The Uniform (夜校女生, Chuang Ching-Shen, 2024)

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The problem for Ai (Buffy Chen Yan-fei) is that a minor difference in her uniform causes her to be treated differently. Set in the late ‘90s, Chuang Ching-Shen’s The Uniform (夜校女生, yèxiào nǚshēng) uses the school to examine the stratified nature of the contemporary Taiwanese society and the elitism that governs it. Having failed the main exam, Ai has won a place at a prestigious girls academy but been relegated to the “night school”. To maximise its efficiency, the school operates on a shift system with day pupils attending classes until 4.30pm and the night students taking over until 9. Though there isn’t supposed to be any difference between the two, the night students are treated as a kind of overflow intake and looked down on by the day pupils while some complain that they’re unfairly using up resources which should be theirs by right. 

Despite the differences between them, Ai strikes up an unexpected friendship with a day student with whom she shares a desk, Min (Chloe Xiang Jie-ru). Shy and somewhat timid, Ai is taken by Min’s free spiritedness and often skips out on her classes to do fun things with her like going to a club to see Mayday before they were famous. Min, obviously, never misses out on her education and though she later reveals her own sense of insecurity in not feeling that she fits in at the school nor really deserves to be there, does not really understand Ai’s situation nor her own feelings of frustration and futility. Ai, meanwhile, is attracted by the upper-middle class atmosphere of the day pupils and increasingly embarrassed by her own more humble home life.

Ai’s father died in an accident and her mother runs a cram school out of their home. Ai’s mother (Chi Chin) is always trying to save money and picking up mismatched furniture for free, much to Ai’s annoyance, while Ai also does a series of part-time jobs including working at a ping pong club at the weekend though her mother doesn’t really want her doing sports because they’re unladylike and not all that useful for landing a place at a top university. The reason she sent her to the academy was to give her a leg up into what she sees as a conventionally successful life by getting a degree and finding a man with a professional job to marry. Ai’s resentment is partly provoked by this sense of being railroaded towards a future she might not want while at the same time facing tremendous pressure and afraid that in the end she won’t be able to measure up to her mother’s expectations. 

It’s at the ping pong club that she first meets Luke (Chiu Yi-tai), a handsome student from the elite boys’ school, and begins to strike up a relationship with him before Min tells her she likes him too. This ordinary teenage love triangle is coloured be class conflict in which Ai doubts she has the right to go after Luke because he is from a wealthy family, lying to him to cover up the fact that she and Min skip school by swapping their shirts which are embroidered in different colours for day and night students by claiming to be a pupil in the elite advanced class while hiding from him that she’s actually a night pupil. After beginning to suspect that Luke might actually like Ai, Min too begins to look down on her as if she thought that Ai were forgetting her place and has no right to date him because, unlike her, she is not his social equal. 

As for Luke himself, he’s actually rather bland and in part because his own life seems so easy because of his family’s wealth though he too later lets slip that he feels embarrassed by his parent’s apparently secret divorce and has only just begun to let go of the idea of them getting back together. For much of the film, it seems like he’s merely in the way of the relationship between the two girls which more successfully overcomes the barrier of class. After vicariously enjoying living Min’s lifestyle, Ai eventually comes to realisation that she and Luke are “not the same” and come from different worlds. He doesn’t really care about that, and seems to have become aware of his privilege abandoning a plan to get into university by competing in the maths olympiad and take the exam instead in the interests of “equality,” which is a well-meaning gesture but not really the bold act of egalitarianism he thinks it is even if also emphases his commitment to Ai in his willingness to break down class barriers that might otherwise work to his advantage.

As a means of denying her reality, Ai escapes through writing letters to Nicole Kidman with the help of a young man who speaks English and works in her aunt’s video store but is eventually jolted into adulthood by a more literal earthquake that reminds her how precious each of her relationships is and fragile the world around her. Through her various friendships, Ai comes to understand that almost everyone she knows also suffers with feelings of inferiority or a lack of confidence, weighed down by the pressure to achieve social success which might not be what they want anyway, but that they can overcome them together through understanding and mutual support that crosses class boundaries. Charmingly nostalgic, the film has a sense of hope for the future that it is indeed possible to achieve success on your own terms while prioritising your friendships and taking care of those around you.

