Silent City Driver (Чимээгүй хотын жолооч, Sengedorj Janchivdorj, 2024)

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Myagmar (Tuvshinbayar Amartuvshin) asks a teenage monk if he thinks atonement is possible. The monk, Sodoo, tells him that he thinks it is, but that it’s difficult and not many people can achieve it. The irony of Myagmar’s life is that he becomes a kind of ferryman, delivering the deceased to a kind of liberation he will never find while trapped in the eternal hell of Ulaanbaatar. Much less upbeat than his previous film, The Sales Girl, Sengedorj Janchivdorj’s melancholy character study finds its solitary hero consumed alternately by guilt and rage while trapped within a world of constant unfairness and inequality.

As Myagmar tries to explain, he’s not disabled, merely nervous though his stammer turns out to stem from extensive beatings during the 14 years he spent in “Dad’s house”, or prison, that have left him with brain damage and the melancholy stillness of one already dead. As he tells the friendly coffin maker at the funeral home where he is eventually employed as a hearse driver, he applied for countless other jobs but no one would give him one because of his criminal record and outsider status. Having lost his only living relative in his mother who died while he was inside, Myagmar lives alone with a pack of stray dogs that he’s taken in and cares for. He explains to the coffin maker’s daughter Saruul (Narantsetseg Ganbaatar) that some of them probably had families, but were abandoned because they got old or they were sick and it costs too much to care for a sick dog. Mostly though, they’re strays, like him, with no home or place to belong.

Myagmar extends this same kindness to Saruul having become captivated by her on seeing her come to collect her father from work. Coffin maker Sodnom thinks she’s a medical student, but Myagmar soon discovers that she works in the seedy underbelly of Ulaanbataar’s sex industry and is also at the centre of a political scandal involving a leaked tape of a politician said to have been uploaded by the woman herself as a last resort and means of revenge with a personal rather than political motivation. Myagmar follows Saruul around in a way which might seem creepy, but is emblematic of his shyness and lack of confidence in himself. Though Saruul eventually responds to his kindness and begins to return some of his affection, it’s largely because they recognise each other as two people who are trapped in this unending hell, he in his sense of futility and the trauma of his incarceration, and she within sex work and abuse. 

At a particularly low point, Saruul tells Myagmar that she wants to go to “that place”, the hell that haunts him though he no longer dreams. He tells her that it is not somewhere she wants to go, that there is no light there, no day and no night. It is a living death in which even his name was taken from him and replaced by a number, as Suruul’s will also be in a moment of grim irony. But all it seems to do is reinforce the fact that this is not so different from the life Saruul lives now. They already live in hell and there is only one means of escape. The monk, Sodoo, tells Myagmar that the best revenge is forgiveness and seeking vengeance won’t change anything, but he cannot overcome his sense of rage towards an unjust society. Still, Sodoo tells him that he did the right thing even if offers little sense of comfort to the melancholy hearse driver charged with transporting souls from this world to the next.

Sengedorj Janchivdorj lends the contemporary city a melancholy quality, a dark and lonely place peopled by the abandoned and downtrodden. Even Sodoo doesn’t quite know how old he is and marks his years by the day in which he was found. The more Myagmar begins to rebuild his life, the more he has to lose and the less it looks like he will be allowed to find happiness or the atonement he seeks for his crime. A gentle soul consumed by rage, he nevertheless has “capable hands” to which to entrust this justice and is capable of creating great beauty such as the stone lions he begins carving for the funeral home, but otherwise maintains a purgatorial existence unable to make a home for himself in a world of such constant cruelties.

Silent City Driver screens in Chicago 6th April as part of the 19th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Manok (이반리 장만옥, Lee Yu-jin, 2025)

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When Manok returns to her rural hometown in the wake of her mother’s death, the irony is that some accuse her of running away from the humiliation of the implosion of her life in Seoul, but in other ways she has unfinished business in Iban-ri and this time she isn’t going to let them drive her away. Lee Yu-jin’s warmhearted dramedy is at heart about a love of community, or rather communities that might not at first seem compatible or even mutually exclusive but are then integrated by the sheer force of Manok’s determination.

