Category: Festivals

A Moon in the Ordinary (平場の月, Nobuhiro Doi, 2025)

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Back in the early 2000s, Nobuhiro Doi was a leading figure of the short-lived “jun-ai” or “pure love” boom with films such as Be With You, and Tears for You, as well as TV dramas like Beautiful Life and Orange Days. Adapted from the novel by Kasumi Asakura, A Moon in the Ordinary (平場の月, Hiraba no Tsuki) is a kind middle-aged take on the same material in which former classmates reunite 35 years later but discover that they aren’t really any better equipped to understand what love is than they were as teenagers.

The pair even bond over hearing Hiroko Yakushimaru’s Main Theme, the title song of the movie of the same name, in which the singer laments that they still don’t understand love even after living 20 years. Kensho (Masato Sakai) and Yoko (Haruka Igawa) have lived more than 20 years since they last saw each other and are each carrying their own particular baggage of failed or compromised romances. Each having returned to their hometown where they’ve reconnected with their former classmates, there is something of a return to childhood in their relationship even while tempered by the compromises of age. As one of Kensho’s former classmates says, he’s reached the age where doing new things is a bother and now the conversation turns on people’s health issues or those of their parents. 

Kansho moved back after his divorce to care for his mother but she now lives in a care home and has advanced dementia. Every time he reminds her who he is, she replies that “Kensho is dead,” but he just humours her. Yoko, meanwhile, has moved back after an ill-advised affair with a younger man left her broke. Widowed young, she harbours a degree of guilt over the circumstances that led to her marriage while also perhaps a little embarrassed to be working in the hospital cafe having graduated from a good university and holding a well-paying job in the city. Despite her initial reluctance, she bonds with Kensho over their shared sense of middle-aged despair as he awaited the results of some potentially concerning medical tests.

Health issues are, however, only a part of the problem. Yoko is also carrying childhood trauma and a low sense of self-worth that once made her determine to live life alone, which is a difficult habit to break. Following her experiences, she lives in a spartan flat she says she keeps tidy to make life easier for whoever has to deal with it after she’s gone and also makes sure to sleep on the bed so the mess will be contained if it’s a while before anyone finds her if she passes away. Even before encountering her own life issues, she seems to be living in a kind of limbo state until reconnecting with Kensho. The “impossible dream” she describes might be as simple as getting to grow old with the person you love, though it’s something she doesn’t really think she’s entitled to or deserving of.

As Kensho says, they’ve both been plenty hurt already, what if they just end up hurting each other more? His older co-worker advises him that getting hurt is just part of it and he’d gladly go through it all again, but romance is as hard at 50 as it was at 15. Some things have changed and others haven’t. It’s a little ironic, in some ways, that the film ends with a Chinese-style disclaimer reminding audience members that it’s illegal for two people to be riding the same bike given that the film’s main theme is the unchanging innocence of romantic connection. After meeting Kensho, Yuko starts to plant flowers in her makeshift garden rather than purely practical herbs as if she were welcoming joy back into her life, but she still feels herself to be a burden and has a tendency to pull away rather than expose herself emotionally while Kensho’s decision to allow her to do that seems foolish in the extreme. In the end, perhaps there is only loneliness and absence. In a flashback to their teenage years, Kensho says that he didn’t want to become a regular grown-up which he inevitably has, now filled with middle-aged regrets while Yoko never quite managed to move past herself and accept the possibility of love as another than an impossible dream.

screens as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Night Flower (ナイトフラワー, Eiji Uchida, 2025)

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The first thing we see in Eiji Uchida’s elliptical crime thriller Night Flower (ナイトフラワー) is a sign reading “Paradise” that’s ironically positioned in the bathroom of a hostess bar staffed by middle-aged women that has the Japanese equivalent as its name. In a moment of dark foreshadowing, the sign tells us exactly where we’re headed while suggesting that the kind of familial utopia the heroine is seeking will always be just out of reach. 

This is largely due to circumstances beyond Natsuki’s (Keiko Kitagawa) control. As hard as she tries to provide for her two young children, the fact is that the odds are stacked against her in this rather patriarchal society. The film opens with her boss shouting at her for having fallen asleep on the toilet, but it’s obvious that Natsuki exists in a permanent state of exhaustion. She’s already working multiple jobs and failing to make ends meet after having been abandoned by her husband who ran off after accruing massive debts. Even after moving from Osaka to Tokyo to try and escape them, she’s being hassled by loan sharks and is already at the end of her tether. It’s not surprising then that when she happens to come across a drug dealer who’s been mugged by his client she steals his remaining stash with the intention of selling it on. 