The Uniform screens in Chicago 12th April as part of the 19th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Teki Cometh (敵, Daihachi Yoshida, 2024)

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“So, reality or literature, which is more important?” an unexpected guest asks a retired professor in Daihachi Yoshida’s Teki Cometh (敵, Teki). Adapted from the novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui, the film is not exactly about encroaching dementia but rather the gradual embrace of fantasy as the hero finds himself inhabiting the shifting realities of age in which his carefully curated persona of the refined professor begins to crack under the weight of its impending end.

Then again, objective “reality” is clearly a strain for Gisuke Watanabe (Kyozo Nagatsuka). It’s probably not a coincidence that Gisuke shares his surname with the hero of Kurosawa’s Ikiru as he too begins to ponder the meaning of his life along with the apparently meaninglessness of his twilight years. He reveals to his friend that he’s well aware his pension won’t cover his expenses for the rest of his projected lifespan and that he’s already calculated what he calls “X-Day” which will be the day the money (and implicitly his life) will simply run out. This day is continually postponed as Gisuke acquires extra money through giving lectures on French literature or writing articles for magazines, but the early part of the film at least is all about money and its relative values. Gisuke says that he does not really contemplate the price of the newspaper because the newspaper is something he wants so he simply buys it while taking out half the amount he’d usually charge for a lecture from an ATM machine. His friend advises him to drop his fees and get more work, but Gisuke explains that his 100,000 yen boundary is carefully maintained as a kind of bulwark against a sense of obsolescence as in he thinks they’ll keep haggling him down until he’s grateful just to get anything at all.

But obsolescence is clearly something he already feels given that interest in his chosen field has already declined and perhaps there no longer is much of an audience for his views on Racine and the development of the French language. Like the professor at the centre of Kurosawa’s Madadayo, Gisuke is surrounded by former students most of whom do not work in fields related to their studies but continue to hold him up as great scholar and influential figure in their lives. Yet as the film goes on and realities begin to blur, we might begin to wonder if any of these visitors are actually real or merely spectres leaking out from Gisuke’s fracturing memory to express his own anxieties about past and present. Former student Yasuko (Kumi Takiuchi) appears to be flirting with him, but on the other perhaps she’s merely reflecting the buried desires for which he continues to feel guilt and shame. He recalls times in which they attended the theatre together and then went for meals and drinks as if they were quasi-paternal or at least platonic, but Yasuko asks him if it wasn’t sexual harassment while at the same time directly stating that the desire is mutual (and there’s 15 minutes left before her train leaves). 

From this point on, Gisuke begins having strange dreams perhaps inspired by weird messages he’s receiving about an “enemy” that’s “coming from the north”. The “north” in a Japanese context would most likely be Russia and the messages reflecting a fear of invasion but also perhaps implying that in Gisuke’s case, the enemy lies within and it’s his own brain that is attacking itself. The illicit desires that he hints at to another former student while discussing his brief foray into and eventual boredom with voyeurism begin to come to the fore in his surreal dreams including one where he is subjected to a colonoscopy that is heavily influenced by BDSM imagery. His surprise visitor asks him if he remembers the war and Gisuke says that he’s told he experienced it in the womb, implying that he carries a degree of trauma from a time before he was even born. The ghost of the grandfather he never met haunts his well-appointed Japanese-style home that speaks of his traditionalism, while Gisuke himself tenderly takes out his late wife’s old coat and deeply breathes in her scent before hanging the coat up in his office so that it too floats like a ghost.