Now in her 50s, Manok (Yang Mal-bok) had owned a popular lesbian bar in Seoul and was at the forefront of queer activism in the city hosting the annual after party for the Pride parade for the last 20 years. But times have changed and the young queer community has begun to find new places to root itself while Manok struggles to adjust to the generational shift taking place. Finding out on the same day that her mother has died and her brothers don’t really want her at the funeral, she’s losing the parade after party and without it her bar will probably go out of business, and her long-term partner Geum-ja (Kim Jung-young) knew all along but didn’t say anything out of fear of her reaction, sends her into frenetic spiral in which she abruptly leaves town and decamps to the house her mother inexplicably left her back in Iban-ri.

Manok had left town to live a more authentic life having tried to accommodate herself to conventionality through marriage but finding it unbearable. She is not exactly welcomed back with open arms as her brothers repeatedly blame her for being a “nasty lesbian,” and using it as a justification for increasing their share of the inheritance to cut her out. Her ex-husband, meanwhile, has become the city chief and rules the local area with an iron hand while misusing his position to exploit the local community. Manok ends up coming to the rescue of his child, Jae-yeon, whose transgender identity he repeatedly rejects while Jae-yeon faces discrimination and harassment from his schoolmates.

Jae-yeon is in many ways the reason that Manok can’t simply leave again and try to reconstruct her life in Seoul because nothing’s really changed in Iban-ri and Jae-yeon is facing all the same problems she once did but without the well-earned armour the middle-aged Manok has managed to forge for herself that allows her to stare down injustice with a steely gaze. Then again, back in Seoul, younger members of the community had accused her of being self-aggrandising, that she was overfond of justifying her actions as being for their benefit when really she simply enjoyed the status of being a community leader. In Iban-ri, however, she gains some time to reflect and truly becomes a part of this community that she again wants to save, this time by challenging her ex to win the position of city chief herself and enact change through kindness and solidarity. While the young leave for the cities, many left behind are elderly and are in their way just as exiled as Manok with the city chief failing in his obligations to look after them.

Later Manok says that her ambition is to make Iban-ri a place where no one is lonely or feels the kind of isolation she once felt through being rejected by those around her because of her sexuality. As her ex pathetically tries to cling on to his patriarchal authority, Manok decides to do things the Iban-ri way by winning hearts and minds and eventually showing them that there’s nothing to fear as she too reoccupies her mother’s house with her partner in tow finally claiming her claiming her space in this place that had no place for her. As Geum-ja had said, Manok really does love her community and sets about making Iban-ri a happier and healthier town where people care for and about each other and no one is left behind. A warm and quirky exploration of small-town life and the power of authenticity the film’s infectious spirit is difficult to deny as the joy it finds in the queer identity even amid so much fear and hostility brokered by one woman’s determination not to back down because there are kids who need protecting in Iban-ri and they all they deserve a Manok in their lives.

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

Trailer (English subtitles)

BFI to Host “Bong Joon Ho: Power and Paradox”

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Throughout April, the BFI will be hosting a retrospective of the films of Bong Joon Ho including both his Korean and international features and the black and white versions of Mother and Parasite. Subtitler and Korean film expert Darcy Paquet will also be in attendance to discuss his work on Bong’s The Host on 24th April.

Barking Dogs Never Bite

Bong’s darkly comic debut follows an unemployed university professor who takes drastic action to silence a barking dog in his apartment block while a young woman investigates its disappearance.

Memories of Murder

Seminal serial killer thriller rooted in a very real and at the time still unsolved crime set amid the backdrop of a declining authoritarian regime. Review.

The Host

Classic monster movie drama inspired by the real life case of the dumping of formaldehyde in the Han River by US military. When a young girl is abducted, her family must come together to rescue her.

Mother

A mother goes to great lengths to defend her son who has learning difficulties believing that he has been falsely accused of a crime.

Also screening in black and white version.

Snowpiercer

A reluctant revolutionary seeks redemption through wrecking the system in Bong Joon-ho’s sci-fi inflected class war drama. Review.

Okja

A little girl goes on an epic journey to rescue her pet superpig when it’s taken away by an evil conglomerate.

Parasite

The Parks have everything and the Kims nothing, but there are really no winners in a system as essentially corrupt as this in Bong’s searing class war melodrama. Review.

Also screening in black and white version.

Bong Joon Ho: Power and Paradox runs at the BFI Southbank throughout April 2025.