The real villain is, of course, the society that fails to come to the aid of women like Natsuki and leaves them with little choice other than to turn to crime. None of her part-time jobs pay enough to live on and when she approaches the town hall, they tell her she can’t claim any more benefits for another month despite being down to her last few coins. The jobs Natuski does are those available to people with few qualifications where the pay is low and disproportionately done by women. There seems to be an implicit assumption still in place that a woman will to some degree have a man to rely on for financial security, though all of the men we see are unreliable from Tamae’s trainer (Ken Mitsuishi) whose gambling problem endangers the gym to Mrs Hoshizuki’s (Reina Tanaka) husband who refuses to take any responsibility for the domestic sphere and treats his wife as a glorified housekeeper.

To that extent, there is a direct line being drawn between wealthy housewife Mrs Hoshizuki, who is effectively a single mother because her husband is functionally absent from the domestic space yet provides financially, and Natsuki that suggests money is not the central issue. Natsuki’s young daughter Koharu is earnest and considerate. She well understands how difficult her mother’s life is and does her best to make it easier. Mrs Hoshizuki’s daughter, meanwhile, falls in with a bad crowd at school and begins using drugs. Her mother is powerless to help her and her father refuses to get involved. When she first hires a detective who discovers Natsuki and Tamae pushing drugs on the streets, Ms Hoshizuki asks if they have families too as if she understood on some level that they’re not necessarily bad people and were reluctant to get them into trouble, but also perhaps wondering how they can do this to someone else’s child if they have children of their own. 

Natuski can’t really afford to think about the customers, and when earning more money through drugs continues her other part-time work and lives modestly wanting to provide for her children if something were to go wrong. She even asks her partner, aspiring MMA fighter Tamae, to look after them as if she were already resolved to pay the price if caught. Tamae is in this because she wanted to get out of sex work which she’d been doing to fund her career in the absence of a sponsor. It’s never quite clear if there is a romantic dimension to their relationship, but it’s certainly incredibly close as Tamae becomes an essential part of the family, dying her hair to match Natsuki’s and beginning to speak with an Osaka accent just like they do. For a time, they find the kind of paradise they’re looking for, but also seem to know that it can’t last.

It seems that Tamae was also abandoned by her mother, while the androgynous gang boss Ms Sato gives them a little leeway precisely because she admires the way Natsuki fights for her kids when theirs did not. Most of the other gangsters also report having bad or no relationships with their mothers, which circles round to a rather conservative viewpoint of blaming mothers for everything. But no matter how hard Natsuki and Tamae fight, the fact is they always lose and the odds are forever stacked against them. All they have is the solidarity they’ve found together as a family unit, but it’s not enough to protect them against the harshness of the world they’ve entered. Night flowers bloom when they feel like it, but it seems like this one only blossoms in an impossible paradise.

Night Flower screens as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © 2025 “Night Flower” Film Partners

Tiger (Anshul Chauhan, 2025)

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At 35 years old, Taiga (Takashi Kawaguchi) is beginning to tire of city life and thinking of settling down, but as a gay man in contemporary Japan, there are limits to how much that is possible for him. Inspired by real life stories from the LGBTQ+ community, Anshul Chauhan’s Tiger is more character study than issue drama, but explores the ways in which Taiga’s horizons are constrained by the way society receives his sexuality to the point that he finds himself considering entering a platonic marriage as the only real way to ensure a full domestic life with the possibility of raising children.

As someone from the “Friendship Marriage” organisation points out, even the recently introduced partnership system available in some areas of Japan is a long way from a legal marriage and is geared more towards housing provision and hospital visits. It doesn’t confer inheritance rights for those who own property, or even the right to attend a funeral if the other relatives object. Child adoption is relatively rare in Japan in any case and not generally available to same sex couples while even costly options such as IVF and surrogacy could be bureaucratically difficult given the way the family register system works. 

Though the woman giving the presentation seems incredibly angry about the weakness of the partnership system legislation, labelling it “a disgrace”, it can’t be denied that Friendship Marriage is essentially complicit with the heteronormative views of mainstream society in which it is still socially and in some cases practically difficult not to be married. After signing up for the service, Taiga meets a woman who is half-Iranian and grew up in Tehran. It doesn’t occur to him that her decision to come to Japan was not made entirely freely and that she cannot safely return there without the threat of violence. Taiga may feel himself constrained, but he won’t be arrested or tortured solely for existing as a gay man. Nevertheless, he faces reduced options when it comes to employment and has never revealed his sexuality to his father fearing that he will reject or disown him.

