ROLL (Daichi Murase, 2020)

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“Change the world!” a stranger yells, perhaps ironically, from a passing pickup truck as the hero of Daichi Murase’s debut feature Roll, pelting hell for leather to rescue a trapped a soul. An unconventional coming-of-age tale, Murase’s experimental drama follows a young man from innocence to experience as he becomes determined to discover the secrets of an earlier age while discovering also that genies don’t go back inside their bottles and in fact may prefer to expire in the light of the sun rather than survive an eternity of vicarious darkness. 

The hero, Yoshihiro is a strange and aloof young man as we gather from the first scenes which find him alone in his room while his dormmates engage in drunken socialising. Yoshihiro’s chief obsession seems to be with disassembling abandoned gadgets into their component parts, sleeping surrounded by neatly grouped collections of various nuts and bolts. His understanding boss at his part-time job as a removal man often allows him to keep bits of interesting junk that would otherwise be disposed of and it’s during one particular house clearance that he makes an unexpected discovery on being charged with investigating a possible haunting of an external annexe. Removing the chains which block the door and wandering inside, he’s confronted by a series of television screens featuring calming scenes of water and then by a frightening apparition. Looking a little like Oogie Boogie, a young woman in a white hazmat suit and black goggles eventually reveals herself and gifts him a strange device of a kind he has never seen before. 

The device, which turns out to be an 8mm camera as his bespectacled roommate reveals to him, sparks a sense of curiosity about the world he did not appear to have in his constant need for disassembly. Yet while his new friend takes him to a worryingly abusive filmset (the director slaps and then randomly licks the face of his leading man) for advice later suggesting they use it to make movies along the themes of “Mushroom, Explosion Festival!”, or “Psychopath Signal”, Yoshihiro is equally preoccupied with mysterious young woman who appears to be being kept captive by her father afraid to let her experience the light of the sun. As ignorant youngsters, the pair are unsure whether Nazuna’s father is earnest in his overprotectiveness and the outside world really is toxic to her, or merely selfish and possessive wishing to keep her locked up forever a secret to himself alone. 

Nazuna, as the young woman is called, of course turns out to be a metaphor for film something which is destroyed on exposure to the light. Strangely, Yoshihiro’s friend mistakenly tells him that the camera needs to be opened once a day to let the air in, apparently little knowing it will erase whatever is inside. A kind of fairytale of enlightenment, Yoshihiro becomes a kind of promethean rescuer literally busting Nazuna out of her jail in an attempt to free her just as he tries to steal the arcane knowledge of analogue technology from a generation apparently unwilling to teach him. She perhaps knows how dangerous her journey may be, but chooses to go anyway insisting that she doesn’t want to grow up which is perhaps to be overburdened with sophistication. Yet does her desire to see the ocean for real negate the idea of truth in celluloid, implying that some things can only be fully experienced by venturing out into the world for oneself, or make the case for it in Yoshihiro’s clumsy filming of her moment of rebellious defiance towards the curse of obsolescence? 

Making full use of the technology himself, Murase shifts from digital into 8mm and then into 16 for the pair’s final adventure as they transition through a tunnel into another world, emerging on the other side perhaps somehow changed. Yet even so, burdened by his ignorance, Yoshihiro fails to bring the message home with him discovering nothing but a blank screen in place of an essential truth. Less about films and medium than perpetual motion, Murase’s enigmatic fable rolls its way towards an inventible conclusion as its hero edges his way towards maturity having discovered an appetite for connection in place of deconstruction. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Space Sweepers (승리호, Jo Sung-hee, 2021)

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If we’re content to ruin one world, why do we assume our salvation lies on another? Billed as Korea’s first blockbuster science-fiction extravaganza, Space Sweepers (승리호, Seungriho) finds a ragtag gang of junkers quite literally cleaning up humanity’s mess while ironically marginalised into outer space by internecine capitalist consumerism which in insult to injury offers to sell you a cure for the disease it has caused but only to those whom it deems worthy of its dubious promises. 

By 2092, the Earth has become all but uninhabitable. Led by 1952-year-old messianic scientist Sullivan, UTS Corporation has prepared a new artificial orbiting home but only the elite are invited while the remaining 95% linger on the poisoned ground below or else, like the crew of the Victory, wander in space attempting to make a living from clearing the debris left behind after countless sattelltes and space station launches. Yet as jaded space sweeper Tae-ho (Song Joong-ki) remarks, the more you work the more debt you earn. The Victory is a well equipped ship and you’d think that would mean greater earning potential but all it means is that it costs more to maintain while the initial outlay has landed them with unsustainable debt not to mention constant random fines and official interference. All of which is why when they find a little girl hidden in a storage compartment of an abandoned vessel and realise she’s the missing android that’s all over the news, they decide to play off the Black Foxes “terrorist” organisation who kidnapped her and UTC who want her back for all they can get. 

As might be expected for all his claims that “humanity is dirty” in its failure to protect the planet, Sullivan is no pure hearted saviour but an amoral elitist intent on terraforming Mars as some kind of authoritarian “utopia” populated only the “best” of humanity. He claims not to care about money, but cites the false equivalency that those with the deepest pockets must necessarily be those with the greatest capability while privately describing those left below as expendable and not really worth saving. Dressed like a cult leader, even at one point appearing as a giant hologram, Sullivan’s appearance owes a significant visual debt to Neon Genesis Evangelion’s Gendo Ikari, leaving little doubt as to his megalomaniacal intensions as he wilfully sells a solution to a problem he himself helped to cause while continuing to exploit the Earth and the people still on it to hasten its demise and his own enrichment. 

