understand him. It simply doesn’t make sense that someone so “obviously” gay could be attracted to women. They ask him if he’s sure or if it might be a phase or if he’s developed some kind of internalised homophobia but never really consider that it’s a possible for a man to be both effeminate and exclusively attracted to women. 

Even Dali begins to subconsciously change himself in order to better conform to their expectations. Having lost her mother at a young age, Angel is surrounded by hyper-masculine men in her father and brothers who all rather hilariously have the same moustache and enjoy manly pursuits such as weightlifting and basketball. Dali, meanwhile, was surrounded by queerness all his life, raised in the salon by a father who now lives openly as a gay man in a platonic marriage with his mother. Despite having seemingly been very happy as a part of a big gay family who all just assumed him to be gay too, Dali begins to reject his father and his own femininity in believing that he must adopt a more stereotypical masculinity in order to convince Angel of his heterosexuality and eventually win her heart (along with those of her conservative father and brothers). 

It might be true to say that Dali’s original presentation as a flamboyant hairstylist and fashion designer is also a kind of performance and an attempt to conform to parental expectation just as his rejection of it is an attempt to conform to the demands of a hyper-masculine society, but only by embracing both extremes can he learn to define himself outside of the images others project onto him. In adopting the traits of traditional masculinity, he becomes boorish and insensitive asking his father to hide his “gayness” to avoid embarrassing him in front of Angel’s dad while later becoming jealous and violent after seeing Angel hanging out with an ex. He can’t see that his adopted persona makes it even harder to form a genuine romantic connection with Angel, not just because he’s actively erasing the sides of himself she first became attracted to in his skill in makeup and fashion but because as she eventually tells him it’s difficult to trust someone who is being dishonest with themselves. 

The realisation he comes to is that he has to be “himself” rather than being what other people expect him to be while those around him come to understand that outdated ideas of stereotypical gender presentation are harmful to everyone. A gentle tale of broadening horizons and mutual acceptance, Intalan’s ironic comedy neatly subverts the coming out trope while situating itself in a world of relative safety in which Dali is free to explore his own identity and means of self-expression encountering opposition only from those who fear he is not being true to himself. The reality may not be so kind as the classic rom-com conclusion may suggest but the film nevertheless neatly takes aim at the ridiculousness of conventional ideas of “masculinity” in a hyper-masculine and patriarchal culture in making a heartfelt advocation for the right to just be oneself.

I Love You, Beksman screens at the BFI Southbank on 18th April as the opening night gala of this year’s Queer East.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Lost in Forest (山中森林, Johnny Chiang, 2022)

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History repeats itself for a former gangster recently released from prison in Johnny Chiang’s melancholy neo-noir, Lost in Forest (山中森林, Shān Zhōng Senlín). Set in a neon-lit Taipei, Chiang’s moody crime drama finds its hero displaced in the modern society unable to look either forward or back while meditating on all he’s lost and another less corrupt vision of his home city as symbolised by his late father’s missing sausage bike and the changing back streets where it was once parked.

This Taipei is however a less wholesome place as suggested by Chiang’s frequent cuts to Christian churches and the giant neon crosses that sit above them as if looming in judgement on the chaos below. 12 years previously, Sheng (Lee Kang-sheng) opened fire on rival gang members who’d kidnapped his best friend and comrade Seagull (Angus Hsieh) who has now taken over the outfit while he’s been inside. Customarily, Seagull should have had someone come to meet him on his release, but Sheng exits the prison alone and is given a lift back into the city by the entourage collecting his prison buddy Ji despite the fact they are headed to an entirely different part of the country. Without a phone and not knowing where the gang even is anymore, all Sheng can do is hole up in a hotel until he finds out what’s going on. All of which suggests that despite his sacrifice, Seagull may not be particularly glad to reunite with him.

The conflict exists on three levels. Sheng must necessarily doubt his old friend Seagull, especially on realising that his new business model involves exploiting vulnerable women by pressing them into debt via high interest loans and then forcing them into sex work, while simultaneously worried about his guys who claim they have not been well treated while Sheng was away. But then it also becomes clear that much like many contemporary Taiwanese crime dramas, the real villain is institutional corruption as Seagull’s alliances with corrupt politicians and shady businessmen continue to destabilise the underground society thanks to the machinations of anarchic street punk Monkey (Sean Huang) who engineers a gang war by giving the businessman’s son a kicking as leverage in a dodgy land deal. 

