BFI London Film Festival Confirms Complete Programme for 2024

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The BFI London Film Festival returns to cinemas across the city 9th to 20th October. East Asian highlights this year include the latest from Jia Zhangke, Hong Sang-soo, and Tsai Ming-Liang along with the long-awaited return of Mipo O eight years on from Being Good, and Hong Kong LGBTQ+ drama All Shall Be Well.

China

  • Caught by the Tides – Jia Zhangke looks back at the last few decades of Chinese history through the prism of his own work.
  • Youth (Homecoming) – the final instalment in Wang Bing’s documentary series focusing on textile factories in Zhili.

Hong Kong

  • All Shall Be Well – an older woman finds herself in a precarious position when her partner dies suddenly without a will in Ray Yeung’s poignant drama. Review.
  • The Way We Talk – drama from Adam Wong Sau-Ping focussing on three young deaf people navigating contemporary Hong Kong society.

Indonesia

  • Crocodile Tears – intense drama in which the close bond between mother and son operators of a crocodile zoo is disrupted when the son meets a girl.

Japan

  • Black Box Diaries – documentary focussing on Shiori Ito’s quest for justice after being sexually assaulted by a powerful political journalist.
  • The Cats of Gokogu Shrine – latest documentary from Kazuhiro Soda focusing on a shrine in Ushimado that is home to a large number of cats.
  • The Colours Within – latest from Naoko Yamada in which a high school student sees others as colours.
  • Happyend – teenage rebels pursue a passion for electronic music in a near future society.
  • Living in Two Worlds – drama from Mipo O following a child of deaf parents.
  • Manji – new restoration of Yasuzo Masumura’s adaptation of the Tanizaki novel Quicksand.

Singapore

  • Small Hours of the Night – experimental drama drawing on the historic case of a “subversive” tombstone.
  • Stranger Eyes – a couple begin receiving strange videos of themselves after their child is kidnapped in the latest from Yeo Siew Hua (A Land Imagined)

South Korea

  • A Traveler’s Needs – latest from Hong Sang-soo starring Isabelle Huppert as an eccentric French teacher.

Taiwan

  • Abiding Nowhere – 10th instalment in the Walker series in which Lee Kang-sheng relives Xuanzang’s pilgrimage.

Vietnam

  • Don’t Cry, Butterfly – drama in which a woman resorts to witchcraft on learning her husband is having an affair.
  • Viet and Nam – etherial queer romance focussing on two young miners.

The BFI London Film Festival takes place at various venues across the city from 9th to 20th October 2024. Full details for all the films as well as screening times and ticketing information are available via the official website. You can also keep up to date with all the latest news via the festival’s Facebook page, X (formerly Twitter) account,  Instagram, and YouTube channels.

Stuntman (武替道, Herbert Leung & Albert Leung, 2024)

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No matter how good a film is, it’s never worth risking someone’s life. Intellectually, “heartless” action choreographer Sam knows that, but once the camera’s rolling all he seems to see is the take and it’s win at all costs. An homage to the glory days of Hong Kong cinema when no one had ever heard the words health and safety, Herbert Leung & Albert Leung’s Stuntman (武替道) is in its way a paean for those who risked their lives for our entertainment but also for a fading Hong Kong which has the film seems to argue lost it’s bite and become rather defeatist if not docile. 

Those around Sam, played by real life action choreographer Tung Wai, seem to be convinced that “Hong Kong cinema is dead,” largely because, for very good reason, it’s no longer possible to make the kind of films they did back then with crazy, death-defying stunts and visceral action sequences. The opening scenes of the film, set in the mid-1990s, find Sam filming what appears to be a Police Story-style chase through a shopping mall that is supposed to end with a stuntman stand-in jumping from a bridge onto a moving car to catch the bad guy. The stuntman, Wai, is young and experienced so he doesn’t make the jump at which point Sam yells at him and asks his assistant, Kam, to to do it instead. But everything that could go wrong does and Kam is seriously injured because of Sam’s singleminded stubbornness in refusing to film the sequence with a cut which would obviously make it safer even if he argues less exciting. 

Sam evidently does feel a degree of guilt for this, especially as it later has other consequences for his personal life, and retreats from the film industry to run a bone setting clinic with posters for classic Hong Kong films on the wall. It’s a reverence for this bygone era that enables him to bond with Long (Terrance Lau Chun-him), a younger and more modern kind of stuntman who isn’t necessarily afraid of taking risks but understands the importance of on-set safety. Long can’t catch a break with demand for stuntmen falling rapidly precisely because of the concurrent decline of action cinema while his brother keeps pressuring him to give up his dreams and join his logistics company instead. It’s Kit’s delivery firm that becomes an accidental villain representing a Hong Kong that’s lost it’s nerve and is determined to play it safe while Sam’s recklessness perhaps represents the opposite, a dangerous desire to risk it all without considering the consequences for those around him.

