Category: LGBTQ+

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.

Kokkuri (こっくりさん, Takahisa Zeze, 1997)

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The tensions between a trio of young women are brought to the fore by an ill-advised consultation with Kokkuri-san in Takahisa Zeze’s atmospheric horror movie. Some more than others, these girls are all haunted if only by adolescent confusion and suppressed desire. Looking for answers with no one turn to in the absence of parental authority, they rely doubly on a late-night radio show, Midnight Blue Bird,  hosted by a girl their age calling herself “Michiru”.

“Michiru” is the heroine of the Japanese version of Blue Bird fairytale about a brother and sister who leave in search of the blue bird of happiness only to return and realise that it was waiting for them at home all along. While the moral of the fairytale might be that happiness is all around us if only you know how to look, there is precious little surrounding the girls outside of their friendship which is already beginning to fracture under the weight of adolescence, not to mention a series of overlapping love triangles.

What neither of the other girls know, is that Michiru is actually a persona constructed by Mio (Ayumi Yamatsu) who is actually the host of the radio show. As Michiru she claims to be sexually experienced and rebellious, answering the questions that come from other young women though, in reality, a regular high schooler and romantically naive. As we gradually become aware, she is in love with her friend Hiroko (Hiroko Shimada), but Hiroko has a crush on Masami’s fickle boyfriend Akira. It was Mio who suggested the Kokkuri-san game on her radio show, a Ouija board style means of divination, but it quickly turns dark with Masami (Moe Ishikawa) manipulating the board to needle Hiroko after realising she’s after her boyfriend.

The resulting fallout pushes Hiroko and Mio towards a confrontation with their shared traumas as survivors of a drowning. Hiroko is haunted by a little girl in red, ironically named “Midori” which means “green”, and struggles to get over the guilt she feels over a childhood friend who drowned in a public bath. Mio, meanwhile, gives contradictory biographical information on her show, but it seems that Mio’s mother intended to take her own life with Mio in tow after she caught her with her new husband to be following the death of Mio’s father. Echoing the central motivation of the film, Mio’s mother suggests the “go together” to where her father is, but later saves Mio alone.

But while Hiroko becomes preoccupied with the notion of sex, vowing to become more like Michiru, she tells Michiro that thanks losing her virginity will change her though she later laments that it’s changed nothing at all. Mio, meanwhile seems to have a hangup having caught her mother with another man. In disgust, she rubs at her libs in the same way that the older Mio later does after finally finding the courage to kiss Hiroko who lips have, by then, been coated in striking red lipstick. The colour red seems to represent the curse of Kokkuri-san and with it repressed guilt, regret, and forbidden desire. Though it seems that by learning to accept herself, publicly unmasking herself on her radio show and confessing her love for Hiroko live on air, Mio alone is able to overcome the curse. The kiss she gives Hiroko is one of life that seems to break the spell and free them both from Kokkuri-san’s trap, though all may not be as it first seems. 

Nevertheless, the fact that Hiroko does not remember makes this something of a private evolution for Mio even as voices from the past resurface and encourage them “go together” toward whatever fate awaits them in the film’s ambiguous conclusion that echoes that of Zeze’s earlier pink tale of frustrated same-sex desire, Angel of September, which shares many of the same themes. Even so, in finally accepting her sister, who is impressed and supportive of her coming out live on air even if she cynically adds it can be her new gimmick, Mio has undergone a transformation into adulthood and symbolically been reborn, emerging from the cleansing waters with greater clarity and self-assurance if perhaps no more certain of what the future may hold.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Angel in September (本番レズ　恥ずかしい体位, Takahisa Zeze, 1994)

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According to Hitomi, she and Eriko were once lovers in a past life in which they were angels battling a demon army. She claims that she recognised Eriko at once, though never had the courage to talk to her at school and has only connected with her now after witnessing her transgressive act of stealing a lipstick from a convenience store. Aside from bristling slightly that in her past life she was apparently a man, Eriko goes along with Hitomi’s bizarre story until their relationship intensifies and it begins to annoy her. 

It’s not really clear if Hitomi actually believes what she’s saying or is making the whole thing up. It may be a way for her to try and articulate her feelings, framing the love she feels for Eriko as a cosmically fated romance that began with an apparently heterosexual union, though perhaps after all angels have no gender. On the other hand, perhaps these demons that they’re battling represent those who would stand in the way of their love. Though it’s plain that Hitomi looks at her with an obvious longing, she asks Eriko if it’s alright that she’s not a boy. When Eriko replies that it doesn’t matter, Hitomi sadly asks if anyone would do while doubting her own worthiness. Eriko laughs and kisses her again, maintaining dominance by assuring Hitomi that she will teach her as she gently removes her clothes. 