Dryads in a Snow Valley (風の波紋, Shigeru Kobayashi, 2015)

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“You can’t live here alone” a older woman admits having long left the village and returning only to visit her parents’ graves to be shocked by its ongoing decline. Shigeru Kobayashi’s mostly observational documentary loosely follows the life of a middle-aged man who left Tokyo for a life in the mountains only to be frustrated by the March 2011 earthquake. Undeterred, he ignores the advice of a local builder that his 117-year-old home is damaged beyond repair and forges on together with the support of the surrounding villagers to rebuild and restore.

It could in a way be a metaphor for the nation’s determination to do the same in the way of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, but it’s also for Kogure a personal mission to fulfil his dreams of country living. Indeed, he gleefully tends to his rice paddies which he says he’s kept chemical free rather than allow them to be polluted by the modern society. Then again, perhaps this is easy for Kogure to say given that he describes his farming to a fellow farmer as a “hobby” and it’s otherwise clear that he’s not using it as a means to support himself. For these reasons he takes pleasure in the simple though arduous acts of planting and harvesting, pushing a wooden plow through the field and revealing that he discovered the traces of those before him in the remnants of an old irrigation tunnel now buried by mud. For him, this sense of continuity seems to be central as if he’s preserving something of an older Japan and a simpler, more fulfilling way of life. 

Kogure had said he wanted to save the house because it was like the pillars cried out to him. A local dye artist says something similar in that he almost feels the wood he harvests is alive though if it were he wouldn’t be able to cut it. There is a sense of the forest as an almost sentient entity with which the villagers live in harmony, but also a less wholesome vision of nature red in tooth and claw as Kogure offers up one of his goats to have its buds removed with hot iron by a local goat expert. The poor thing cries in pain but is ignored, the expert simply stating that it’s only natural and what is always done though it seems if it really is necessary there must be a less cruel way to do it. Kobayashi later wisely cuts away as we realise a goat is about to be slaughtered, cutting straight to the “meat carnival” it provides for the villagers. 

Most of those interviewed are themselves transplants like Kogure who moved to the mountains 20 or 25 years previously usually from the cities and have largely adapted to a simpler way of life, though it’s also true that there are few young people besides a young woman and her daughter who cheerfully exclaims that rice is her favourite food. The woman is grateful for the unconditional support and acceptance she’s received from the villagers whom she says smile in the face of hardship, keen to help each other and make sure that no one is excluded. Yet this way of life is often hard and it’s true enough that no one can survive here alone amid the heavy winter snows. One old man decides that it isn’t worth trying to repair his home after the earthquake and it’s better to demolish it instead while his wife reflects on her life explaining that she was more or less forced to marry him by her family who lured her back from Tokyo on a ruse that her mother was seriously ill. 

Nevertheless, Kobayashi demonstrates the closeness of the remaining villagers as they bond together through shared feasts, laserdisc karaoke, and a general sense of community. “Breaks are a big part of shovelling snow” one man jokes, focussing not so much on the unending labour as the pleasure taken in rest and friendship. Another later suggests the snow will become “a memory of a trial I survived” echoing the harshness of this village life in winter, even as the camera cuts to a glorious spring filled with bright sunshine and verdant green. Kogure continues to plant his rice while a goat runs about in the field behind him in a timeless vision of pastoral life despite itself persisting. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

Like A Rolling Stone (出走的决心, Yin Lichuan, 2024)

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A middle-aged woman’s decision to walk out on her abusive marriage and pursue a life of ultimate freedom on the road went viral in 2022 making her an accidental feminist icon in an overwhelmingly traditionalist and patriarchal culture. Yin Lichuan’s dramatisation of Su Min’s life, Like a Rolling Stone (出走的决心, chūzǒu de juéxīn), makes plain the various ways in which her life has been shaped by patriarchal forces that also continue to shape that of her daughter who is sympathetic to her mother’s plight but also perhaps still feeling herself entitled to her mother’s sacrifice while wary of making such a sacrifice herself.

As she says, Hong (Yong Mei) has been waiting a long time. A flashback to 1982 finds her as a fresh-faced teenager with hopes and dreams who wanted to go to university and travel the world. But her father pulls her out of school and forces her to work in a factory to support the family while devoting all their resources to her brother. She marries Dayong (Jiang Wu) to get away from her father’s oppression, chasing another kind of freedom but soon finding herself disappointed. In the present day we can see that Dayong is cruel and abusive. He continually runs Hong down, calls her stupid and lazy, and becomes violent when challenged. 