But as he’s fond of saying, there’s always a way. It doesn’t have to be either or. The film seems to say, Hong Kong cinema isn’t dead, but now it belongs to those like Long to lead in new directions, modernising rather than fading away and taking the best of the past with it while leaving the more problematic elements behind. Originally swayed by Sam’s charisma, Long is somewhat horrified when he’s confronted with the consequences of his old school approach to filmmaking which includes going guerrilla style in the street without paying for permits with the consequence not only of police with real guns getting involved but innocent civilians trying to go about their day getting caught up in their fake robbery, becoming frightened and even injured in the ensuing panic. 

Meanwhile, he teaches old dog Sam a few new tricks in that being deliberately unpleasant is no longer the way to exert authority on set while ordering takeaway for everyone is a nice gesture that reminds them you’re all part of a team. As much as Long is a kind of surrogate son for Sam, he’s also reminded that there are some relationships that can’t ever really be fully repaired even if it’s not too late to try to remake them. His pain on seeing his soon-to-be-married daughter’s (Cecilia Choi Sze-wan) step-father taking pride of place at the wedding is palpable, but in the end he realises he’ll never really change because he’s a relic of an older Hong Kong unable to move forward into this new era. “No matter how strong the wind, keep the flame alive,” he tells Long talking both about the Spirit of Hong Kong and its cinema while in a flashback sequence reminding his young daughter that the fireworks will forever glow in her heart. Lent a degree of pathos by Tung Wai’s impassioned performance, the film is a true homage to classic Hong Kong action while also insisting that there’s always a way and it’s never too late to reclaim something of what’s been lost.

Stuntman opens in UK cinemas 11th October courtesy of CineAsia

UK trailer (English subtitles)

Gifts from the Kitchen (キッチンから花束を, Hisashi Kikuchi, 2024)

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One of the few places offering Chinese-style home cooking, Fumin had become a home from for many during the 50 years its founder worked her kitchen herself. Fumi Sai has now retired, though welcoming one set of guests a day to her home, but there are many who continue to visit the restaurant under the management of her nephew Kazuyoshi and reminisce over their long years of enjoying not just the cooking but a familial relationship with Fumi herself. 

Collaboration with the clientele is cited by many as a reason Fumi’s restaurant became so popular. After a few years of working as a hairdresser, she decided to open a cafe after a friend remarked it was a shame more people didn’t have the opportunity to taste her cooking. Her first location was a tiny bar-style place with a handful of seats at the counter which of course meant that she was able to build up close relationships through talking directly to her customers. Others describe her cooking style as spontaneous, that she would come up with new dishes just by adding something or other to see how it would taste but she also took hints from customers as well sometimes adding their successful requests to the main menu and allowing them to feel as if they were fully involved in the restaurant. It’s this sense of connection brokered by an exchange of tastes that seems to be integral to the degree of warm feeling many have for the place and for Fumi herself.

Director Kikuchi frequently switches between testimonials from regular customers some going back decades and many remarking on the incongruous sight of Fumi herself, a small woman battling a giant wok in the centre of the kitchen. All these years later and despite the expanded capacity there are always queues to get in while customers claim that there are dishes they might not otherwise care for or actively dislike but that Fumi alone can make appetising. She attributes her skill to her upbringing in a Taiwanese family where her sisters joke their father had a gambling problem and didn’t work but did do most of the family cooking. She picks up new ideas on trips to the island nation and on one occasion visits a Taiwanese woman to experience more home cooking who also points out that cooking is imbued with emotion. Fumi’s own enthusiasm and love of the craft finds its way in, delivering care and attention to her customers who just as often may be looking for somewhere to belong as much as a good meal.

The film otherwise does not pry too much into Fumi’s personal life, never stepping too far outside the restaurant save for exploring her relationship with nephew Kazuyoshi and three younger sisters as well as her soon to be 100-year-old mother who was responsible for the restaurant’s constant supply of Taiwanese sausages. Food is a family affair, the now elderly women recalling the dishes they remember from their childhood and putting on a large spread for New Year. Yet the restaurant is also a kind of home for Fumi, one she admits she was reluctant to leave. She’d never considered a successor, but later came round to the idea of entrusting it to her nephew and head chef. 