On the one hand, Sheng watches history repeat itself as a handsome foot soldier, Chenghao (Prince Chiu), vacillates over leaving the gang for his respectable girlfriend Alice (Puff Kuo), while on the other Sheng becomes attached to sex worker Jing (Lee Chien-na), one of Seagull’s exploited women working for him to pay for her father’s medical bills. Sheng’s former lover tells him that if he really cared about her, he shouldn’t have sacrificed himself for Seagull just as Chenghao shouldn’t put himself in harm’s way out of a pointless sense of loyalty for a gang that has no real loyalty to him. Before his release, the prison warden had advised Sheng not to let his sense of loyalty get the best of him, but as he says Sheng no longer has much of anything else. His parents died while he was inside, the woman he loved married someone else, and Seagull can’t even remember what he did with Sheng’s dad’s sausage bike which is his only path back to a more wholesome existence. 

In a certain sense he’s powerless, unable to escape the inexorable pull of gangland karma until finally forced to reckon with the destabilising force that is Monkey to restore some kind of order and undermine the system of corruption that has arisen between underworld thuggery, local politics, and big business. The warden had also pointed at the fish in his tank and asked Sheng if it was happier in there or back in the sea but Sheng had merely said that it’s up to the fish to decide, hinting that in a certain sense it’s all the same and it’s just that one prison is bigger than another. At least the fish gets fed and is kept safe from predators even in its lonely isolation, which might be more than can be said for Sheng who can never truly escape his past even as he tries to free Chenghao and Jing from a similar fate. A melancholy mood piece, Chiang shoots night-time Taipei as a land of neon emptiness set against a classic jazz score that echoes Sheng’s deadpan ennui in a modern world of electronic smoke and rueful nihilism in which there is no escape from karmic retribution. 

Lost in Forest screens in Chicago April 16 as part of the 16th season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Day Off (本日公休, Fu Tien-Yu, 2023)

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The wholesome small-town values of an ageing hairdresser place her increasingly at odds with her cynical consumerist kids in Fu Tien-Yu’s poignant tale of changing times, yet as she’s fond saying children have their own lives and all that really matters is that you’re satisfied with what you have. Day Off (本日公休, běnrì gōngxiū) is partly a lament for the things we’ve thrown away in the name of convenience but also a celebration of human connection brokered by something as simple and routine as a haircut.

A Rui (Lu Hsiao-fen) has toiled away in her family-run barbershop for most of her adult life and the business has changed little in the time she’s been running it. Old men and their sons have been coming to get a haircut and a shave for the last few decades because as someone else later puts it, men are largely creatures of habit and a hairdresser like a wife is hard to switch. A Rui’s daughter Ling is also a hairdresser but works in a much more modern salon and is planning to open a supercuts-style express service aiming to get people in and out in a short amount of time for a small amount of money. Ling’s philosophy is contrary to everything A Rui was taught, advised by her mentor to take her time and work with precision. He told her that if she provided a good service she’d always have custom and does that does seem to have been the case. 

Then again perhaps times aren’t so different as they seem. Ling is unpopular at her salon because she has poor customer service skills and doesn’t seem to be particularly well suited to the social nature of the job. Her boss always gets all the best clients and that’s largely because he treats them just like A Rui treats hers even if his care and attention is a little more cynical than heartfelt. Ling has also divorced her husband, Chuan, essentially for being too nice after he lent money they were saving for a new flat to a friend in need. A Rui can’t understand why she’d split up with a perfectly good man when they have a small child together, but Ling is an ambitious ultramodernist who values change above all else and looks down on small-town values of community and reciprocity seeing her former husband and mother as merely foolish and living in the past. She can’t understand why her mother bothers to ring up her elderly regulars to remind them they’re due a haircut when she could just set up an automated system to take care of it for her, nor can she get her head round it when A Rui says she’s going to travel to a faraway town to cut the hair of an elderly gentlemen who can’t make it to the shop without even asking for expenses. 