Hong has long wanted to leave but is prevented firstly by a sense of shame in going against conventional wisdom. When she’d tried to leave him before, her family refused to help her and in fact encouraged her to return to Dayong and put up with her mistreatment. Dayong had also frustrated her attempts to work so that she would have nowhere to go and no way of supporting herself if she left him while simultaneously taking advantage of her financially. The couple had separate finances since early in their marriage, but while Dayong doesn’t like Hong spending on things that make her happy, he often helps himself to her possessions declaring that everything belongs to the family. 

But Hong bites her tongue and does as she’s told because that’s what she’s been taught she’s supposed to do. She’s sacrificed all of herself for her family and has even been working unpaid for her brother for over three years only to see him become surly when she eventually asks for her backpay. Her daughter, Xiaoxue (Wu Qian) resents her father for the way he’s treated Hong and is supportive of her liberation but at the same time she also over relies on her asking her to cancel a trip to see her old friends to be around during her pregnancy and then again when first loses and then gains a better job but is afraid to ask for time off in case it ruins her chances of being kept on.

Hong asks her own mother why she treats her the way she does and continues to prioritise her brother while telling her must allow herself to be exploited to serve the family but she doesn’t have an answer for her. There’s certainly a greater understanding between Hong and Xiaoxue about the patriarchal structures in which they are both trapped. When she loses her job, Xiaoxue’s husband encourages her to stay home with the children just as Dayong had discouraged Hong from looking for work. Xiaoxue wants a job to avoid her mother’s fate of becoming trapped within the domestic environment with no time for herself. While her husband seems nicer and treats her better than Dayong has treated Hong, he is not necessarily that much better and still operates on a patriarchal mindset. He praises women for being superhuman, but in doing so suggests that the domestic sphere is a woman’s concern alone. It does not seem to occur to him that he could do his fair share or that the division of their labour could be more equal. 

Things may be better for Xiaoxue which was all that Hong wanted, but they are far from perfect and when push comes to shove she too just expects that her mother will sacrifice her own desires to suit Xiaoxue’s needs. Everyone keeps telling her to wait, but Hong waited to escape her father, to meet a “decent” man, for Xiaoxue to grow up, get married, and have children of her own, then for the children to start kindergarten. If she doesn’t leave now, there’ll be another reason why shouldn’t. There is something quite empowering about Hong’s gentle progression towards achieving her freedom beginning with getting her driving license in her 50s despite the misogynistic banter of the instructors. When she gets her car, Dayong immediately gets into the driver’s seat and it takes a little longer for her to assume her space, but as she says no one can stop her now. She won’t be bullied or belittled anymore, nor will she allow herself to be taken for granted or guilted into sacrificing herself for others who rarely sacrifice anything for her. One of a recent series of films addressing ongoing patriarchal oppression, Lin’s film is itself a way of fighting back against the idea that unhappiness is something you just have to accept as a woman as Hong begins living her best life out on the road, finally free and very much in the driving seat of her own life.

Like A Rolling Stone screened as part of the 19th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Summer’s Camera (여름의 카메라, Divine Sung, 2025)

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Summer can’t bring herself to press the shutter button on the last four exposures left on the unfinished roll of film her father left behind. Her unwillingness to do so and seeming abandonment of their shared passion for photography hints at her difficulty to come to terms with his passing along with her own sense of adolescent confusion. But just as her father had told her she would, she learned to hear the shutter for herself and took three of her four remaining photos without thinking, all of Yeonwoo, the star of the school’s football team by whom she is unexpectedly captivated.

Well, perhaps not all that unexpectedly. Summer appears to already be aware of her queerness even if she hasn’t explored it yet and quickly finds that her interest is returned by Yeonwoo who immediately responds to her roundabout confession of love by asking her out. Which is all to say, this world is quite different from that Summer’s father Jihoon inhabited in his youth even if it’s rosier than the still conservative reality of contemporary South Korea. Summer’s direct announcement to her best friend that she likes girls is met with a simple “I know,” having noticed that she never took photos of guys and only a little hurt that she never said anything before and hasn’t let her in on her recent dating news.