But it’s also clear that Eriko has other things going on and, in some ways, represents the demon to Hitomi’s angel. She messes around with men via the telephone club, essentially a hookup line, getting Hitomi to come with her as they go on a date with a middle-aged man they plan to extort. After she and Hitomi run away together, she sleeps with the truck driver they hitched a lift with in the next room as if deliberately torturing Hitomi who writhes in agony while being subjected to her moans. Unable to bear the torment she calls her mother and asks to be picked up. Which causes a rift between herself and Eriko in what Eriko sees as an act of betrayal. After dropping out of school, Eriko takes up with another girl and rejects Hitomi’s pleas to come back, telling her that she doesn’t want to be railroaded onto a conventional life of marriage and children that believes is all that school leads to. Hitomi may, in that sense, be more conventional. Her innocence is reflected in the fact that she’d never drunk alcohol and disliked it when Eriko made her try. She dresses in a subdued manner and is fearful of Eriko’s reckless behaviour.

Nevertheless, she too tries on Eriko’s persona by going on an awkward arcade date with a boy from the telephone club who takes her to a hotel where she sleeps with him, but evidently loathes the experience and tries to regain control of the situation by becoming violent and demanding money. Resenting Eriko’s assertion that she couldn’t be an angel because she doesn’t have a scar, Hitomi burns herself by heating a metal fork to mimic the Orion’s Belt motif of moles Eriko has on her breast. Despite accusing Hitomi of only caring about herself, it seems that Eriko too is using the fantasy as an excuse to reject emotional intimacy. The other girl she’s with accuses her of thinking of Hitomi while they make they love with which she appears to be unsatisfied and there is something in her that seems fearful of genuine connection.

When they finally reunite, the final time they make love mirrors the first with roles reversed as Hitomi gently removes Eriko’s shirt and Eriko reaches out to touch the brand on Hitomi’s breast in shyness and wonder. The Orion’s Belt motif echoes the cosmic nature of their connection, as if they had finally completed their journey home to each other. But the ominous undertones remain as Hitomi returns to her story in which she romantically sacrificed herself for Eriko by jumping into the water to quell the demons’ storm. In releasing the apparently resurrected goldfish that she flushed away in pettiness and anger, she lets herself go as, like the butterfly lovers, she and Eriko seem to be transformed into fish free to swim in the ocean. Delicately shot with the yellow hues of nostalgia, Zeze’s poetic tale of toxic, frustrated love ends on a melancholy note that suggests the lovers are bound only for a loop of eternal heartbreak in every possible reincarnation.

The Road to Sydney (Benito Bautista, 2025)

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As a young person in Palawan, Sydney Loyola found herself the victim of toxic masculinity and a fiercely patriarchal culture. She recalls that her father once made her fight a neighbour’s son and threw her into a lake in what she then felt to be a rejection of her femininity. This feeling of being unloved by her father and responsible for the breakdown of her parents’ marriage has left a permanent scar on her life that continues to haunt her even as she begins the steps towards embracing her authentic self.

Shot over several years, Benito Bautista’s documentary follows Sydney through her transition having moved to the United States where she encounters a different kind of rejection and discrimination. A dancer and choreographer well versed in the traditional dance of Palawan, Sydney nevertheless had a survival job in San Francisco working for a property management company. When she told her boss that she needed medical leave to recover from surgery and that, on her return, she would be known as Sydney, he was apparently supportive. When she returned to work, however, the situation was quite different and her employers seemed to seize on any chance to dismiss her. Despite having sought advice from former fire fighter Mia who had undergone a successful transition in the fire service and assured Sydney that transgender people already enjoyed workplace protections in San Francisco she is eventually let from her job, forcing her to move out of her apartment, too.

But in another way, being forced out of her apartment is only another migration that acts as a fresh start at the beginning of her new life as Sydney. On reconnecting with her dance background, Sydney returns to the Philippines to choreograph a new routine inspired by a local folksong about a man who swore he would return for a woman. Sydney has done something quite similar, returning to reclaim not only her authentic self but her culture as rooted in the history of Palawan by choreographing a routine that incorporates traditional elements and western-inspired dance. Performed on the shores of a local beach, hers is a dance of migration inspired by the nomadic Batak people that reflects her journey toward becoming Sydney, embracing her authentic self, and eventually coming home.