Yoshida structures the film through a series of vignettes ordered by season, yet there’s nothing necessarily to say that the seasons are consecutive or occur within the same year. Time is becoming abstract to Gisuke, even as he’s pursued by his invisible “enemy” that attacks his respectable facade and the very image of himself as he too embraces fantasy as a means of liberation from an otherwise monotonous if also serene life of awaiting the inevitable. The monochrome photography and static composition add to the air of deadpan humour in Gisuke’s increasingly surreal world. Teki cometh for us all, but in the end teki is us and we are teki. Our own fears, regrets, and insecurities will indeed return to torment us and show us who we are. Likely as not will not like what we see.

Teki Cometh screens in Chicago 11th April as part of the 19th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Ne Zha 2 (哪吒之魔童闹海, Jiaozi, 2025)

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By the end of 2019’s smash hit animation Ne Zha, the titular hero (Lü Yanting) and his opposite number Ao Bing (Han Mo) had figured out that they were two halves of the same whole and were much better off fighting alongside instead of against each other, but even after getting their physical forms reconstituted with the help of a little lotus flour, they discover that the evil Shen Gongbao (Yang Wei) isn’t done yet. The first film may have been in its way subversive in the hero’s bold assertion that he will defy his fate and define his own identity, but Ne Zha 2 (哪吒之魔童闹海, Nézhā zhī Mó tóng nào hǎi) takes things a step further as Ne Zha comes to discover that not even the Heavens are free of corruption or prejudice.

Indeed, it’s this idea of prejudice which lies at the heart of the film for even if Ne Zha had won the hearts of the townspeople by saving Chentang Pass in the first film, he realises that there are some among the immortals who wish to erase all demon kind. The conclusion he eventually comes to is that demon and immortal are arbitrary terms used to control those who are different. He’s sick of hiding his demon nature and thinks it’s time he reveal himself to the world while fighting the injustice that’s taken over the Heavens in the Master’s absence. 

Meanwhile, his desire to break free of oppressive authoritarianism is symbolised in his breaking Wuliang’s (Wang Deshun) cauldron and freeing those inside who were otherwise to be turned into pills of immortality and fuel the heavenly economy. While he and Ao Bing resolve that the real enemies are those who bully the weak and bring evil to the world, the villains insist that siding with the strong is the only way. Ne Zha and Ao Bing’s response to this is to insist that if there is no place for them, they will create it for themselves and if they are not accepted they will change people’s minds. As they later say, they are young and have nothing to fear echoing a spirit of resistance among contemporary youth confronting an oppressive and authoritarian society.

Then again, a key feature of Ne Zha’s goodness is his love for his parents and desire to be a “good son” by traditional standards. It’s clear that even Ao Bing’s father the Dragon King of the East, Ao Guang (Li Nan / Yu Chen), acted only in the best interests of his son and has otherwise been framed by ambitious forces around him who decided they were better off entering a more active partnership with a corrupt authority rather than appease them by accepting their oppression. Even so, both sets of parents eventually tell their sons that they should now follow their own paths and do what they think is right. The world is no longer as was is when they were young, and they are not well equipped to understand these problems nor to solve them. If the Heavens are to be purified once again, it will be up to Ne Zha and Ao Bing to do it.

Aside from this more series and potentially subversive message about asserting one’s identity and challenging authoritarianism, the film has a lot of fun with its anachronistic worldview as drunken Taiyi Zhenren (Zhang Jiaming) struggles to remember the password to open the lotus before remembering he can use a fingerprint instead, while another villain later runs into a problem trying to open a door that works by face recognition because he’s sporting so many bruises and swellings after getting a beating from Ne Zha. He then realises he’ll have to wait another 10 years to try again because he cursed the technician for laughing at his ridiculously battered face. The film’s action sequences are also tremendously well animated and exciting as Ne Zha’s parents try to fight off the demon hordes which mainly consist of the “Monsters of the Abyss,” various sea creatures such as octopuses and sharks that were previously held in check by the Loongs but have now been set loose because of a dragon queen’s ambition. In any case, improving on the original the sequel maintains its quirky humour and charming worldview while doubling down on its surprising messages of acceptance and diversity as Ne Zha and Ao Bing prepare to forge their own paths and fight for justice to clear the Heavens of their corruption.

Ne Zha is in UK cinemas now courtesy of CineAsia.