Tensions come to a head, as they so often do, when the matter of inheritance is raised. Taiga’s sister Minami (Maho Nonami) is aware of his sexuality though does not seem altogether accepting and is resentful of his life in Tokyo which she assumes to be aimless and free of responsibility while she has had to shoulder the burden of caring for their ageing father alone. It’s obvious that she has been banking on inheriting the family home and is resentful on hearing their father has suggested leaving it to Taiga on the condition that he marries and has children, knowing that this is something that is not possible in contemporary Japan. The implication is that Taiga had no choice but to leave his home town in order to lead a more authentic life and essentially develops two opposing personas, that of “Tiger” the aspiring porn star and “Taiga” the would-be-family man. 

Minami later wields this duality against him, asking him to baby-sit her daughter Kaede to whom he is especially close, while threatening to out him to their father if he doesn’t agree to give up his right to the domestic space represented by their family home. His former lover, Koji (Yuya Endo), has entered a conventional heterosexual marriage without disclosing his sexuality to his wife and is riddled with regrets over not leaving with Taiga and trying to start a domestic life in the city as a gay couple. The Friendship Marriage system removes the element of betrayal, but also elides authenticity in providing a mechanism for each partner to fulfil social and parental expectation while avoiding disclosing their sexuality, and equally prevents them from enjoying a full and loving domestic relationship with a same-sex partner.

The film never particularly suggests that there is anything wrong with the way Taiga is living in Tokyo nor with his desire to get into gay porn, but merely highlights the sense of emptiness he feels as someone denied the possibility a full domestic life. There is after all a kind of age cap involved in his life as a sex worker working at a men-only massage parlour which he may fast be approaching even aside from the clients who like to exorcise their own sense of powerless by paying money to abuse and humiliate him. In the end, all he’s left with is an uncertain liminal space living as a literal stand-in marooned on the sidelines with no place to call his own.

Tiger screens as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © Tiger Production Partners

Suzuki=Bakudan (爆弾, Akira Nagai, 2025)

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At first glance, the English-language title of Akira Nagai’s adaption of the novel by Katsuhiro Go, Suzuki = Bakudan, might seem a little strange, even aside from the incongruity of leaving “bakudan” (bomb) untranslated. But there is something to be said of the idea that there are little bombs everywhere, and each person is also powder keg waiting to explode given the right trigger. That might play in to the rather cynical view of the Hannibal Lector-like presence at the film’s centre who seems to be leading the police a merry dance with his various riddles and determination to play the part of a man whose mind has been ruined by alcohol and hopelessness.

The first thing about Suzuki (Jiro Sato), arrested for busting up a convenience store, is that he gives a name that at least sounds fake and attempts to brazen it out. Detective Todoroki (Shota Sometani) tells him that the store owner doesn’t want to press charges and will settle for compensation to fix the damage, but Suzuki says he’s broke ad offers to help the police instead. He claims to have psychic powers and knows that a bomb is about to go off, but the police assume it’s an obvious delaying tactic and take no notice, until there’s actually an explosion in the middle of the city. 

The obvious conclusion that occurs to Todoroki is that Suzuki is the bomber, but at the same time he seems to think there’s something innocent about him. He is indeed as Todoroki and later Ruike say childish in his playfulness and means of expression, though there’s also a sinister edge to the way he speaks that suggests it’s all an act. He quotes poetry and and appears to ramble like a madman but while Ruike becomes convinced he’s dropping them arcane clues, others think he’s just manipulative and deliberately wasting their time. “Not every word has meaning,” one insists though it seems as if it really might for Suzuki who seems to list not being listened to by society as one of his grudge points.

The point that he makes frequent digs at the homeless despite identifying as one hints at this paradoxical sense of injustice in the contemporary society. In one of the traps he sets for the police, he sets them up with a binary choice of whether to save schoolchildren or the homeless community. The detectives don’t realise that’s what they’re doing, but still didn’t really think to much about the people who live in the park while desperate to find a potential bomb threat in a school. Later Suzuki lists off a series of people he can’t stand from the homeless to pregnant women, families, and lawyers, in fact pretty much everyone which itself seems to be more a reflection of an absurd social prejudice than his own feeling. 

He might, however, have a point about social indifference and the arrogance of the police with Todoroki’s superiors rolling their eyes and refusing to take Suzuki seriously while the bombs keep going off. Everything seems to link back to a disgraced police officer, Hasebe, who took his own life by jumping in front of train and was not supported by his colleagues aside from Todoroki who only utters that he’s not insensitive to his feelings which seems like a lukewarm advocation for the police brotherhood. Suzuki seems to have resented not being accorded one of the group, and holds the police in contempt for the way they treat their own. Yabuki (Ryota Bando) is also forever trying to get his foot on the ladder as a detective, but is only exploited by those above him which is one reason he’s willing to take so many risks to catch the bomber.