Even in the US, Sydney had said that dance was the only place she felt truly safe while those who remember her from her youth in Palawan state that she was already able to express her authentic self even if she was too afraid of her parents’ reaction to do so openly. She recalls that she repressed herself and did everything she could not to stand out and be noticed, though the other children at school called her effeminate and bullied her. Even as an adult, she breaks down in tears wondering why people look down on others. Several of the other interviewees, some of whom are also from the Philippines, recall similar stories of being rejected by their families for not conforming to rigid gender roles.

Sydney says that she never felt loved by her father and suspects that his rejection of her was born of a feeling of inadequacy, that her femininity brought his own manhood into question. On reuniting with him, it seems as if her feelings toward her father may have been due to a lifelong misunderstanding, or at least, he doesn’t seem to remember her childhood in the same way she does and though the meeting is more of a positive experience than she feared it might be, she’s left feeling shortchanged for a lack of acknowledgment for all she suffered. Though she describes her mother as more supportive, Sydney also waited until after she died to pursue her transition fearing that it should be too difficult or her understand and cause further strain near the end of her life. Despite having gone to America to be free of this patriarchal culture, coming back to Palawan allows Sydney to come full circle by reclaiming her authentic identity and overcoming a past sense of rejection. Resolving her situation in the US and rediscovering old friends in Palawan, she finally arrives at herself and a moment of serenity having become the person she always knew herself to be.

The Road to Sydney screenedas part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival Spring Showcase.

Beyond the Fire: The Life of Japan’s First Pride Parade Pioneer (熱狂をこえて, Hiroaki Matsuoka, 2026)

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Hiroaki Matsuoka’s documentary Beyond the Fire: The Life of Japan’s First Pride Parade Pioneer (熱狂をこえて, Nekkyo wo Koete) follows the life of Teishiro Minami who started the first Pride parade to take place in Japan in 1994. The film is not, however, an exercise in hagiography and examines Minami’s troubled legacy as someone whose attempts to control the movement ended up destroying it and leading to tragic and unforeseen circumstances. The parade has since been reborn under Tokyo Rainbow Pride which aims for greater inclusivity for sexual minorities and operates out of a community hub where all are welcome.

As for Minami, he was born in 1931 on the island of Sakhalin which was eventually taken by the Russians during the war. The family evacuated to Akita to live with his mother’s relatives, but his father refused to come with them and remained behind. This sense of physical dislocation and displacement only deepened Minami’s sense of rootlessness and lack of belonging having figured out his sexuality while hanging out with part-timers at his family’s shop. With his mother having to support the family single-handed, Minami was keen to start working and got a civil service job after high school working in the local prosecutor’s office. Once his father returned, he asked for a transfer to Tokyo and began looking for the mysterious “House of Secrets” and the gay world he’d read about in magazines.

But after failing to gain a promotion, Minami resigned due to a discomfort about the way of thinking at the prosecutor’s office. His repeated decisions to resign from most of the jobs he held echoes his forthrightness, but also an unwillingness to compromise or inability to work with others who might not agree with him. He quits his job in broadcasting in part because he overhears his colleagues using slur words and speaking disparagingly about men like him which makes his workplace an unpleasant and unsafe environment, though times being what they were he couldn’t exactly complain about it. Most of the men he meets at gay bars when he finally discovers them are unable to be out at work and some of them are married, only able to live their gay lives at weekends. Minami too gets married out of a sense of social obligation and to give his mother grandchildren. As an older man, he seems to feel guilty about the way he abandoned his wife and children to live a more authentic life, but also seeks no kind of reconciliation.

His path to Pride began with a series of gay-themed magazines and a meeting with international activist Bill Schiller who convinced him that the gay rights movement was something that could make a difference in Japan. Having travelled to San Francisco and witnessed the Pride parade there, he begins planning one in Japan but despite the success of the first event, internal divisions came to the fore. The biggest of these was that though Minami had followed Schiller’s example and included lesbians in the movement, he’d largely done it for cynical reasons and really had no interest in working with them, admitting to finding women difficult in general. Admitting now that he went too far, the real crisis arrived when Minami tried to turn the third Pride parade into an exclusively political event, banning outlandish outfits or celebratory behaviour. He intended the parade to end in a rally in which they’d adopt a manifesto he’d written by himself without discussing it with the wider community. When some of them protested, a member of Minami’s team was heard to ask what the women were even doing there, making it clear that the organising committee believed this to be an event solely for gay men. Minami then took back control by excluding women from the committee entirely.