But what Summer discovers after taking one very deliberate photo of Yeonwoo and having the film developed is that her father also took pictures of someone he liked and that someone was a boy, Maru. Of course, this revelation is quite destabilising for her. She can’t get her head around her father’s relationship with herself and her mother if he was gay though as her friend points out, he may have been bisexual which actually didn’t occur to her. In a quest for answers, Summer approaches the now middle-aged Maru and eventually like her friends did of her simply accepts this unknown fact about Jihoon while finding in Maru someone who’s gone through the same things she’s experiencing and with whom she can discuss the things she can’t yet talk about with her mother or friends. 

In her recollections, we never see the face of the adult Jihoon. He always appears with her back to her or just out of frame reflecting the ways in which she no longer feels as if she knew her father and has lost sight of her relationship with him in the wake of her loss. Though told it was a traffic accident, Summer wonders if in reality he might have taken his own life and chosen to leave her behind. Through re-embracing photography, she begins to rediscover him and come into herself gaining not only the confidence to be who she is but to believe that loss is something she can bear while like Yeonwoo’s running hobby which apparently can alter the flow of time, photography is also a means of trapping a memory which means that nothing’s ever really gone.

With the universal love and acceptance that seems to surround Summer, the film implies that the world has moved on and if her father chose conventionality over love that’s a choice that she may not need to make. Even so, in Maru she finds a strong queer role model who even in his own sadness and grief in his lost love for Jihoon is able to help her move forward in showing her a different side of her father which she had never known. He helps her navigate young love and offers a safe space for her to be herself until she’s ready to confront the unresolved past and make peace with it. Though perhaps tinged with melancholy and longing, Summer’s world is otherwise bright and sunny. Filled both with the giddiness of first love and the deep sadness of a catastrophic loss, it is nevertheless warm and beautiful as Summer sees it through the camera lens. With the shutter button as her guiding light, Summer learns to see in new ways peering both back into the past and ahead into her future now less fearful and more certain of herself having reclaimed both something of the father she lost and the one she never knew.

Summer’s Camera screened as part of this year’s BFI Flare.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Festival Champ (お祭り野郎 魚河岸の兄弟分, Norifumi Suzuki, 1976)

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Who doesn’t love a festival? The hero of Norifumi Suzuki’s Festival Champ (お祭り野郎 魚河岸の兄弟分, Omatsuri yaro: Uogashi no Kyodai-bun) loves them so much that he travels all over Japan to help out in places where young men have become thin on the ground thanks to increasing urbanisation and rural depopulation. Following the success of Suzuki’s entries in the Truck Yaro series in 1975 and 1976, the film was part of a new line of comedies and sports movies launched by Toei as well as a vehicle for Hiroki Matsukata who was trying to move on from yakuza movies.

Katsuo (Hiroki Matsukata) is however something of a goodhearted bruiser who is always getting into manly scraps and especially at the festivals he travels to which is a pretty good hook for an ongoing series. But it’s not all that great for his employer who runs a family fishmonger’s at the Uogashi fish market and complains that Katsuo’s always running off and causing trouble. The fish market itself takes on an exoticised quality in the opening sequence which features a voice over from karate queen Etsuko Shihomi, here in a purely dramatic role, who is the daughter of a well-to-do traditional Japanese restaurant and travels there daily by speedboat to pick up the best fresh fish available. Suzuki throws in some documentary-style stock footage and statistics about the market that lend a strangely corporate feel, but then homes in on its capacity as a community hub. Kiyoko says it’s her favourite place precisely because there’s nothing formal about it. Deals are done through body language and you don’t need any kind of resume to work there, everyone’s welcome. 

That may be the implied contrast between Kiyoko’s father, who owns an upscale place and cultivates genuine relationships with local fishermen and brokers, and local boy made good Kurosaki who has supposedly become the CEO of a restaurant chain, itself a symbol of the soulless corporation of ‘70s Japan. Kurosaki rocks up dressed like a yakuza, but everyone treats him as a successful businessman and in part thanks to Katsuo’s boss Zenjiro’s recommendation is eager to make deals with him but predictably he’s running a huge scam that could destroy the local economy. Zenjiro is later faced with the difficult decision of selling his family business to repay all the other fishermen and brokers that have fallen foul of him. 