As other guests remark, food a means of building body and soul. The nourishing wholesomeness of Fumi’s cooking seems to have a positive effect on those who visit the restaurant which was often home to various celebrities from the illustrators and designers of the surrounding area to the top stars of the day such as Tora-san himself, not to mention sustaining her mother to the ripe old age of almost a century. Guests describe her as a radiant character, like someone in an animation, an improbably small woman filled with a warmth that draws others to her offering comfort and connection through food but also an artist whose medium was cooking creating a series of unique dishes that couldn’t be found anywhere else yet quickly offering to teach anyone who wanted to know how to make them. A tribute to a bygone era, Kikuchi captures a sense of nostalgia for simple pleasures but equally of pleasure in the moment for as Fumi says to eat is to live.

Gifts from the Kitchen screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Till the Day I Can Laugh about My Blues (ブルーを笑えるその日まで, Karin Takeda, 2023)

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A lonely, isolated young woman finds refuge in a new friendship only to worry it won’t survive summer’s end in Karin Takeda’s gentle adolescent drama, Till the Day I can Laugh About My Blues (ブルーを笑えるその日まで, Blue Wo Waraeru Sono Hi Made). Opening with a title card reading “to you and me back in the days,” the film has an autobiographical sensibility and boundless empathy for the kids who feel they don’t fit in, that no one notices them, and their lives will never we worth living.

You can tell that Ayako (Miyu Watanabe) is depressed by her opening dialogue, “I don’t like this weather,” said to perfectly blue skies. She says everything in her life is blue, and is so shy that she literally can’t speak. Her class are reading Night on the Galactic Railroad, and though she spends the entire time reading the line that she’s figured out is hers is put off when another student heckles her because of her quiet voice and just stands there gripping the paper while her teacher prompts her with the previous line. He then just moves on to the next student, but more out exasperation than empathy, doing nothing much else to help her. 

It’s not clear if Ayako was always this way or if something led to her becoming withdrawn but the other kids evidently regard her as weird while her former best friend Yuri (Rin Marumoto) has joined up with two popular girls who appear to be bullying her. Ayoko’s parents aren’t much help either, unfairly comparing her to her sister who wants to be a doctor all of which only makes Ayako feel even more useless and inadequate. It’s only when a mysterious old lady gifts her a kaleidoscope that Ayako’s outlook starts to improve and she befriends a another young girl she meets on the rooftop of the school who has a kaleidoscope too.

In discussing the passage of Night on the Galactic Railroad, which is about a friendship between two boys which ends abruptly in tragedy, a teacher asks what the milky way is made of before explaining that if you look at it through a microscope it’s full of tiny stars. Ayako too begins to see tiny stars while looking through the kaleidoscope, refracting her world and beginning to see the beauty of the light between the trees even if she’s cautioned that the patterns are pretty because you never see the same one twice. In any case, Ayako finds a kindred spirit in Aina (Sumi Kokona) but also suspects she may actually be the ghost of a girl who took her own life by jumping off the roof of the school, so their friendship can’t last past the start of the new term.

Like Giovanni in the story, Ayako has to figure out how to go on alone not just without Aina but in her complicated relationship with Yuri too who tells her she doesn’t like and hanging out with mean girls Natsumi and Nao but still joins in when they make fun of her. Some gentle words from a librarian who knows what’s she going through all too well remind her of the point of the story, that the boys still go on travelling together as Campanella still exists in Giovanni’s heart. But before all that she still ponders blowing it all to hell, saving the school goldfish but otherwise letting the place burn while wondering if she’ll ever be able to grow up. 

Shot with an etherial whimsicality, Takeda shoots Ayako’s world in shades of loneliness in which her literal inability to speak is almost a reaction to the fact no one listens. Pondering the fate of a goldfish that died because of another student’s neglect she laments that no one’s kind to you until die, a comment that later seems ironic but echoes her sense of alienation. She thinks her friendship with Aina is like a dream, but like she says not necessarily one they need to wake up from because whichever way you look at it their friendship is “real”, saving each of them and giving them strength to survive until the day they can laugh about their blues smiling at a memory rather than feeling sad and alone while looking for the tiny stars hidden in the fabric of the universe.