In some ways, his story is a cautionary tale about how strong personalities with a need for control can derail a movement or risk turning it into a vanity project. A young man who’d worked as a part of Minami’s team and had stayed to mediate when protestors stormed the stage later took his own life in despair with the direction things had taken. Many had been uncertain a Pride parade would work in Japan given the levels of hostility and the risks involved for those taking part. Their fear was that no one would come, but attendance was much greater than expected and many joined the parade later, encouraged by seeing that others had already done so and they were not alone. Though many praise Minami’s efforts and activism, not only with the Pride parade but during the AIDS crisis, and acknowledge the importance of his courage in taking the first step towards creating a gay rights movement, they also question his methods and motivations. Using a mixture of animation, archive footage, and talking heads interviews, the film does its best to record this landmark moment in the history of Japan’s LGBTQ+ community through the eyes of an elder statesman but never shies away from his mistakes if only in seeking to learn from them.

Beyond the Fire: The Life of Japan’s First Pride Parade Pioneer screened as part of this year’s BFI Flare.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Impure Nuns (汚れた肉体聖女, Michiyoshi Doi, 1958)

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Shintoho had arisen as a new studio during the labour disputes that engulfed the film industry in the late 1940s and to begin with specialised in artistic fare by orphaned filmmakers such as Kon Ichikawa and Kenji Mizoguchi, but faced with several box office failures it was in red right from the very beginning. After several attempts at relaunches and reorganisations, the studio appointed Mitsugu Okura to work his magic. The owner of a chain of cinemas and a former benshi, Okura had a reputation for being able to turn failing businesses around. His ethos was, however, decidedly populist. He shifted the studio’s focus from artistic films towards the low-budget genre fare with which it became most closely associated such as racy dramas and ghost films.

To that extent, you could say that Shintoho was ahead of its time. Most of the other studios would shift in the same direction as the studio system went into decline, and many of the stars at Toei in the 1960s such as Bunta Sugawara, Tetsuro Tamba, and Tomisaburo Wakayama had their start at Shintoho. Michiyoshi Doi was one of the studio’s key directors, though he often worked on its higher-bow output of literary adaptations. All of which might help to explain the seeming mismatch between the salacious Japanese title of 1958’s Impure Nuns, “Holy Women with Sullied Flesh” (汚れた肉体聖女, Kegareta Nikutai Shojo), and its content, which turns out to be a rather sensitive, sympathetic love story set in a Catholic Convent.

Eri (Miyuki Takakura) is the daughter of the aristocratic Taira family which apparently has a long history of Christianity. She is particularly devout and shortly after we meet her, she genuflects in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary. Throughout the film the welcoming arms of Mary seem to be contrasted with violent images of Christ on the cross, a presence that seeks to oppress the women in the free embrace of their desire. While her brother’s friend, Tsuyama (Toshio Mimura), is visiting, Eri suggests going into town to get something, but her mother is against it due to reports of some kind of “trouble” plaguing the streets. Tsuyama offers to accompany her, and they are actually beset by a gang of street toughs intent on raping Eri. Tsuyama does his best to fight them off until a policeman eventually arrives and chases them away. But then he ends up raping Eri himself, after which she becomes pregnant and undergoes an abortion at the urging of her parents.

While her father is scandalised and angry, Eri’s mother is sympathetic, but still each of them decide that the best thing to do is send Eri to a nunnery where she can be reborn in Christ. Due to her experiences, Eri seems to have developed a fear of men, but is also known as the strictest and most severe of the nuns. As the captivating Anna (Mayumi Ozora) enters the convent, another woman is being kicked out apparently by Eri for an undisclosed indiscretion with another woman. The mild implication is that Eri’s frustrated sexual desires have been channelled into authoritarianism in the insistence on discipline and punishing its breaches. It may be this that first attracts Anna who, to begin with, seems to be trying to initiate a sadomasochistic relationship by continually doing things to get Eri to punish her, such as singing while working which is, contrary to expectations, considered very bad form for a nun. 

Anna is, however, hardly a typical bride of Christ and is forever dancing and being cheerful. Her influence seems to break Eri out of her asceticism, as she too begins to ignore the rules and become more of herself again. After the convent bizarrely agrees to organise a dance, Eri gives in to her desire for Anna and the two fall in love, sharing a passionate kiss. But Sister Kashiwagi (Junko Uozumi) is watching, not so much because of the scandalous nature of their relationship, but because they are rivals for a coveted opportunity to study abroad in Rome with Eri currently the front runner. The trip to Rome is positioned as the antithesis of Eri’s freedom in her relationship with Anna as a symbol of repression in committing herself to religion. 