It’s this societal sense of unfairness that stripper Kumi (Terumi Azuma) hints at when she says she feels “frustrated” and that her long-lost brother Eiji (Toru Emori) probably feels even more frustrated than she does after he slaps her having found out that she’s become a burlesque dancer. As she points out to him, he ran away from home and left her behind with the aunt that was cruel to them so what exactly he expected her to do is a mystery. In the end, it’s his own fault for abandoning her, so he has no leg to stand on in criticising her for the way she’s lived her life. Kumi is well accepted in the local community and walks around in very elegant attire which gives her the air of an “ojosan” or upperclass lady to much greater extent that Kiyoko has in her love of the earthy world of the fish market. The fact that she turns out to be suffering from a tragic terminal illness perhaps only reinforces this sense of unfairness, that the modern world has essentially poisoned her and she can no longer survive in it.

The only things that give her solace are Katsuo and the idea of joining in carrying a shrine festival which would seem to be ways of reconnecting with a more essential Japaneseness. Despite his rowdiness, Katsuo is as she describes him the kindest person she’s ever met and a more positive vision of a still traditional masculinity that looks to protect the community and those around him. He gets into a fight with Eiji, but after exchanging a few blows the men become firm friends, while it’s trying to hook his wimpy friend Kinichi up with a date that brings him to Kumi in the first place. Meanwhile, it seems like Ayuko (Junko Natsu) has a crush on him and despite Zenjiro’s exasperation with Katsuo, everyone expects that he will eventually marry her and take over the family business. 

And so, it’s only a violent, but also quite funny, intervention from Katsuo that can eventually overcome the disruption Kurosaki threatens. Suzuki throws in a lot of his trademark weirdness including all of Zenjiro’s other daughters having fishy names, and a local sex worker who is insatiably aroused by octopuses followed by a gag in which Katsuo is trolled with a suggestive-looking shellfish, but mostly rests on a sense of qualified wholesomeness and community all carried on Katsuo’s broad shoulders as the lone guardian of a more essential Japaneseness otherwise uncorrupted by venal post-war capitalism.

*Norifumi Suzuki’s name is actually “Noribumi” but he has become known as “Norifumi” to English-speaking audiences.

Hunter Brothers (獵人兄弟, Su Hung-en, 2024)

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Two brothers find themselves on opposite sides of tradition and modernity as they descend into a state of warfare over the future of the ancestral hunting grounds in Su Hung-en’s familial drama, Hunter Brothers (獵人兄弟). Exploring the complicated position of the indigenous community marginalised by an increasingly capitalistic urbanity the film also critiques contemporary visions of masculinity in the wider society as the brothers each try to find new ways of defining themselves amid changing notions of manly success.

In the opening scenes of the film, Teymu celebrates the fact that his son, Yuci, has become a doctor because now he will never have to do manual labour and will have a more comfortable standard of living. But in private, Teymu seems upset. He feels as if he has failed the ancestors because in the eyes of their community, Yuci is not a proper man. Many people tell him that he is “not cut out to be a hunter,” and he has no desire to be one anyway, but still suffers from a serious inferiority complex and wounded male pride. To find some kind of answer, Teymu forces Yuci against the wishes of his mother to accompany him to the mountains for one last hunting trip to prove himself by killing a wild boar and finally validating Teymu’s own fractured sense of masculinity that his son is indeed a “proper man.”

It’s during this trip that Teymu is killed in mysterious circumstances. Yuci’s brother Siring ends up going to prison for the crime, but unlike him had been more of the son his father wanted. Yuci had been clever and studious, but Siring is more of a traditional mountain man who lives for the hunt and has a very unreconstructed sense of masculinity. But he also loved and understood his brother, knowing this life wasn’t for him and trying to protect him from their father who was in other ways a failure. Teymu drank and was violent, objecting to his wife’s attempts to stop him taking Yuci to the mountain by threatening her and using incredibly offensive language. Yuci’s reaction against this traditional society is also towards his father and everything he represented. But this traditional world is the only one a man like Siring can live in. He has no real qualifications or other skills and cannot survive outside of their community. On his release from prison, Yuci is keen for him to get a job and against his return to hunting, but it soon becomes clear that isn’t a way that Siring can live.