UK trailer (English subtitles)

Homestay (ฮมสเตย์, Parkpoom Wongpoom, 2018)

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“You got a prize!” the hero of Parkpoom Wongpoom’s spiritually-tinged existential drama Homestay (ฮมสเตย์) is told, though he won’t really realise the kind of gift he’s been given or that in reality he had it all along until the end of the picture. Based on a Japanese novel, the film is part mystery, part psychodrama as the hero is charged with finding out who caused the young man whose body he’s taken over to take his own life and why. If he manages to figure out the answer within the 100-day time limit, he can extend this “homestay” indefinitely and win the chance at a new life. If he fails, he’ll die and won’t even be reborn.

Taken another way, this Min (Teeradon Supapunpinyo) trying to understand why he did what he did having apparently lost his memories after his traumatic experience of being clinically dead for an entire day. In any case, he’s helped and hindered by a collection of “guardians” who appear to taunt him and issue reminders about his time running out. Though no one suspects Min is not Min, they all remark that seems like a different person from his new ability to eat durian fruit to his outward cheerfulness. As for why he hasn’t been attending school and even missed a set of important exams, they’ve been told he had “the flu” and seem to believe it. But even as this fresh soul seems to ease into Min’s life and originally finds it not bad enough to want to die to escape, he soon begins to discover fracture points in Min’s reality.

The biggest of those would be friction with unsympathetic brother Menn (Natthasit Kotimanuswanich) along with animosity towards his father who apparently gave up a steady job as a teacher to join a multi-level marketing scam peddling vitamins. The other Min was apparently embarrassed by him, as is new Min when he turns up at school and tries to recruit his classmates while giving him a bag of samples for one of the teacher’s which turns out to be a trick to get him to see a child psychologist. Old Min also resented him for the way he treated his mother who works at a factory in another city while he reduces the family to financial ruin even going so far as to sell her wedding ring. 

But as much as he wants to know about Old Min, New Min is also determined to start again. He gets a fancy haircut and starts dressing in a snappier fashion in part in hope of getting together with Pi (Cherprang Areekul), his crush before and after, while less than kind to old friend Li (Saruda Kiatwarawut) who also seems to have a crush on him. The more he finds out about how Old Min lived, the more his world darkens. He begins to understand why he might have wanted to end his own life and feels as if it’s everyone else’s fault or the essential corruption of the world. But what he gradually comes to understand is that it was a choice he made himself. Having turned too far inward, old Min lost the ability to see that others around him were also suffering. He couldn’t see how unhappy his mother was in her marriage, nor his father’s humiliation, or how hard and lonely it must also have been for his brother who dreamed of studying abroad solely to escape. “Stop thinking that no one loves you,” Menn eventually tells him in admonishment of his tendency to take it all on himself.

To that extent, life itself is the prize and that was something Min already had though his vision had been clouded by his intense pain and sense of futility. Guided by his post-death experiences, Min awakens to the suffering all around him and in an odd way feels both less alone and a greater responsibility not to cure it but simply to be present and more compassionate towards others. Parkpoom Wongpoom reflects his dilemma in the ever present tonal incongruity. New Min’s school life is shot like a typical rom-com complete with jaunty score only for him to suddenly find himself confronted by one of his Guardians and reminded his time is running out, as it is for us all. Strangely uplifting even in its touches of existential horror, the film has a genuine empathy for its embattled hero in his moments of selfishness and self-obsession as he begins to find his way back towards a less bleak existence through discovering the power of mutual compassion and forgiveness.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Chigasaki Story (3泊4日、5時の鐘, Takuya Misawa, 2014)

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Desire and desperation bubble to the surface at a small hotel making preparations for a wedding in Takuya Misawa’s Chigasaki Story (3泊4日、5時の鐘, 3-paku 4-ka, 5-ji no kane). Though the English-language title may recall Ozu who wrote several of his most highly regarded films while staying at the inn, Misawa pays him only cheerful homage with a series of pillow shots apparently added only as an afterthought while his true inspiration seems to lie in the breezy Rohmerism that has come to dominate a certain strain of Japanese indie cinema over the last decade or so. 