Suzuki tries to guess the shape of people’s hearts, and finds those of the policemen largely warped by office politics and backstabbing. Selfishness is the sad truth of humanity, he intones. And he might be right, people only really want the bombs not to go off near them and they’re less bothered by the idea of them hurting other people than they’d like to think. After all, Hasebe’s family’s lives imploded too when they were sued by the railway company after Hasebe’s suicide, hounded by the press, and ostracised by former colleagues. Acceptance by the group, it seems, is only ever really temporary. Still, Suzuki leads the police by the nose exploiting all their weaknesses and affecting the persona of a sane madman claiming to be psychic and to have been hypnotised to erase his memory but keeping all his cards close to his chest as the cat and mouse game between him and Ruike ratchets up in tension and finally reaches its ironic conclusion.

Suzuki=Bakudan screens as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © Katsuhiro Go/KODANSHA Ltd. All Rights Reserved © 2025 FUJI TELEVISION NETWORK, INC./Warner Bros. Japan LLC/ KODANSHA LTD. All rights reserved

The Spring Outside the Fence (竹籬笆外的春天, Li Youning, 1985)

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Two young women attempt to ride the waves of a changing Cold War Taiwan in Li Youning’s bittersweet melodrama, Spring Outside the Fence (竹籬笆外的春天, zhúlíbā wài dechūntiān). The titular fence is that of the military dependents’ village where the two women grew up that comes to represent an increasingly distant past and a vision of Taiwan that has all but become obsolete by the film’s conclusion in 1972 in which the nation seems to have abandoned both the US and the idea of reclaiming Mainland China to forge a more independent future.

The film opens in 1949, not long after the Chinese Civil War and nationalist defeat in which Chiang Kai-shek’s forces fled to Taiwan. The military dependents’ village is a settlement for the family members of former KMT soldiers and a rather ramshackle, rundown place. Nevertheless, Ai Hua (Su Ming-ming) says she likes it because the people are kinder there than elsewhere. They’re like one big family with everyone supporting each other. To that extent, one could describe her relationship with best friend Li Lin as “sisterly”, though there are hints in her longing gazes that suggest her affection for her may lean towards the romantic. When Li Lin begins dating their childhood friend He Kang, Ai Hua abruptly agrees to go out with another boy she’s previously turned down only to later admit there is “no chemistry” between them.

That’s partly because he’s a slightly patronising hypocrite who tries to encourage Ai Hua to work on her English so she can study abroad in the US. He gives Ai Hua books on “existentialism”, while He Kang had given her poetry after reading some of her own in the newspaper. When Taiwan is kicked out of the UN, the other boy first broaches the subject with Ai Hua but then drops it saying he thinks it’s probably too difficult for her to understand. Despite his sense of betrayal that America sided with China, he is still studying English and planning to study in the US in order to get ahead. Ironically, capitalism has now become the enemy of right-wing patriotism even among the formerly privileged waishangren whose status has begun to decline. With the Vietnam War coming to a close, the bar in Taipei where Li Lin works as a hostess, and Ai Hua as an accountant, begins to refocus its attentions on chasing Japanese businessmen rather than US forces.

He Kang’s early death can also seen as symbolic of the death of the KMT’s vision of Taiwan. As a child, he’d given a firebrand speech about becoming a fighter pilot like his father to liberate the Mainland with a large picture of Chiang Kai-shek dominating the classroom. The children used to enjoy standing on the air raid shelter watching the planes go by safe in the knowledge that they were protected. For Li Lin, the planes also seemed to symbolise freedom and a world outside of the village. Her room is full of pictures of classic Hollywood stars like James Dean and Clark Gable, while she listens to the Beach Boys and dances to the The Twist aligning her with the anti-communist sensibilities of the KMT. Her love for He Kang is also bound up with this ideology in which the village is only ever really a transient space designed to exist only until the Mainland is retaken and the families return. 

Speaking of her own emotional repression, Ai Hua remarks that she was always envious of Li Lin who was confident in expressing her feelings and having a good time outside the fence while she remained trapped within it. Though Li Lin remains wedded to the past, wearing He Kang’s jacket and the aeroplane necklace he gave her in lieu of a ring, the two women watch the plane carrying Chinese-speaking American airman Michael, whom Li Lin has rejected, fly away with a sense of sadness tempered with optimism. They have now only each other, but have perhaps achieved a kind of self-sufficient independence free of both Mainland China and America in the new nation of Taiwan. 

The Spring Outside the Fence screened as part of this year’s Queer East.

New Group (Yuta Shimotsu, 2025)

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If all your friends went and formed a giant human pyramid, would you go and form a giant human pyramid too? Parents used to caution against such dangerous group think, but it has to be said that perhaps they only complained when the group activity didn’t suit them or required some additional expense they didn’t really want to pay. If the group activity was studying hard at school to get into a good university and become a successful member of society rather than buying the later must have fashion item to fit in at school, then they’d hardly complain about that.