But Anna also disrupts the convent as she becomes the centre of a love triangle, while another nun later declares her love for Eri, only to be rebuffed. Sister Kashiwagi is killed by falling down the stairs while physically fighting over Anna, whose affections sometimes seem to wander, while Sister Sone similarly falls in a bottomless swamp that seems to stand in for obsessive desire. The love between the two women begins to amass a body count as they struggle to maintain it. Though it might seem as if the arrival of male policemen might further disrupt the convent, they simply declare their work done when Anna tells them she was asleep when her roommate left and didn’t see anything. But for her part, Anna has already described herself as cursed, abruptly revealing that her mother killed her father and then herself and that everyone in her family meets a bad end. Even her brother (Shuntaro Emi), who turns out to be a rapist and eventually takes his own life, describes her as a kind of demon that ruins everyone around her, and there is something of that in the way that she seems to attract so much attention at the convent.

Yet even when the script seems to want to paint this same-sex love as something dark or evil, Doi resists the impulse and largely depicts the relationship between the two women as something real and true that has beauty and delicacy. There’s something poignant in Eri’s final plea to run away together, and Anna’s reply that there isn’t any point because there’s nowhere they could go where they could live happily together. It’s Anna who now seems unable to break free of the convent, unexpectedly turning on Eri and going back to her bell ringing. The bell may represent a kind of order, but it’s also ironically reminiscent of the original Shintoho logo. In any case when they eventually fall from the tower, the other nuns arrive with flowers and encircle them with sorrow as if in recognition that it wasn’t the love that was a tragedy, but its impossibility. Though its frankness may have shocked audiences at the time, the film avoids the exploitative content suggested by the title, featuring little nudity beyond a silhouette of bared breasts, and embraces overt melodrama, a touch of gothic horror, and the beauty of this love rather attempt to censure or constrain it.

Impure Nuns screened as part of this year’s BFI Flare.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Deepest Space in Us (そこにきみはいて, Yasutomo Chikuma, 2025)

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The dress code at Kaori’s office doesn’t seem to be all that formal, but for some reason she alone looks like she’s going to a funeral. As it turns out, there’s a reason for that, but it also reflects the way that her job makes her feel dead inside and how she’s made to feel by a judgemental society that refuses to accept her as she is but punishes and excludes her for living outside of its expected norms and social codes.

Kaori (Momoko Fukuchi) doesn’t usually attend the team’s after work drinking parties, but is dragged along this time only to sit impassively ignoring everyone until a couple of drunk guys press her for her first love story and then ask a series of invasive questions about what kind of guys are her type. There are obviously a lot of assumptions in play here, and their obsessive probing borders on harassment. Kaori eventually gets up and leaves, but is chased by one of the guys who tries to ask her out. She tells him directly that she’s not interested because she doesn’t experience sexual attraction or desire, but that’s like a red flag to a bull for a certain sort of guy and this one laughs in her face after tearing her shirt as she tries to get away. People simply don’t believe her when she tells them, or else they conclude that there’s something wrong her that needs to be cured. She too feels as if she’s “not normal”, and is pressured by a society in which it’s still marriage and children that are the benchmarks of social success for a woman.

That’s one reason she bonds so easily with Takeru (Kanichiro), the lawyer who handled the probate for her estranged late mother’s estate which Kaori declined to inherit. Takeru tells her that he has something he wants to reject too, and it’s true enough that, to begin with, Kaori may be trying to reject her asexuality. She tries to initiate sex with Takeru in order to overcome it, but it isn’t something that either of them can go through with. Though he tells her that he has someone he can’t forget much as he’d like to, Takeru does not disclose that he is gay because of the intense shame he feels about his sexuality. Kaori evidently had a difficult childhood with a mother who was physically abusive towards her and thereafter raised in foster homes, while Takeru’s conservative mother (Mariko Tsutsui) seems to have instilled in him the same anxieties that plague Kaori in expecting him to marry and have children. Takeru’s former lover, Shingo (film director Ryutaro Nakagawa), has married a woman he doesn’t seem to like for convenience’s sake. Ten years after he and Takeru parted, Shingo is now a successful novelist writing populist fare that he secretly hates himself for knowing he’s writing for others and not himself. 

They all, in their way, attempt bury their true selves to achieve social success through heteronormative marriages, but Takeru and Kaori slowly discover that whatever joy they may have found in their mutual decision to overcome their self-loathing in a platonic union, it won’t work. They each at different times end up in the same hotel room with a hookup date staring a black mark on a wall that comes to represent an internal void. Realising that he will not be able to reject his homosexuality nor get over the grief and sense of loss he feels in Shingo’s rejection, Takeru eventually takes his own life. Struggling to understand why, Kaori ends up on a strange road trip with Shingo in which it’s never quite clear whether she fully realises he is Takeru’s former lover, or has already figured everything out and is trying to help him accept himself as a means of atoning for being unable to help Takeru do the same.