But to A Rui it’s just the right thing to do and an appropriate act of reciprocity for decades of custom. Chuan feels much the same, always willing to put his life on hold to offer roadside assistance and understanding if a client can’t pay him right away knowing that they can’t get the money if they can’t work so it’s better to just fix the car. A Rui worries about her other daughter living with a boyfriend and a dog in a rented flat in Taipei, and about her son who seems to have several failed entrepreneurial projects behind him, but encounters on the road another man who gave up a job as a scientist to become a farmer and seems to be happy with his choice. In the end it might not be that one is better than the other, the only thing that matters being whether or not you’re satisfied with what you have.

There’s a certain poignancy in the disappearing quality of A Rui’s way of life, the hair on one of her customer’s heads slowly turning from black to grey as if she were literally shaving the years off him. “Time flies” she often remarks, realising that she’s known some of her customers all their lives and has become a kind of community hub that they can always return to even if they move away. The knees she once practiced her shaving on are now old and worn from years of standing, but as her customers remind her she can’t retire because no one knows their heads like she does and then where will they get their hair cut? Bittersweet and elegiac, Day Off ends on a note of moving on as A Rui gives the baby of a second generation client their first haircut and prepares to say goodbye to a much a loved friend seeking a more satisfying future while resolving to carry on doing what she does best in providing the best possible service to her regulars and to the world around her.

Day Off screens in Chicago April 15 as part of the 16th season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Flowing Stories (河上變村, Jessey Tsang Tsui-shan, 2014)

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Shooting in her own home village, documentarian Jessey Tsang Tsui-shan spins a meandering tale of diaspora and dislocation in her 2014 documentary Flowing Stories (河上變村). Beginning in the small village of Ho Chung in which almost all of the residents have gone abroad to find work, the film charts the paths of migration along with the hardships discovered both at home and away while centring the village festival held every 10 years as a point of reunion as sons and daughters return in celebration of an idealised village life the modern world has denied them. 

Tsang begins her tale with Granny Lau, an elderly lady who lived next-door to her when she was a child whose relatives often brought her souvenirs from Europe. As Granny Lau explains, her life was always hard. She married Grandpa Lau at 19 in an arranged marriage but he left to find work abroad soon after, returning only a handful of times in 20 years during which they had several children Granny Lau had to raise alone. She describes her familial relationships as without affection, her husband a virtual stranger to her while she also had to work in the fields leaving her disconnected from her sons and daughters. Later, many of them traveled to Calais to work in the restaurant Grandpa Lau had set up with the intention of reuniting his family in France. 

The children who went also talk of hardship, being unable to speak the language and mixing only with other migrants from Hong Kong many from the same the village. Fourth daughter Mei Yong remarks that only the thought of the village festival kept her going when she came to Calais at 17 leaving all her friends behind and having nothing much to do other than work in the restaurant. Her sister-in-law says something similar, that when she arrived she was immediately put to washing dishes and only reprieved when the children were born but that wasn’t much better because the only source of entertainment available to them was to have dinner together. The second of the sisters Mei Lan moved to London with her husband and still doesn’t know the language, having regular mahjong parties with with her neighbours who are also from Hong Kong and many of them nearby villages. 

Most of the others say they don’t think they’ll ever move back, as Grandpa Lau eventually did, because they’ve spent more than half their lives abroad and have had sons and daughters who have grown up and made lives in other countries. But for Mei Lan it’s different because she has no children. She and her husband regret the decision to go abroad, suggesting they did so because their parents encouraged it thinking it would be easier for them to find work but really there were opportunities to be had in Hong Kong and they might have been happier living in a place where they spoke the language. 

But life is hard in every place, and equally for those who leave and those who are left behind. Some reflect on the changing nature of Ho Chung with its new settlement across the river dominated by detached houses which has, a daughter who moved to Edinburgh suggests, disrupted the sense of community. Where people once rarely closed their doors and neighbours wandered through each others homes helping each other out where needed, now everyone is scattered in disparate settlements. Then again, Granny Lau seems to think that sense of community is largely a myth explaining that in her day you had to do everything yourself, no one was going to feed your cow or plough your field if you couldn’t do yourself.