Yuta Shimotsu’s absurdist satire New Group is in many ways about the deeply ingrained patterns of thought that exist within a society to the extent that they are rarely ever questioned. Ai (Anna Yamada) is coming to an age in which she is beginning to feel hemmed in by a conformist society but at the same time does not have the courage or confidence to challenge it. When she sees another girl being bullied, she wants to step in to defend her but all she manages to do is give the bullies a hard stare. Her friend Haru asks her what university she’s thinking of applying to to, but Ai only says she’ll apply to the same one as her and study the same thing. She can’t even answer when she’s put on the spot about what she wants to do for the school festival for fear of picking the wrong one and being ostracised from a particular faction, so she just goes along with the first person who asked for her vote.

As her teacher says, though there is a strong groupthink in play, everything comes to a binary. It’s always “uchi-soto”, us and them. But what does it mean to be a member of the main group? Ai isn’t convinced she wants to give up her autonomy just to fit in and increasingly feels herself to be an outsider. Her name is of course reminiscent of the English pronoun “I”, though it’s true meaning is “love”. She’s pulled out of inertia by a boy named “Yu” who nevertheless is later pulled into the pyramid and tells her that “ai” is here, meaning both that the group is love and Ai, the individual, belongs with in it. She replies that he’s wrong, that isn’t love, and it isn’t her. There is no room for the individual within the pyramidic structure of the group.

Yu has recently returned from abroad and is living alone free of parental authority which is why he doesn’t fit into the carefully controlled harmony of the school. He is out of step at marching practice and less afraid to voice his true opinions. He intervenes to save the other girl from the bullies and chastises Ai that just watching makes you complicit. Yu might as well be one of the space aliens they keep talking about on TV, a subversive force out to destabilise the harmonious society. Yet Ai’s doubts seem to have arisen because of a personal trauma. As a child, she chose the group over her younger sister who was then killed in an accident. She feared being excluded and essentially sacrificed her sister for approval while also denying her affiliation to the group that is her family.

The quest of Ai and Yu is then to maintain their selfhoods while operating in a society that demands conformity. Controlled by the maniacal headmaster, their schoolmates all immediately start marching to the beat of the PE teacher’s whistle and dutifully take their place in the pyramid in which all they do is uphold the structure of the group. As the pair are chased by the zombie-like figures, Ai has to confront the fact that it might just be easier to go with the flow, even if that too comes at a price. Even so, in her efforts to resist, is Ai not just creating another group of her own that can only exist because of its opposition to the first? If there is “I” there must also be “you” and never the twain shall meet. A TV commentator played by the director Takashi Shimizu tries to speak out about the nonsense groupthink being conveyed through the innocuous medium of daytime television but is dragged off air while shouting at everyone to wake up and think for themselves. It seems that few are brave enough to switch off and think for themselves while the only path to freedom lies in loneliness and exile even if in the end it is “love” that saves us after all.

New Group screens as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Images: ©2025 “NEW GROUP” Film Partners

Sai: Disaster (災 劇場版, Yutaro Seki & Kentaro Hirase, 2025)

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We like to tell ourselves that if we do everything right and follow all the rules then everything will be okay. But the reality is that life is chaotic and you have no control. No one knows when, where, or who, will suffer a disaster, as one man puts it. But then again, in Yutaro Seki and Kentaro Hirase’s Sai (災 劇場版, Sai Gekijoban), there may be someone who does know and acts as some kind of harbinger of doom guiding the unlucky towards their unhappy fates.

The mysterious man (Teruyuki Kagawa) appears in different guises to different people and apparently disappears not long after they do. A policewoman, Domoto (Anne Nakamura), is becoming convinced that a series of unexplained deaths in which the bodies were missing a small piece of their hair is the work of a serial killer, though others tell her it’s a just coincidence. It remains unexplained whether the mysterious man is, as Domoto suspects, a very human serial killer travelling all over Japan and inserting himself into people’s lives before engineering their deaths, or else a more supernatural creature and embodiment of the very nature of “disaster”.

In any case, a bereaved husband says he’d rather think of his wife’s death that way. Just something that happened for no rhyme or reason, like a landslide or an earthquake. It doesn’t matter to him whether she killed herself or was murdered, because the net result is that she’s dead. People don’t die for no reason, Domoto insists, but there is a kind of crushing inevitability to each of the stories as the mysterious man works his magic often offering a listening ear or a shoulder to cry on. Other times he seems oddly impish, encouraging one’s worst instincts as he does with recovering alcoholic Kuramoto (Ryuhei Matsuda) by constantly tempting him with drink.