Her trip also strangely brings her into contact with a woman from her office who once claimed to hate her, but has now come to apologise while also looking, like Kaori, for some kind of acceptance and recognition. She says that she too hates herself, sure that men are only ever interested in sex and never in her. Eventually making a pass at Kaori, she admits that for some reason she is only able to be honest with her rather than her friends, family, or lovers. Nevertheless, though Kaori rejects her romantic advances, this simple act of unburdening and watching the sunrise together in silence seems to clear the air and grant both women a kind of peace.

Besides her sexual identity, Kaori seems to have a degree of trouble in dealing with people that suggests neurodivergence, but also longs for acceptance and companionship. While processing Takeru’s death and leading Shingo towards an acceptance of himself, she too learns to embrace her authentic identity and refuses to hide or run away from who she really is to please others rather than herself. Holding a mirror up to a repressed society, she achieves a kind of freedom in self-acceptance, which she then begins to extend to Shingo who once admitted that he ran away from love out of fear, and only now has the courage to face himself and the terrible delayed grief of having lost something precious that can never be reclaimed.

The Deepest Space in Us screened as part of this year’s BFI Flare.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Warla (Kevin Z. Alambra, 2025)

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A group of transwomen attempts to turn the tables by kidnapping wealthy foreign businessmen and blackmailing them to fund their surgery, but a newcomer to the group forces them to confront their hypocrisy in turning the violence inflicted on them back on the patriarchal society. Inspired by a real life case, Warla explores the marginalisation of transpeople in a country so imbued with Catholicism and toxic masculinity as the Philippines where all they really have to rely on is each other.

The violence of that society is evident from the very first frames as a body begins to drift into view. Mother Leila has been murdered in a brutal fashion for the crime of existing. Kit-Kat (Lance Reblando), rejected by her conservative father and brother, is cast adrift with no other means of affirming herself. When her father kicks her out, she’s taken in a family of transwomen led by Joice (KaladKaren), but what she didn’t know is that their business model is meeting foreign businessmen on dating apps, kidnapping them, beating them up, and blackmailing them by threatening to tell their wives, families, and employers. In doing so, they’re turning the prejudice they face back on those who rejected them, but as Kit-Kat points out, it’s as if they’ve joined the system rather than beating it. She doesn’t want anything to do with the violence, with ends up partially going along with because it she wants to remain part of the group and has nowhere else to turn.

As Joice points out, having nowhere else to turn is why they’re doing this. There is no social support for them in the Philippines and they struggle to even get casual jobs in fast food restaurants just by virtue of being transpeople. Barbie Ann (Serena Magiliw) has a son from her previous marriage which ended when she decided to embrace her trans identity, but her former wife, Kate (Francesca Dela Cruz), has met someone else and wants to move in with him. Roger (Jel Tarun) is evidently a much more conservative man and is already beginning to distance Kate from Barbie by banning her from the house. When she tries to talk to him on the street, he tells her that she’s filling her son’s head with a lot of nonsense about how people like her are okay which will lead to him getting bullied. He thinks that, as he’s accepted the child and will now be providing for him, he should have a greater say over what he’s taught to think. Barbie’s existence is dangerous precisely because of what she was teaching son, challenging the social order by undercutting the patriarchy.

Ning (Valeria Kurihara), meanwhile, struggles to maintain a relationship because she wants to wait until she’s had her surgery to become intimate. Experiencing extreme dysphoria, she doesn’t want her partner to see the part of herself that she hates, but he gets fed up and leaves her for a cis woman. He tells her that their relationship was always doomed because his father wouldn’t accept her. With his new girlfriend, he can post pictures on social media and doesn’t feel the need to sneak around. Getting the money together to go to Thailand for her surgery becomes an obsession in part so that she can get Lance back, but also so that she will finally feel whole. Barbie also wants the surgery to avoid the kind of violence she inflicts on their victims. Kit-Kat says she isn’t interested in surgery which places her at odds with other members of the group such as Barbie who suggests it’s alright for her because she presents as more obviously feminine and so isn’t subject to the same levels of violence and rejection.

Though they may feel that they’re only playing these men at their own game, they bite off more than they can chew with a short-fused Japanese businessman who talks like a yakuza and flies off the handle with wait staff. Most of the other men gave in quite quickly because of the shame they feel and the fear they have of their transgressions being exposed, but Isamu (Jacky Woo) was like them in that he had nothing left to lose and soon realised he’d been set up. In the end, Joice is forced to make the ultimate maternal gesture to try and save her girls, while Kit-Kat must reckon with where this dark path has taken her. Though she knew that her mother loved her but was unable to stand up to her father’s patriarchal violence, she eventually finds solace in the fact that she can still hold her hand and call her by her true name even if the rest of the world refuses to recognise her.