Accordingly the tale is set in the small seaside town of Chigasaki and most particularly at the 115-year-old Chigasaki Inn to which former airline ground crew Risa has recently returned following her marriage to a filmmaker named George whom she met in the course of her work. The couple have already held the ceremony and enjoyed a honeymoon in Hawaii but are now holding a celebratory party for their friends and family in Japan. Meanwhile the inn is also host to a contingent of university students from the same department in which local boy and part-time worker Tomoharu is studying archeology. 

Somewhat meek and mild-mannered, Tomoharu takes his job incredibly seriously and is generally found running around on errands for guests or else cleaning up but his presence becomes a disruptive factor caught between the two groups of visitors instantly captivated as he is on the arrival of Karin, a young and pretty former co-worker of Risa’s who has arrived with the comparatively uptight Miki who has missed nothing in this exchange and is already frustrated by her friend’s wanton behaviour. Miki undeniably has a point when she criticises Karin for putting Tomoharu in an awkward position by inappropriately flirting with him at his job especially as he seems shy and easily embarrassed, but in turn is perhaps also jealous on a personal level intensely irritated when she blows off a plan to visit an aquarium to hang out on the beach with Tomoharu at stupid o’clock in the morning. 

The row only highlights the differences between the mismatched friends though the tables are turned when Miki realises that the students are from her old university and in fact led by her former professor with whom she begins to grow close much to Karin’s consternation. Reverting to her student persona, “workaholic” Miki becomes carefree and uninhibited at once doling out pieces of sisterly advice to the younger women and imposing her company on the students by joining in on their field trip. Her behaviour may in a sense reflect her dissatisfaction with her life as she contends with overbearing bosses having taken over Risa’s role while complaining about Karin’s fecklessness at work and otherwise seemingly jealous of their ill-defined friendship. Risa meanwhile may also be harbouring a degree of doubt in her decision to quit her job, get married, and return to run the family inn especially as her new husband is off working until the day of the party and like everyone else there isn’t really anyone with whom she can share those feelings honestly leading to an unwise if possibility long-term act of rebellion against a potentially stultifying existence that places her at further odds with the already on edge Miki. 

Caught between the women Tomoharu also has a more age-appropriate suitor in an earnest young woman from his class, Ayako, who likes him because of his tendency to care for others while getting on quietly with his work. Attempts to communicate culminate in a lengthy game of ping pong as the angry little balls of truth are batted back and fore across the table until a third player enters the scene and disrupts the flow. Tomoharu had said that his work of piecing ancient bowls back together was different from a jigsaw puzzle because you don’t know what shape it’s supposed to be until it’s finished, which might in a way explain these intersecting relationships as they run through and across each other but ultimately ending up in the place that they’re supposed to be culminating in a wedding party which is either the calm after the storm, an intense act of hypocrisy, or something between the two. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

Harbin (하얼빈, Woo Min-ho, 2024)

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Ahn Jung-geun is one of the most well-known figures of modern Korean history and his story has indeed been dramatised several times before, but what’s unusual about Woo Min-ho’s espionage thriller Harbin (하얼빈) is the way it tries to sublimate Jung-geun the individual in favour of making him an emblem of the common man. As such, the film is more egalitarian than might be assumed and ultimately praises the integrity and resilience of the Korean people who save their country and their culture in a more spiritual than literal sense.

Indeed, Ito Hirobumi (played by Japanese actor Lily Franky), former prime minister of Japan and the first Resident General of Korea after it became a Japanese protectorate, remarks that he has always been sceptical of the annexation because though they have been ruled by “foolish kings and corrupt officials” the Korean people will continue to be a thorn in his side. Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s attempt to invade Korea was defeated by a volunteer army and a charismatic admiral, Yi Sun-sin. Then again, a Japanese soldier remarks that it will be difficult to find such a hero in the Korea of today, a pointed comment that implies Ahn Jung-geun is just such a hero through the film skirts around the fact his assassination of Ito did not in the end prevent Korea’s annexation which was completed in 1910, while the Independence Movement did not succeed in liberating in Korea which regained its independence when the Japanese Empire collapsed at the end of the war and even then was subjected to a period of occupation by US forces before its sovereignty was restored. 