Till the Day I Can Laugh about My Blues screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Tatsumi (辰巳, Hiroshi Shoji, 2023)

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The titular Tatsumi (辰巳) laments that there used to be a line. They used to be better than this. But his incredibly duplicitous boss just laughs at him and says they can’t live on honour and humanity anymore. In any case, there didn’t seem to be much honour or humanity in Tatsumi’s decidedly unglamorous life of petty gangsterdom even before everything went to hell but despite his cynicism and seeming indifference he is the last holdout for some kind of gangster nobility.

Though he has a cover job as a fisherman, Tatsumi’s (Yuya Endo) main hustle is as a cleanup agent getting rid of inconvenient bodies for various gangs. He finds himself mixed up in local drama when a pair of crazed, sadistic gangsters become aware someone’s been skimming their meth supply. They torture and kill a suspect who leads them to another, garage owner Yamaoka (Ryuhei Watabe) who is married to an old flame of Tatsumi’s, Kyoko (Nanami Kameda), while her younger sister, Aoi (Kokoro Morita), is also in trouble with another rival ganger, Goto (Takenori Goto), on the suspicion of having pinched some of his meth supply. Tatsumi ends up agreeing to mediate for Aoi, gets much more than he bargained for when the crazed Ryuji (Tomoyuki Kuramoto) murders Yamaoka and Kyoko and Aoi becomes a secondary target after catching him in the act.

Ryuji doesn’t seem to care about tying up loose ends, but just wants Aoi dead for reasons of total vengeance. It’s his uncontrolled violence that has disrupted the equilibrium of the local gangster society though the proposed solution is simply more violence in allowing him to kill the people he wanted to kill in the hope he’ll then calm down and stop which seems unlikely. Like many similarly themed yakuza dramas, Ryuji’s violence appears to have a sexually charged quality and there is also a hint of a potential relationship between Ryuji and Tatsumi’s boss whom he calls “Skipper.” 

Ryuji also has a slightly less crazy sibling in an echo of the relationship Tatsumi once had with his own brother who died of a drugs overdose having become involved in petty crime. The implication is that Tatsumi gave up on his brother and was relieved when he died but also that he harbours a degree of guilt for preventing him ending up the way he did and not trying harder to save him. That may partly be why he decides to help Aoi, seeing echoes of the brother he couldn’t save while she is also friendless alone having unwisely made enemies of almost everyone because of her outrageous behaviour and reckless disregard for authority. Aoi has an unpleasant habit of spitting at people who upset her while otherwise adopting a devil-may-care attitude with those minded to kill her. If she did skim from Goto’s stash, it cost the life of another falsely accused underling. 

Despite himself, Tatsumi becomes increasingly determined to help Aoi even though or perhaps because he assumes neither of them is likely to survive this crisis. Desperately trying to stay one step ahead he plays one side against the other and tries to find the best angle for escape while knowing there probably isn’t one. Shoji sets the tale across a series of moribund jetties and shacks laying bare the busy emptiness of this world with only the sea beyond. “Emotion will make you fail,” Tatsumi tells Aoi while describing dead bodies as just things and trying to keep his cool when needled by Ryuji or another dangerous and violent gangster. 

Death and life by extension appear to be meaningless and of little value. Tatsumi does perhaps close a circle, or maybe more than one, as the last principled gangster who thought there ought to be a line between what they do and greedy thuggery only to find there never was one and his determination not to cross it is the kind of sentimentality that can get a man killed. Making good use of slow dissolves, Shoji revels in a retro aesthetic in a tale of moral compromise and redemption as Tatsumi determines to safeguard Aoi not only from her own reckless impulses but the meaningless emptiness of the gangster life but the toxic legacy of violence and fallacy of vengeance as a salve for the wounds of the soul.

Tatsumi screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Promised Land (プロミスト・ランド, Masashi Iijima, 2024)

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An avalanche approaches a small town in Japan, a harbinger of change in which the centuries old practice of bear hunting has finally been put to rest by government directive. The buried question at the centre of Masashi Iijima’s Promised Land (プロミスト・ランド) is who exactly that land has been promised to and what the rights and responsibilities surrounding it are in the midst of a changing society in which there may longer be a place for the hunter.

Some might argue that there shouldn’t be, and it has to be said this is one ancient tradition that’s increasingly hard to defend. Set in 1983, the film finds the “Matagi”, or traditional hunter, already all but extinct even before the head of the local association (which appears to only have five members) calls them all together and tells them the hunt is off for that year due to a preservation order by local government. One of the younger members, Rei (Kanichiro), immediately objects sensing that if the hunt is canceled this year it will never be held again. He says he thinks it’s unfair as it’s industry encroaching on the forests that has led to a decrease in the bear population rather than overhunting while another of the men takes constant pops at rich men from the city who come in and treat hunting like a hobby failing to abide by any of their rules such as not shooting mothers with their cubs.