Warla screened as part of this year’s BFI Flare.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Pollen of Flowers (화분, Ha Gil-jong, 1972)

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Park Chung-hee kept a tight rein on cinema which he saw as an important political tool and means of communication. That’s not to say, however, that criticising his authoritarian regime was impossible, but that criticism was often expressed in unexpected or abstract ways. The debut film of Hollywood-trained director Ha Gil-jong, The Pollen of Flowers (화분, Hwabun), was adapted from a novel by Yi Hyoseok that was published in 1939 when Korea was under Japanese rule but now speaks directly to the contemporary era as a young man and woman long for escape from the oppressive atmosphere of the “Blue House”.

The Blue House is the name for the residence of Korea’s president and where Park Chung-hee lived at the time, but within the context of the film, it’s inhabited by the mistress of a wealthy businessman, Se-ran (Choi Ji-hee), and her younger sister, Mi-ran (Yoon So-ra). The relationship between the sisters is, however, much more like mother and daughter with Se-ran repeatedly stating that Mi-ran is “everything” to her and that she must grow up to become a “great woman”. The slightly uncomfortable implication is that she is encouraging a possible relationship between Mi-ran and her patron Hyeon-ma (Namkoong Won) or at least that by “great woman” she means Mi-ran should be the partner of a great man who moves within their social circles. Ominously, however, the film opens with Mi-ran discovering that all the fish in their pond have died making it clear that the water here is poisoned and the atmosphere rancid. 

It’s not exactly clear how old Mi-ran is intended to be, only that Se-ran had been worried that hadn’t yet started menstruating. She’s spent her entire life in the cosseted environment of the Blue House and knows nothing of the world outside. That she gets her period for the first time when her father brings his secretary/secret lover Dan-ju (Hah Myung-joong) to the house suggests that she has, in a sense, been liberated by his arrival. For whatever reason, Se-ran had tried to warn her off him. She appears jealous while implying that Dan-ju is a dangerous social climber who threatens the integrity of her household. Mi-ran replies that you shouldn’t judge someone because of their background, but in a fit of pique also refers to Dan-ju as a “servant” which hurts both his feelings and his male pride.

But Dan-ju himself is something of a cypher whose motivations are often unclear. Having grown up working class, he’s risen in the world through complicity with Hyeon-ma’s authoritarian rule. As Se-ran says, Hyeon-ma is infatuated with him but perhaps more as a symbol of his overall control. He reminds Dan-ju that he controls his future and repeatedly asks him if he wants to go back to his old life of being a “scumbag” not quite realising that Dan-ju may have become fed up with his degradation and no longer thinks this kind of success is worth it. Hyeon-ma refers to Dan-ju as his “dream and ambition,” even going so far as to say he’d like to start a new life with him, though this is obviously not something that would be considered publicly acceptable in the Korea of the early 1970s. The film is often referred to as the first to depict a same-sex relationship, but it’s one motivated more by power than by love. It’s not clear if Hyeon-ma is so convinced that Mi-ran is completely safe with Dan-ju because he believes him to be interested only in men, or if he is certain that his control over him is absolute, while Dan-ju may not actually be interested in men at all and is only submitting himself to Hyeon-ma’s attentions in return for social advancement.

What he comes to represent for each is freedom. After running away, Mi-ran explains that she was happy with her life within the Blue House, in other words under authoritarianism, because it treated her well and so she could think of no other happiness. But meeting Dan-ju has shown her that happiness is possible outside of it. Love is a force that threatens the social order, and now Mi-ran resents her tightly controlled life and longs for the freedom Dan-ju represents over the patriarchal oppression represented by Hyeon-ma to which Se-ran has wholly submitted herself. Now that she’s committed to the regime, she cannot permit Mi-ran to leave it and tries to convince her to study music abroad and date an international pianist who could help career. Hyeon-ma, meanwhile, reacts in jealousy and frustration. He beats Dan-ju and throws him in his shed echoing the torture and imprisonment of dissidents that took place under Park’s regime. 