In her own way strangely cheerful in her stoicism, Granny Lau is a tough woman who asks why she would cry for a husband who was over 80 years old when he died, insisting that she had “nothing to be nostalgic about” and counting herself lucky as long as she has two meals a day. Now only around 900 people remain in the village, while it is said that the Shaolin Temple may be looking to build a new complex in the area as the natural vistas are disrupted once again by diggers further eroding the traditional qualities the village festival celebrates. The stories of migration flow in and out of Ho Chung taking pieces of the of the village with them as they go but equally leaving behind a melancholy sense of loss for a disappearing way of life.

Flowing Stories screened as part of this year’s Hong Kong Film Festival UK.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Lotus Sports Club (ក្លឹបកីឡាបាល់ទាត់ផ្កាឈូក, Vanna Hem & Tommaso Colognese, 2022)

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Solidarity becomes the watch word of a team of athletes led by the much loved Pa Vann in Tommaso Colognese and Vanna Hem’s observational documentary, Lotus Sports Club (ក្លឹបកីឡាបាល់ទាត់ផ្កាឈូក). Now in his 60s, Pa Vann is a trans man living with a longterm partner and running a women’s under 21 football team in which the majority of members are LGBTQ+, offering a place to belong to young people who often have nowhere else to turn having become estranged from their families or rejected by the world around them. 

One of the players on the team, Leak, explains that he always knew he was a boy but was expelled from school for cutting his hair short and behaving in a more masculine fashion. After leaving the home of a relative, a friend brought him to Pa Vann’s where he found a new sanctuary and a place he could be accepted for being himself. Amas, meanwhile, is from a conservative village and a Muslim family who struggle to accept his identity as a trans man and are unable to reconcile it with their religion and community. 

Both Leak and Amas are deeply grateful for the new family they’ve found with Pa Vann and also for the opportunities they’ve gained through football, Leak especially thankful to have met so many different people from so many different places while coming to see that he wasn’t alone and there were other people like him. The team is however for under 21s meaning that the pair will inevitably at some point age out and though it’s clear that they wouldn’t have to leave Pa Vann’s because of it they seem to struggle with what else to do with their lives. Leak in particular is deeply worried about not having a job at comparatively late age and eventually leaves for the city without saying goodbye apparently out of a desire to avoid hurting Pa Vann’s feelings or a fear he may be angry with him for leaving. 

Pa Vann is however philosophical if a little hurt, knowing that his job is to send them back out into the world with better skills to survive its harshness. Opening his home to the team members, he gives them life advice and teaches useful skills to help them find work such as carpentry and handicrafts. The entire point of the football team, which includes both LGBTQ+ members and otherwise, is to foster a sense of solidarity between the players to support each other in their everyday lives often in the face of entrenched social prejudice. 

Prejudice is something the team receives its fair share of. Players complain that some coaches from other regions accuse them of having men on the team and inappropriately ask for “proof” that they are female sometimes by having a look or a feel for themselves. But Pa Vann isn’t having any of that, directly telling the other coaches that he won’t have people being “rude” to his team and that their requests are “unacceptable”. Leak complains that the short-haired players have it worse and finds it ironic that he has to tell them he’s a woman to be left alone while even spectators sometimes hurl homophobic slurs from the sidelines. 

It seems unclear whether Leak and Amas find the city anymore accepting after moving there, but they do apparently find signs of hope in seeing other queer people living well while having their horizons broadened. Amas is also grateful for his time with Pa Vann but suggests that it might have been too easy to simply stay in the village and that he wanted to see more of the world and experience more of the life though he’d never have had the courage if it were not for the “solidarity” that Pa Vann showed him. Pa Vann’s own life cannot of have been easy. His partner explains that her family disowned her over the relationship while she herself identifies as straight and has never thought of Pa Vann as anything other than a man. But it has perhaps allowed him to show kindness and compassion to those like himself in giving them a safe place to stay where they can be accepted for who they are that then gives them the courage to extend the same kindness to others as they go out into the world seeking new and brighter futures of joy and solidarity. 

Lotus Sports Club screened as part of this year’s BFI Flare. It will also be screening at Bertha DocHouse on 23rd April as part of this year’s Queer East.

Trailer (English subtitles)