The hunters seem to think of themselves as keeping nature in check, “culling” the bears to keep the mountain safe though there’s no sign that they are any real danger to humans and anyway their numbers are now depleted. There doesn’t seem to be any other way to defend this practice outside of tradition, but it’s evidently something very important to Rei, important enough to constitute a large part of his identity. Thus he alone is determined to defy the order and kill a bear anyway even though he knows there’s a good chance of going to prison for illegal hunting and being branded a poacher. 

Rei ropes in Nobu (Rairu Sugita), a childhood friend who apparently owes a debt to him having received a blood transfusion from him when he was four and now deeply resents having that fact wielded against him all these years later. Unlike Rei, Nobu is a much more modern young man whose father makes fun of him for wearing fashionable clothes and perfume. He hates working on his father’s farm and longs to escape the moribund small town and its brutal traditions such as the bear hunt he’s been roped into since birth just because like many things his ancestors always did it. While hunting for a bear, the pair have an opportunity to talk, Rei admitting that hunting and the gun represent for him the essence of the man he once was while reeling from the breakdown of his marriage to a woman he failed to support when she failed to fit in to village life. He recounts the story of a banker he did some work for who says that he envies the freedom of his life as a landscape gardener while he sits in a prison all day counting other people’s money but when he asks him why he does’t give it a try the man just backtracks and starts making excuses.

Rei seems to be wondering what true freedom means and perhaps feels he doesn’t really have it, asserting dominance over the mountain by killing the bear to regain control over his life. He calls the bears a gift from the mountain god as if they existed only for him to kill, though it’s difficult to see why his tradition or need for raw masculinity is worth more than a living creature’s life. When he eventually kills a bear, the film hovers on the ritualistic quality of the act as Nobu and Rei bend over the body, wafting it with leaves, and skinning its pelt before drinking its blood. This is an act of cruelty more of necessity. They have no need of the pelt or meat, do not make a major part of their income from selling them, and the bear did not threaten them. This is in short a tradition that can safely be left by the wayside, but by the film’s conclusion the two men seem to have switched positions Rei now pondering leaving the village while Nobu seemingly has a renewed desire to stay and preserve these old traditions. Perhaps it is his promised land after all, or else was intended to exist for the bears as creatures of nature free from the destructive forces of humanity.

Promised Land screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Afterschool Anglers Club (放課後アングラーライフ, Hideo Jojo, 2023)

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What does it take to learn to trust people again after a traumatic experience? Mezashi (Toomi), the heroine of Hideo Jojo’s adaptation of the light novel by Kaeru Inoue Afterschool Anglers Club (放課後アングラーライフ, Hokago Angler Life), was bullied by people she once called friends and has since retreated within herself, becoming a massive people pleaser while terrified of annoying people or upsetting them in some unknown way.

Fortunately for her, her father is transferred to the country and so they all have to move with Mezashi taking the opportunity to trash her phone and with it her traumatic memories of being bullied both online and off. As one might expect, people in the country are inherently more friendly and it’s difficult for Mezashi to tell if her new classmates are just excited about her arrival or already making fun of her. On moving to the country she’d written a new manifesto swearing that she wouldn’t attempt to make friends and would carry on people pleasing, instantly agreeing to any favours asked of her, smiling sweetly, and always giving non-committal answers to avoid causing offence. 

She runs into trouble when she’s invited to the secret club run by two of the girls, realising that her goals are incompatible so she can’t avoid both making friends and refusing a request. Though the girls more or less adopt her and make her a part of their unofficial fishing club, Mezashi can’t seem to work out how to be a part of a friendship group and is often confused about what she should say and do. She’s constantly worried that her new friends are annoyed with her for not being very good at their shared hobby of fishing and subsequently ruining their fun. But this sense of insecurity is a vicious cycle in that she continues to present a facade of blandness which prevents her from generating a friendly intimacy with any of the girls. Ring leader Shiira (Marupi), who originally bonds with her because their names both have a fishy connection, says as much in mentioning that it bothers her Mezashi never laughs from her heart or gets angry with them. Her defensive mechanisms actively sabotage her new relationships while she struggles to overcome the trauma of her betrayal at the hands of former friends turned bullies.