As time passes, however, something evidently goes wrong with Hyeon-ma’s business causing him to flee in a hurry abandoning Se-ran and Mi-ran to their fates. The ominous maid who has been dropping rats through their windows, eventually tries to release Dan-ju with whom she has some kind of intimate connection, with the consequence that he haunts the mansion like a ghost. Mi-ran appears to have reassimilated, dancing with another man while wearing what looks very like wedding a dress, but her desire for freedom is reawakened by Dan-ju’s return. The house itself is then stormed by the revolutionary force of Hyeon-ma’s creditors who are not exactly noble avengers. They raid the place looting his possessions to get back what they’re owned, even going so far as to cut off Se-ran’s finger to take her ring and pulling out her gold teeth. The message seems to be that the dictator will probably get away (Park didn’t, he was assassinated by the head of his own security forces), but a heavy price will be paid for complicity when the regime falls, as all regimes eventually do. 

Blue Boy Trial (ブルーボーイ事件, Kashou Iizuka, 2025)

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The police of mid-1960s Japan have a problem. They’re desperately trying to clean up the streets. But they keep running into transgender sex workers whom they can’t arrest because the working of the anti-prostitution laws explicitly targets women only, and in legal terms the people they’re picking up are regarded as male, so they have to release them. Knowing they can’t touch the women, a resentful police officer decides to go after the doctor who treated them instead.

Inspired by a real-life incident, Blue Boy Trial (ブルーボーイ事件, Blue Boy Trial) examines the social and legal repercussions of the actions taken against Dr Akagi (Takashi Yamanaka) after he was charged with supplying drugs illegally and breaking the anti-eugenics legislation by performing sterilisations while treating transgender people. Though Akagi agrees to plead guilty to the drugs charge, he refuses to move on eugenics, insisting that the surgery he performs is a legitimate medical practice that has nothing to do with any eugenicist ideology. The lawyer appointed for him, Kano (Ryo Nishikido), has an uphill battle ahead but hopes he can convince the judges by putting some of the women Akagi helped on the witness stand, to show that the treatment he gave them was medically necessary.

But part of the problem is necessarily that many of these women work in the sex industry. They aren’t respected, and their testimony won’t be either. That’s why Kano is keen to get Sachi on board seeing as she lives what the court will consider a conventional, “respectable” life like any other woman’s. Nevertheless, his request is insensitive and he appears not realise what exactly what he’s asking. If Sachi (Miyu Nakagawa) takes the stand she will be outing herself and putting the life she’s managed to build on the line. One of the other women Kano asks to testify takes her own life after being described as “mentally ill” in court and accosted by a drunk man outside it. When a picture of Sachi and her partner Akihiko (Ko Maehara) is featured in a newspaper report, she’s fired from her job in a cafe with her manager (Kiyohiko Shibukawa) accusing her of “fraud” for having responded to a job ad that clearly stated it was for “women only”.

Even Kano, to begin with, repeatedly refers to the women as “he” and uses slur words to describe them. Focussed more on winning the case, he pursues avenues that are offensive such as characterising the surgery as treatment for a mental health condition, asking why they “decided” to become women, and probing them on intimate details such as their sexual experiences as “men”.  Aside from prejudice towards the LGBTQ+ community, these attitudes also hint at the latent misogyny in the wider society which is still defined by traditional gender roles. Tokita (Junpei Yasui), the conservative prosecutor, makes a fairly nonsensical point about all the men who died in the war, accusing the women of being “selfish” and unpatriotic in giving up their manhood while panicked that transgender people threaten the very fabric of society as if he were worried that every man secretly wants to be a woman. In her emotional testimony, Sachi rejects his insistence on a socially defined gender binary and states that conforming to what he defines as a woman would also be inauthentic. What Akagi’s surgery helped her become was only her true self.

To that extent, Sachi’s partner Akihiko (Ko Maehara) is also unmanned by virtue of his disability. He too experienced prejudice and could not beat “small-town life”, much like Sachi in having been excluded by his otherness. He knows all about Sachi and has accepted her, presenting her with a ring though they cannot be legally married, but even in the big city they cannot find the freedom to live happy quiet lives. Sachi’s friend Ahko (Sexy Izumi) agreed to testify to claim the right to live well for the younger generation, so they could be free to live their lives without having to hide. The fact that Akagi is found guilty may not be surprising given the nature of the law as it was, though it did in a round about way legitimise the idea of confirmatory surgery as a legitimate medical procedure by suggesting guildelines to be followed in order for it to take place legally. Nevertheless, the first fully legal surgery did not take place until 30 years later, while those like Sachi continued to face prejudice and were forced to live their lives without the ability to be fully themselves. Even so, Sachi at least seems to have found her own happiness and fulfilment despite the social hostility that haunts her existence.

Blue Boy Trial screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © 2025 “Blue Boy Trial” Film Partners