In that respect, they represent opposing polls. Yuci is the modern man of science, a doctor, while Siring is a man of the forests and mountains, Then again, Yuci is a devout Christian and his religion also seemingly a challenge to traditional indigenous practices though also alien to the mainstream society. The boys’ mother is living with dementia and those around them tell Siring that she has most likely been cursed by the ancestors who are angry with them for doing something “dishonest” which might be why she starts insisting Yuci go to the police and that they made a bad decision that should be put right. Yuci, for his part, does not appear to feel guilt for the role he may have played but is anxious that the life he’s built for himself in which is accorded a man by his career success, marriage, and fathering a son, may now crumble if Siring will not fall into line.

Tensions come to a head when Yuci decides to sell their ancestral hunting grounds which are earmarked for a development that would destroy the mountain altogether. Siring obviously objects, this world is the only one he can live in, but can do little about it. He resists his brother’s modernity and becomes estranged from him, but they are both in their way exiles and neither of them can fully live in this society. The natural affection they hold for each other as brothers is not enough to bridge this divide and merely leaves each of them lonely and alone, mired in futility and unable to move forward in any meaningful way. The ebb and flow of their lives is reflected in the way they are alternately called by their indigenous names and Mandarin equivalents, each of them living in two worlds but never really at home in either while fever divided from themselves.

Hunter Brothers screens in Chicago 29th March as part of the 19th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Indera (Woo Ming Jin, 2024)

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“Let’s leave this place,” a father tearfully tells his daughter, “we’ll find a better home,” but it seems the girl has found her home already and no longer wishes to leave in Woo Ming Jin’s eerie folk horror, Indera. In many ways about coming to terms with loss and grief, the film also explores tensions within the contemporary society through allusions to the 1985 Memali Incident in which political tensions in the country culminated in the siege of a village resulting the deaths of 14 villagers and four policemen.

The film begins however nine years earlier with Joe driving his pregnant wife Anisa down a country road only for the engine to overheat. Joe gets out to find some water leaving his wife alone, but his stabbing of a beetle for his collection on the way back seems to provoke some strange event. On returning to the car he finds Anisa gone, and flashing forward to the present day we can see that he is now a single father to Sofia who has been mute since birth but is able to hear.

Ironically, present day action opens with her refusing to open a door though she will later be told not to listen when a mysterious force calls her name only to ignore the warning. This time she avoids answering because she suspects it’s debt collectors. Lost in his grief, Joe appears to be living in financial difficulty and is far behind with his rent. They’ve run out of food, which is why Sofia has eaten only sweets, which she seems to be rationing, for breakfast. Joe tells her that they have to protect their castle like in the fairytale Sofia is fond of reading, but in fact the pair are soon kicked out with otherwise sympathetic landlord Haji giving them a tip off about another job as a live-in handyman for a Javanese shamaness living way out in the country. On their arrival however, it’s clear that there is something very odd going on that neither of them really understand.

Nevertheless, the old woman’s home is a kind of liminal space that comes to represent Joe’s unresolved grief. The old woman, who asks to be addressed as “Mother,” asks him if he’s heard about what’s going on in Memali, and he admits he has but that it’s none of his business. Mother agrees that there’s no need to become involved in the affairs of others, but also ominously points to her birds and asks if a blind bird knows that it is caged. The same could be asked of Joe as his fate and that of the King in Sofia’s fairytale become intertwined while she progresses towards a destiny that is out of his control. Encountering a spirit that seems to be that of his late wife, Joe is forced to face his paternal anxiety and the fact that on some level he may have been responsible for what happened to Anisa while also resentful towards Sofia as a child he may not have wanted whom he also blames for her loss.

Perhaps Mother knows all this already, telling Joe that everyone has their sickness and she’s worked out what his is already though he cannot seem to see hers nor what the ominous hole she seems to be worshipping may represent. She claims that the children she has with her in the former orphanage that is her home were all “unwanted,” as Sofia may also have been and Anisa too, but has a dark purpose for them that Joe is ill equipped to understand. The hole comes to represent the bottomless pit of his grief and regret, but the spirits are also echoes of the forces of authoritarianism haunting Memali in which the children are told not to look back or answer if something calls their name and on no account ever to venture near the hole.