But then there are also tensions within this otherwise close and supportive friendship group in that Akari (Tamao Hirai) has an obvious crush on Shiira and is resentful of Mezashi joining their gang though not to the extent of bullying or rejection. Shiira, meanwhile, seems to be constantly flirting with Mezashi who does not appear to be interested in her in that way, even at one point pretending to have been stung by a venomous fish so that Mezashi will suck the toxins out of her leg. Nevertheless, Nagi (Futaba Mori), another member who discovers Mezashi’s secret, tries to encourage her to be less of a people pleaser and just be honest if she doesn’t like something or doesn’t want to do it such as threading the bait onto the hook or gutting the fish. In effect, she gives her permission to be herself and the confidence to believe that your friends won’t abruptly stop liking you just because you asked for help but they can’t bond with someone who won’t let them know when they’re not okay. 

All in all, Jojo paints this corner of a small coastal town as a wholesome place of kindness and comfort where people are on the whole friendly and welcoming as opposed to the city where they can be cruel and judgemental. The very thing that allows Mezashi to find her new friends was her unusual name for which she’d previously been bullied. Learning to trust again is certainly no easy thing, but just as Nagi had said humans are made to rely on each other and friendship is about both give and take, offering support and agreeing to accept it. With fishing, you just have to cast the line and see if anything bites and friendship is much the same, Mezashi gaining the strength to reel it in thanks to the gentle support of her new friends and tranquil rhythms of small town life free of the petty prejudice and casual cruelties of the city.

Afterschool Anglers Club screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Worlds Apart (違国日記, Natsuki Seta, 2024)

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Adapted from the manga by Tomoko Yamashita, Natsuki Seta’s quietly empathetic drama Worlds Apart (違国日記, Ikoku Nikki) eventually reveals the private lonelinesses and hidden sorrows that everyone has which isolate them from others. The film’s Japanese title plays on a homonym for the word for “foreign country” instead using the character for “different” which in itself suggests each person is an entire world often unable to make contact or be fully understood by those who cannot after all ever travel there. 

Perhaps that’s something most people feel every once in a while but becomes acutely obvious to 15-year-old Asa (Ikoi Hayase) when her parents are killed in a surreal traffic accident in the film’s opening scenes. She sits struck dumb and vacant at the funeral, having no idea what’s going to happen to her now while other relatives crassly describe her as having been cast adrift like an “unwanted barrel”. It’s this insensitive phrase that seems to drive her aunt Makio (Yui Aragaki), a novelist, into an impromptu decision to offer to take her in though they had only met briefly long in the past and had no real relationship with each other. Makio had been estranged from her sister for many years and never makes any attempt to disguise her utter loathing and resentment towards her for having been so cruel and judgemental when they were children. 

It’s refreshing, in a way, that the film doesn’t encourage her to change her feelings after her sister’s death. She doesn’t discover another side to her through bonding with Asa nor are her feelings invalidated much as Asa originally tries to make her like her mother as a means of reclaiming her. In fact, what Makio does is normalise whatever way Asa is feeling telling her at the hospital when forced to identify her parents bodies that it’s alright not to know how she feels. The two sisters were it seems very different, though the grandmother eventually offers an explanation that Makio’s sister had once been seriously ill and therefore unable to live a “normal life” which might explain why she was so enraged by Makio’s decision to chart her own course and wilfully spurn conventionality. 

These are also hints to the hidden world contained with the diaries Asa’s mother left behind to opened when she graduated high school. Makio wrestles with whether or not to pass the notebooks on and when, unsure if Asa is ready to receive the knowledge that might be inside them. Though she settles in to Makio’s home quite comfortably, Asa keeps her grief and occasional bouts of resentment to herself. Seta often frames her as standing alone in vast empty spaces or total darkness, isolated and lonely, now displaced by her liminal status no longer anybody’s daughter but not quite independent. 

Yet this isolation also blinds her to that of others. She doesn’t quite pick up on it when she clumsily attempts to talk about boys with her best friend Emily (Rina Komiyama) who directly tells her she has no interest in them and deflects the question when she asks if she likes girls instead. Emily is also lonely and isolated in feeling anxious to reveal her sexuality to Asa who in any case reacts clumsily when she eventually does. A similar thing happens with a girl in their class who studied hard to apply for a special programme only to be told the organisers are looking for a male student because it requires “physical strength,” while Asa also seems to develop a fascination with a bass player in the school music club who declines an offer to collaborate because she doesn’t want to get her hopes up only to be disappointed in the end. 