What Jung-geun becomes is a kind of torch bearer for another Korea serving as a moral compass and preventing those around him from becoming just as bad as the Japanese whose cruelty they resist. As the film opens, Jung-geun’s comrades are awaiting his return after going missing following a disastrous encounter with Japanese forces. Despite having won the initial battle while heavily outnumbered, Jung-geun’s decision to release the Japanese commander, Mori (Park Hoon), as a prisoner of war results in a counterstrike in which his forces are all but wiped out. His comrades had been against the decision and now doubt his abilities and judgement along with a new suspicion that should he return he may have been captured and turned by the Japanese to spy on them. But Jung-geun’s decision signals his righteousness and refusal to give in to the cruelties of war. He releases Mori because it is the right thing to do. Executing prisoners of war is immoral by commonly held standards of war, and he pities Mori as a husband and father. He perhaps also hopes that it is a gesture of good will that shows him the Independence fighters are just and reasonable. 

But just and reasonable the Japanese are not, and so Mori betrays his trust. Deluded by the death cult of militarism, Mori is humiliated by Jung-geun’s magnanimity which is after all a show of power and that he has overturned the dynamics by granting Mori his life. Mori asks to die as as loyal soldier of Japan by committing ritual suicide but is denied in this both by Jung-geun who tells him he must live and by Chang-sup (Lee Dong-wook) who wants to execute him. This deep sense of humiliation and shame in remaining alive after defeat spurs Mori into a personal vendetta against Jung-geun to reclaim his honour and that of Japan which leaves him almost indifferent to Ito’s fate though nominally in charge of preventing his assassination at the hands of Jung-geun. Jung-geun is also trying to redeem himself for the loss of his men’s lives and has in a sense declared himself already dead in that he lives only for the souls of dead men and has embarked on what is in effect a suicide mission to kill “the old wolf” as a means of atonement and the eventual liberation of his country. 

But then his comrades are already weary and some are already beginning to ask themselves if it’s really worth it. How many more men will have to die before they win their freedom? Sang-hyun (Lee Dong-wook) laments that if the Japanese write their history, his name will be forgotten and he will have left no mark upon the world. They are grieving what they’ve lost in more personal terms aside from their lost nation. In order to get the dynamite to blow up Ito as a backup plan, the gang have to make contact with a former comrade who has since abandoned the cause to become a bandit (Jung Woo-sung). Having lost his eye and his brother, who was also the husband of another committed revolutionary Ms. Gong (Jeon Yeo-been), he decided it wasn’t worth it anymore and chose a different kind of freedom. “If we all die like dogs, no one will remember us,” Sang-hyun later laments. But Jung-geun, who will be remembered, is less concerned with his legacy insisting that even those who may have betrayed them should be given a second chance for they will eventually see the light. Like Ito, he believes in the Korean people and that they will come together to carry the light into the darkness. 

What he does is light the way, and as the closing scenes imply pass the torch to others who will each keep it alight until the dawn of liberation. Nevertheless, Jung-geun does have an unfortunate habit of getting those around him killed while the horror of the battle scenes, the grimness of decapitated and limbless bodies along with the constant sense of loss and defeat seem to imply that perhaps it isn’t worth fighting in this way lending further justification to Jung-geun’s conviction that taking out the leadership is the only way to turn the tide of this war of attrition. In sacrificing his own life, he becomes a kind of martyr, wearing traditional Korean white clothing as he goes to his death knowing that others will come after him. Rich with period detail and tense in its sense of intrigue, the film ultimately argues for a more compassionate sense of revolution governed by righteousness in opposition to the rather cynical justifications made by Ito for the cruelties of Japanese imperialism.

Harbin is released in the US on on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray™ and DVD courtesy of Well Go USA.

International trailer (English subtitles)

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)