The lives of the victims paint a particularly bleak vision of contemporary Japan as a place ruled by loneliness and fear. No one can get what it is they want, and they don’t even want that much. Kuramoto seems to want to rebuild his life after killing someone drunk driving by giving up drink and working hard to be reaccepted by his community, but his wife doesn’t want to see him and according to her mother at least, his problems were more serious than he first suggests. Schoolgirl Yuri (Sena Nakajima) just wants to continue with her education and eventually become an architect but is saddled with toxic parents who couldn’t care less about her future. The first victim that we see, a young woman running a restaurant for fishermen (Yumi Adachi), seems to be caught between loneliness and humiliation following the sudden disappearance of her husband. A cleaner working at the shopping centre (Chika Uchida) is the only one to take her job seriously, but has no luck with men. An inn keeper (Jiro Ohkawara) takes to smoking marijuana after his wife leaves him for another man while struggling to maintain his family business.

When his wife left him, the inn keeper assumed the worst had already happened and he’s survived his disaster, but it doesn’t really occur to him there could be another one waiting. The sense of dread that Seki and Kentaro Hirase conjure is the manifestation of this anxiety that something bad is lingering on the horizon just out of sight but ready to strike at any moment. In editing down the original six-part TV drama into a feature film, Seki and Hirase intercut each of the stories rather than letting them play out in linear fashion. It’s only later that we get dates, making it clear that all of these stories are taking place at different times and happening in sequence rather than parallel meaning that they could, perhaps, all be motivated by the same person and the mysterious man is just that rather than a malevolent supernatural entity or walking disaster in human form. Perhaps that’s all he really is anyway, no different from an earthquake or a landslide, just something that happens to you if you’re unlucky enough to stray into his path. As much as Domoto might try to create some kind of order by pinning a narrative onto the unexplained deaths or trying to solve the mystery, the truth is that some things cannot be explained. Disaster lurks at every turn and strikes when least expected.

Sai: Disaster screens as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Open Endings (Nigel Santos, 2025)

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Is it acceptable to be friends with your exes? Charlie’s (Janella Salvador) bond with her friendship group made up of women who’ve all been romantically entangled at one point or another becomes a problem for her new relationship. Rafa (Rachel Coates) finds the situation altogether too weird, and even goes so far as to ask Charlie to cut her friends off. It might not be a good idea to date someone who tries to isolate you from friends and family, but Rafa claims these are just her boundaries and she can’t help feeling uneasy with Charlie spending so much time with women she’s previously slept with.

Then again, it’s not easy to be gay in the Philippines and this community is quite small. Can you really afford to cut people off just because of potential awkwardness? Each of the women is struggling in their own way, but tries to support her friends and is supported in return. The group only really formed as the exes banded together to look after Hannah when her partner passed away. Sundays have now become sacred to them as a time they can all come together and share their fears and worries no matter the various unresolved feelings that exist between them.

These relationships are often messy and ill-defined, but genuine and heartfelt. For Kit (Klea Pineda), friendship is most the beautiful of gifts and she fears acting on her feelings for Charlie because she doesn’t want to ruin what they have. Still closeted not wanting to upset her parents are religious and conservative, Kit is in an awkward non-relationship with a married woman who is also the mother of one of her pupils at the school where she teaches. Alexa (Yesh Anne Burce) is trapped with a heteronormative relationship she cannot escape because divorce is still not legal in the Philippines. Constrained by her own circumstances, she becomes possessive of Kit who is the only path back to her authentic self and the only person with whom she can be free. In other ways, however, perhaps the impossibility relationship suits Kit because she cannot be her authentic self either while unable to reveal her sexuality to her parents. 

The impossibility of divorce is also a factor when Hannah (Jasmine Curtis-Smith) suddenly drops the bombshell that she’s become engaged to a man. The group’s only bisexual, Hannah faces prejudice from her family who express relief that she’s finally got over her lesbian phase and rediscovered the right path, while the friends also see it as a kind of betrayal though perhaps only because she kept her new relationship secret from them for several months. Charlie is also subjected to homophobic violence when a man barges into the gay bar where she’s drinking and propositions her, insisting that she is “alone” because he’s only seen her with another woman. When he finally figures it out, he sees it as a challenge and quickly becomes violent. 

These kinds of petty aggressions remind the women of their precarious position within a hostile society that enforcers heteronormativity and traditional gender roles. Their friendship is a small bubble of resistance that gives each of the women additional confidence to continue being who they are. This atmosphere of hostility plays into Mihan’s insecurities, her far of commitment and inability to clearly declare her feelings. She resents Hannah for choosing to marry a man as if she were doing it because of social expectation rather than personal desire, while also forced to accept that this is all her fault. She had plenty of time to try and patch things up with Hannah, but never did. 