Makio hadn’t previously wanted to share her life, separating from an old boyfriend she still seems attached to out of an apparent fear of intimacy but nevertheless opens herself to Asa in deciding to respect her as an adult giving her agency over her own choices along with good, empathetic advice while simultaneously being clear that she doesn’t know if she can come to love her given the depth of hatred and resentment she bore towards her sister. But what the pair of them realise is that good or bad they can each share their memories rather than being forced into a frosty silence even if as Makio points out Asa will never understand her hurt and she will never understand Asa’s loneliness. Gentle and wholesome, the film ironically lays bare how opening up to others can in fact expand the world inside you instead filling the space rather than leaving you isolated inside it and returning light to a world that might otherwise have seemed dark and lonely.

Worlds Apart screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Vital (ヴィタール, Shinya Tsukamoto, 2004)

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“There is the vast realm of the unconscious,” one of the professors explains to vacant medical student Hiroshi a soon-to-be physician attempting to heal himself from a trauma he doesn’t fully understand. Perhaps as the title implies, Vital (ヴィタール) sees Tsukamoto branch out from his vistas of urban alienation to find a new paradise in nature albeit one that it exists largely in the mind and that the hero can never fully return to because this place of life is also one of death which exists inside a kind of eternity.

This explains to some extent Hiroshi’s (Tadanobu Asano) temporal confusion. Having lost his memory following a car accident in which he later learns his girlfriend Ryoko (Nami Tsukamoto) was killed, he shifts between “reality” and what first seems to be flashbacks of his unremembered past but are actually taking place in a kind of alternate, perhaps idealised reality in the “vast realm of the unconscious” as Hiroshi attempts to reconstruct his image of Ryoko along with that of himself. Another of his professors more philosophically asks were lies the seat of the soul in the human body and is this something that Hiroshi maybe unconsciously looking for during his anatomy classes in which he is coincidentally assigned Ryoko’s body to work on only realising when he sees her tattoo in one of his visions. 

In some ways this grim task of dissection is a bid for greater intimacy, to take Ryoko apart and then put her back together as the students diligently do at the end their studies reassembling the bodies and placing them in coffins in keeping with culturally specific death rituals. The faces of the cadavers are covered with a bag until the students are instructed to remove them, but they are always reminded to treat the dead with dignity and that their role here is one of understanding as they attempt to work out not only how these people died but also how they may have lived. Hiroshi causes conflict with some of his fellow students on just this point, seeming rather creepy in his vacant intensity over the body while also wanting to take ownership over that of Ryoko rather than work as part of the group complaining that the others are too clumsy and it’s affecting his ability to learn. 

Ryoko’s father comes to say that though he once blamed Hiroshi, his daughter had been in a way dead for a long time before she died, the light apparently going out of her eyes when she was still in high school. Only in Hiroshi’s unconscious does she say that she didn’t want to die despite an apparent obsession with death in Hiroshi’s other resurfacing memories/visions of her as symbolised in her repeated requests for him to strange her during in sex. Another of the professors had said that the suppressed desires of the unconscious could create conflict and this alternate reality is also in some senses Hiroshi’s own latent desire for death, to be with Ryoko in this new paradise that is founded on an idyllic beach rich with nature and sunshine where they are free to be together liberated from the oppressions of civilisation. 

Indeed, it’s been raining all through the film as if in expression of Hiroshi’s gloomy mental state but we later learn that Ryoko’s most treasured memory was simply standing in the rain with him and breathing in its scent. Verdant nature is aligned with the vitality that is often absent from the soulless concrete of a city in which everyone seems to exist in tiny, separate worlds which only border on but never join each other. Ikumi (Kiki), a strange female student who develops a fascination with Hiroshi, has an illicit conversation with a professor she’s apparently been sleeping with each of them speaking into mobile phones while standing steps apart. Tsukamoto often isolates the protagonists, placing them in corners or blurring the periphery as if they alone existed in this moment. In Hiroshi’s idealised alternate reality, these barriers disappear as he and Ryoko share an entire world in love and freedom. 

The irony is that he resurrects himself through the process of dissecting Ryoko’s dead body. His Da Vinci-like sketches begin to shift as do the ink-like shadows on the wall amid the reflection of the rain as Hiroshi stares vacantly trying to reassemble his past. Through accepting Ryoko’s death, he rediscovers life and is in a sense reborn insisting he will continue medicine even though his professor and parents advise him not to given what he’s just been through though his parents had also said that before the accident they didn’t really think he had it in him to become a doctor. Their disapproval may explain some of the pressures he was experiencing as perhaps was Ryoko that may have urged them to long for death. In any case, what the film presents is the archaeology of grief, a prolonged period of introspection and loneliness and a seeking of intimacy no longer really possible but discovered only in the vast realms of the unconscious.