Still, Sofia can’t help being curious and the hole may come to represent something else to her while Joe struggles to understand his relationship with his daughter, seeing her perhaps as a manifestation of his own transgression and ultimately an embodiment of evil that it is his duty to destroy. Eerie in its palpable sense of dread, Woo Ming Jin’s oblique folk horror is pregnant with political allegory and locates its most chilling moment in Sofia’s insistence that “this is our home” in the suggestion that in the end there is no “better home” to go to but only this inescapable hell. 

Indera screens in Chicago 28th March as part of the 19th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer

I Am Kirishima (桐島です, Banmei Takahashi, 2025)

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In early 2024, an elderly man made a shocking confession. He told members of the medical staff at the hospital where he was being treated that his name was actually “Satoshi Kirishima” and that he was a fugitive from justice wanted for the terrorist bombing of Mitsubishi Industries in 1974 that resulted in the deaths of eight people. Banmei Takahashi’s I Am Kirishima (桐島です, Kirishima desu) attempts to chart the course of his lifetime on the run but may prove controversial in the depths of its sympathy for a man who was party to this kind violence and to a degree found it justified even if he could not justify that his organisation threatened the lives of ordinary people rather than simply the infrastructure of companies they believed to be fuelling corporate imperialism.

Takashi has visited this era before with 2001’s Rain of Light which like Wakamatsu’s United Red Army readdressed the Asama-Sanso Incident and the failure of the student movement in early 1970s of which both directors had been a part. In February 1972, five members of the URA fleeing a purge inside the group holed up in a mountain lodge taking the innkeeper’s wife hostage. The event was one of the first news events in Japan to be broadcast live and its aftermath exposed the cult-like depths of violence and abuse to which the URA had descended forever the souring the nation as a whole on the idea of left-wing revolution. Meanwhile, the fragmentary groups that remained shifted further towards the extremes such completing bombing campaigns to disrupt the new capitalistic prosperity of the economic miracle. Kirishima and his cell believe these large conglomerates, such as Mitsubishi, to be enacting a new kind of Japanese imperialism through exploitative labour practices often targeting migrant workers in much the same way they made use of the forced labour of Korean and Chinese people trafficked to Japan during the colonial period.

To this extent, Kirishima justifies acts of terrorism but thinks they should avoid ordinary people getting caught up in the blast. The film is keen to cast him as “a man behind the times,” an foolish idealist who is exiled from the modern society because of his outdated beliefs in equality and fairness. As such, it lends an elegiac quality to the tragedy of his life in which his 50 years on the run weren’t all that much better than prison given that he had to live under an assumed identity, forever watching his back and unable to put down roots. A tentative romance with a singer-songwriter is hinted at, but Kirishima forgoes his romantic desires out of a feeling that it would be irresponsible to marry without being able to reveal his true self. 

But the film equally seems to drawn a parallel with contemporary Japan in Kirishima finds himself working alongside a middle school drop out with openly xenophobic views who makes frequent racist remarks such as implicating a co-worker when he’s taken to task for being late by insisting that it must be the other guy’s fault because he’s Korean and Koreans always lie. He also says that the migrant workers whom he claims are working illegally should be grateful to be exploited in Japan and can always go home if they don’t like it. It’s all a little too much for Kirishima who sacrificed his life for an ideal this boy repudiates while Japan has become a nation ruled by capitalism and exploitation with the labour revolution he dreamed of now a distant memory. Watching a Shinzo Abe press conference in which he discusses revising the constitution, Kirishima throws a beer can at the TV in frustration. His old comrade dies in prison leaving only a book of poetry behind, while another is released after serving his time though he obviously can’t make contact with him without risking his identity being exposed and getting picked up after all these years. 

Indeed, the film romanticises this image of Kirishima as a man from a bygone age in which another Japan was possible but did not and now presumably cannot come to pass. In doing so, it gives tacit approval to some of the actions of the extremist groups of the 1970s while simultaneously declaring the end of an era as a “case closed” card is placed over the cheerfully smiling face of a young Kirishima which had graced wanted posters all over the country for the last 50 years. His life itself becomes a failed revolution, but also kind of victory in which he managed to “beat” the police by remaining a fugitive all that time even if in the end he seems to regret the life he was prevented from living along with the isolation and loneliness of which he may now at last be free.

I Am Kirishima screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)