The open-ended nature of these relationships leaves Mihan with anxiety, but it also allows these women to continue being friends and supporting each other. The friendship doesn’t have to end just because the romance did. But at the same time, she has to accept that the risk of heartbreak is something that has to be actively embraced and her tendency to skip out on relationships the moment they become serious leaves her only with a lack of resolution. Painting a warm and funny portrait of contemporary queer life in the Philippines which nevertheless does not shy away from its difficulties, Open Endings celebrates most of all the joyousness and power of female friendship in the face of social hostility.

Open Endings screened as part of this year’s Queer East.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Girlfriends (女孩不平凡, Tracy Choi Ian-Sin, 2025)

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Now in her mid-30s, Lok (Fish Liew) feels as if she were perpetually standing at a crossing waiting for the light to turn green. She made her first film five years ago, but hasn’t been able to make another one since. A producer likes her script, but tells her that with this kind of content they won’t be able to release it in Mainland China or Malaysia, so they won’t be able to recoup their investment. As he says though, the script can always be tweaked and if she rewrote it including a role for an actress looking for a comeback they might be in business.

But Lok doesn’t really want to compromise. Tracy Choi Ian-Sin’s semi-autobiographical Girlfriends (女孩不平凡) is in many ways about the of fear of being railroaded into something that’s not what you really want. After an argument with her girlfriend Bei (Jennifer Yu), Lok begins to look back on her life in reverse chronological order inching towards the source of her insecurity in her Macao childhood. At 17, she faced intense pressure to conform. As a member of the debate team, she’s tasked with making an argument for something she doesn’t believe in and resents being forced to say what’s expected of her rather than how she really feels. Her parents expect her to go a local university and become a civil servant without really giving her much choice in the matter. The older sister of a classmate, Faye (Eliz Lum) is the first person who asks her what it is she really wants. 

Lok finds herself watching 2004 Hong Kong drama Butterfly and trying to sort out her confusing feelings for Faye while secretly taking the exam to study at a university in Taiwan in the hope of living a freer life, if only for four years. There seems to be a part of present-day Lok that still thinks she’s on an extended holiday and will one day have to return to Macao and become a civil servant after all. She’s incapable of thinking of the future and seems to be mothered, to a certain extent, in all her relationships as her respective partners take on the burden of practical considerations like financial planning. Each time things start to get serious, she begins to back away, even ghosting her Taiwan girlfriend to return to Macao alone without saying goodbye.

Both the Taiwan girlfriend and Bei seem to want move back to Macao with Lok without even really considering if she actually wants to go. This assumption seems to further fuel her desperation and send her looking for an escape route. Returning to Macao with a girlfriend does not seem to be an option for her because Macao represents conventionality and the life she doesn’t really want but still deep down thinks she is unable to escape. Never having fully addressed her lost love for Faye, she lacks the courage to commit or to believe in a long-term future. Her apartment seems to be full of reminders of old lovers, while she remains uncommunicative and insecure. Using sex as a means of avoiding confrontation, she has a tendency to storm out rather than have a conversation and has never fully accepted herself. When her long-term girlfriend Bei starts talking about serious things like marriage and children, she tells her that she wants her to have a “normal” life, as if she were preventing Bei from having one.

Bei is indeed under the pressure of conventionality, nagged by parents who still haven’t accepted her relationship with Lok to settle down and marry a man. Lok’s family in Macao seem to have already accepted Bei as her wife, but still Lok can’t get over the mental hurdle of believing that she has a right to a future of her own choosing. After her script is turned down, she goes to the cinema to see The Lyricist Wannabe and over identifies with a line in which the heroine is bluntly told that if she’s spent all this time waiting and still not got anywhere, perhaps it’s time to consider another career. Her lack of success further deepens her insecurity as Bei practically points out that they do actually need some money coming in, and perhaps they might have to compromise their artistic dreams as an actress and a director under the pressure of living in difficult economic circumstances while planning for their long-term financial future. It doesn’t sound very romantic, but in a way it is. It’s only by looking back over her life and failed relationships and returning to Macao to put her past to rest, that Lok is finally able to stop chasing the ghost of Faye and gains the courage to seize the future that she really wants.

Girlfriends screened as part of this year’s Queer East.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

The Outsiders (孽子, Yu Kan-Ping, 1986)

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Released at the tail end of martial law, Yu Kan-Ping’s adaptation of Pai Hsien-Yung’s seminal novel Crystal Boys seems to anticipate a coming liberation, but also perhaps that even then not all will be free. The film’s Chinese title, Unfilial Sons (孽子, nièzǐ), hints at the way it, in a certain sense, circles back to a kind of conservatism in which the hero must reconcile with his abusive father for cultural rather than personal or psychological reasons. But at the same time, perhaps this reconciliation will be necessary at the time the present regime falls and speaks more of a need for peace as the authoritarian father must learn to accept that he has a gay son and will end his life alone if hex chooses not to do so.