Vital is released on UK blu-ray 30th September courtesy of Third Window Films.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Desert of Namibia (ナミビアの砂漠, Yoko Yamanaka, 2024)

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There’s a moment in Yoko Yamanaka’s quietly enraged character study Desert of Namibia (ナミビアの砂漠, Namibia no Sabaku) in which the heroine, Kana (Yuumi Kawai), finds herself stood at a crossroads. It might be tempting to read it as a symbol of her indecision, knowing she has to nix one of her two boyfriends but vacillating over which, but it’s more that she exists permanently between two states and as she later says may not really understand herself or the world around her.

We can see this in the opening sequence in which Kana fails to respond to her friend’s emotional distress when she tells her that a mutual acquaintance has taken their own life. She seems bored, indifferent, not really listening until suggesting that the pair hit a host club together in an attempt to cheer her friend up. But Kana soon leaves her friend behind, making excuses about an early start to meet a man we first think is her boyfriend but is actually the bit on the side. She cuddles up to him in a taxi and tells him that she wants to go visit his parents (right now, in the middle of the night) to see photo albums of his childhood but later returns home to the man she lives with who patiently holds her hair as she throws up into the toilet while asking politely how her friend is.

Perhaps the problem is that Honda (Kanichiro) is too nice, too respectable for the flighty Kana. He’s an estate agent with a cosy and well kept flat where he likes to make hamburgers from scratch and is otherwise very considerate of Kana’s needs little suspecting she’s seeing another man on the side. In Hayashi (Daichi Kaneko) she may see someone a little more exciting but is equally terrified when he asks her to break up with Honda and date him exclusively. She cheerfully bickers with Honda about his upcoming business trip, urging him to stand up to his boss if he tries to make him go to a sex club. Honda says he’ll just refuse, but of course doesn’t making a heartfelt confession on his return. The problem isn’t really that he slept with a sex worker or was unfaithful, but that he couldn’t stand up to his boss and allowed himself to be controlled by Japan’s overarching, hierarchal social structure, did something he thought was wrong and did not want to do to keep his boss happy and maintain his career prospects. 

Kana doesn’t actually care about the sex, but it gives her an excuse to jump ship to Hayashi taking Honda’s fridge, and its frozen hamburgers, with her as she disappears completely from his life. But it’s at this point that her mental state begins to decline. She meets Hayashi’s well to do, upper middle class family who are actually very nice to her (even if randomly bringing up the fact her mother’s Chinese hints at latent prejudice) but feels out of place and inadequate especially on discovering that Hayashi had a previous girlfriend by the same name who may have aborted his child. Abortion seems to be a red button issue for Kana, possibly bringing up some long buried trauma of her own. She seems disconnected from her family and wanders restlessly around suburban areas while later hinting at resentment towards her father who may have in some way abused her. Her rage seems to escalate, culminating in physical abuse of Hayashi who resists but doesn’t really fight back. She craves his attention, but he wants to be left alone. 

In her spare time, she watches videos of animals in the Namibian desert, suggesting that what she might actually crave is an unstimulating environment or a more peaceful solitude but at the same time yearns for male attention. Only 21, she seems somehow older but is also unbalanced by a new colleague at work who is like her spiky and rebellious and two years younger. An unsympathetic online psychiatrist tells her she may be bipolar or have borderline personality or something else completely but is dismissive assuming she can’t afford his fees so tells her her problems are too big to solve. She sees a more sympathetic female psychiatrist in person who helps her begin to understand something of herself, but exposes her loneliness when she tries to invite her out to dinner as if she were a friend. Abstracted from herself, she disassociates and has an out of body vision of watching herself and Hayashi wrestling as if she were watching animals in the Namibian desert, staring blankly as she often does unable to comprehend herself or the world around her. 

Filming in a boxy 4:3, Yamanaka lends an air of constant tension and constraint to Kana’s world. The psychiatrist tells her that she imprisons herself in believing there’s a way she ought to feel but doesn’t when everyone is free within their minds redefining her Namibian dreamscape as the only place she is really free to be herself yet can only watch rather than directly access. “I don’t understand” she tells Hayashi when he asks her what “ting bu dong” means in a conversation with her family where her mother is apparently still somehow absent as if illuminating the entirety of her life and with it an ironic new understanding of herself. 

Desert of Namibia screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Trailer