Li Qing’s (Shao Hsin) father is, in many ways, a symbol of the authoritarian regime in that he is a former KMT soldier who came to Taiwan with Chang Kai-Shek after the Chinese civil war. Filled with notions of toxic masculinity, he kicks Qing out when he is expelled from high school after being caught having sex with a male lab assistant. Screaming at him in the street, he calls him a “degenerate” and tells him never to come home. Yet it seems obvious that Qing’s father has no real power and all his abuses stem from just this fact. His son’s homosexuality calls his own manhood into question, while his violence towards his wife also stems from his insecurity that she will leave him for a better man. She eventually does leave him for a trumpet player, abandoning her two sons the youngest of which dies as a direct result of his father’s neglect. 

Though Qing was a wounded, lonely little boy who felt himself rejected by both parents due to his mother’s obvious preference for his brother, he adopts a maternal position that comparable to that shown to him by “Mama Yang” who takes in “homeless birds” or young gay men who’ve been rejected by their birth families and have nowhere else to go. Qing was kicked out not only of his home but the school too, leaving him educationally disadvantaged. He can only earning a living as a sex worker in the Peace Memorial Park which has become a cruising spot for gay men. Pushed out of the mainstream society and left with nowhere to go, they have repurposed this public space as their own but are not safe even in here given the frequency of police raids. Auntie Mann, the former actress who lives with Yang, asks him where these young men are supposed to go if they can no longer go to the park with the consequence that they decide to formalise their situation by selling Yang’s photo studio and the building Mann owns to open a gay nightclub called The Blue Angel.

The club speaks of a need to carve out one’s own space in a hostile society, but also the commodification of gay life that accompanies greater acceptance. The park was free and money could also be earned there, but here the guests will need to pay because this is, after all, a business in addition to being a community hub. It also seems that for whatever reason, policemen are also drinking here, so it is not completely liberated and its existence depends on not offending the authorities. Nevertheless, it otherwise extends the family forged by Yang and Mann to a wider community of queer people by offering them a safer space in which they can be their authentic selves if only for a short time.

This seems to be true for Mann’s former director who seems to make a point of going everywhere with two very young and attractive women hanging on his arms, but abandons them to flirt with men at the club. Closted movie Hua Kuo-Pao similarly seems to have taken a liking to Qing, but must presumably keep his sexuality secret in order to go on working. Dangers are spoken of regarding the potential violence of obsessive love in a repressed community as Yang cautions Qing about entering an affair with Dragon, a man he meets in the park, who killed his lover Phoenix in a crime of passion and has been a wandering soul ever since having convinced himself never to love again because it would only end in death.

Yu frames murder as a moment of gothic madness as fog rises behind the bridge in the park, which was already a space of darkness and depression symbolising the degree to which these men are already isolated within their society. Another of the young men Yang takes in ties to take his own life after his lover kicks him out. Though the others tell him his boyfriend was not worth dying for, the problem seems to be more that being thrown out again convinced him he had nowhere else to go. If it were not for Yang and Auntie Mann, he would be totally alone. There does seem to be, however, a degree of tension in the relationship between Yang and Auntie Mann in which there exists a deep platonic love that cannot be resolved sexually. Just as he saves the boys, Yang also once saved Mann from an addiction to drugs, though he could not save her film career or hope for feminine fulfilment through marriage. The Blue Angel club finally only possible because of Mann’s acceptance that she will never be an actress again nor marry for love. Yang has been a kind of beard for her, helping her save face and avoid the stigma of being an unattached woman by making it look like there was a man in her life, just as she perhaps provided security for him in ways other than allowing him to rent his shop from her cheaply and have a place to live.

So tying into the film’s title, these new support networks play into a heteronormative vision of the family in which Yang becomes a father figure to Qing and teaches him how to live a more fulfilling, safer life as a gay man in contrast to his birth father’s authoritarian attempts at dominance. Another of the boys eventually leaves with a lover to look for their father in Japan, but seemingly struggles to find him reflecting the way in which each of them search for a more positive parental input having been failed or abandoned by their birth families. What they discover is a sense of brotherhood and solidarity that gives them a place to call home within the community. Nevertheless, the film ends with the symbolic gesture of Qing following Yang’s advice and attempting to reconcile with his father though an “unfilial son”, while his father too seems to have pulled himself together and is readier to accept Qing for who he is. This sense of homecoming for the homeless bird may then play into a code of familial obligation which could itself by oppressive, but also signals a new beginning and the opening up of a more liberated era.

The Outsiders screened as part of this year’s Queer East.