While the central message reinforces the idea that large corporations are not to be trusted while the capitalistic system they uphold is inherently destructive, it also perhaps undercuts that of the impending environmental crisis with which we are faced if we can’t mend our ways fast enough. Even so, it falls to the space sweepers to mount a unified global resistance against the wilful destruction of their homeland in protecting the android, Dorothy / Kot-nim (Park Ye-rin), who of course holds the key to saving the world. Despite having taken in her in with a view to ransoming her, the crew soon bond with the adorable little girl as unofficial daughter while Tae-ho alone remains reluctant in grief over child for whom he continually searches while internalising a sense of resentful failure in the knowledge that he lost her because of his own self-absorbed sense of hopelessness. 

Even so, there may be something a little uncomfortable in the final resolution in which the crew coalesces into a recognisable family unit each of them somehow “improved” as they accept their responsibility for Kot-nim whether in giving up drinking or erasing tattoos. Nevertheless, the film is refreshingly progressive in its depiction of a transgender character who gains the confidence to be their authentic self thanks to the unconditional solidarity among the crew members, though the sudden reversal of UTS from cult-like evil corporate entity to remorseful force for good seems rather optimistic as if the only problem was Sullivan and not the system that gave rise to him.  While the overall aesthetic may be somewhat televisual, Space Sweepers does feature some interesting production design and impressive CGI though its greatest strength lies in the jaded idealism of its space bandit protagonists as they band together to resist their marginalisation with mutual solidarity and compassion.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Tiger Stripes (Amanda Nell Eu, 2023)

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There’s a moment in Amanda Nell Eu’s Tiger Stripes in which a teacher writes a sentence in English on the board for the students to fill in the blanks. “The father ___ to work,” one reads. Another, “The mother ___ at home.” It’s within these blanks that the girls live their lives, contained by rigidly held patriarchal norms supported by a religious environment that turns resistance into heresy, something demonic and evil that must be rooted out so the afflicted individual can be returned to society without their parents being ostracised.

A bright and talented student, Zaffan (Zafreen Zairizal) is shown to flaunt these rules by wearing a bra and commandeering the toilets to record tiktok dance videos with the help of her friends Mariam (Piqa) and the more conservative Farah (Deena Ezral). Perhaps the most transgressive thing about them is that she’s removed her hijab and in fact much of her clothing, defiantly assuring herself with a cheekiness that seems almost naive. After getting her school uniform wet in a local pond, she cheerfully runs home hair exposed in only her smalls. Her father barely bats an eyelid, but her mother is incensed. Somewhat counter productively, she drags her outside and shouts at her in front of all the neighbours about bringing shame on their family. 

Time and again, it’s other women that cause Zaffan the most trouble. After her classmates discover that she’s got her period and is therefore a woman, they beat her up and call her names suggesting that she’s unclean and no longer wanting to associate with her. It doesn’t help that her new status is known to all because girls on their period cannot participate in some of the religious practices at the school which similarly reinforce the idea that menstruation is a pollutant and womanhood itself is toxic. It’s indeed womanhood which been activated in Zaffan along with a natural desire to resist her oppression and be who she is. She begins to undergo a transformation that even she barely understands, snapping and snarling those who challenge her while otherwise catching and eating wild animals which she tears apart with her teeth. 

The girls tell each other a story of a woman, Ina, who apparently went feral and escaped to live in the forest. They tell it as a cautionary tale, but Zaffan begins to see and identify with Ina who has found a kind of natural freedom outside of the oppressive patriarchal social codes of the contemporary society. Yet it’s precisely this freedom that must tempered ad women kept in their place. The school later calls in some kind of spiritualist, Dr. Rahim (Shaheizy Sam ), who pedals snake oil treatments and claims to be able to exorcise the young women who have similarly come down with shakes and shivers in the wake of Zaffan’s metamorphosis. Earlier on, Zaffan had seen a wild tiger filmed by a man who walked slowly behind it, menacing but unwilling to engage. Her friends tell her they probably mean to kill it, but there’s also an ineffectuality in this male timidity that is essentially afraid of an independent woman. Having transformed herself into a tigress, Zaffan too is followed by a crowd of men but all they do is stare at her back.

Meanwhile, in the background her teachers make ironic comics that the students won’t amount to anything while the Malay pupils seemingly trail behind their Chinese classmates. Zaffan becomes the embodiment of monstrous femininity, a dangerous and transgressive womanhood that rejects all of the constraints placed upon it. Though she does not understand what is happening to her and is hurt that her former friends, still on the other side of adolescence, now view her as something other and unpleasant, Zaffan longs for the freedom of the forest and to dance to her heart’s content no longer willing to submit herself to the strictures of the patriarchal society. Her rebellion earns its followers among girls of her age, themselves longing for freedom but too afraid to ask for it. Tinged with supernatural dread, the film nevertheless presents Zaffan’s progress as a gradual liberation found in the natural world, nature red in tooth and claw but alive and unconstrained as free as a tigress in a world without man.

Tiger Stripes is in UK cinemas now courtesy of Modern Films.

UK trailer (English subtitles)

Sound in the Mist (霧の音, Hiroshi Shimizu, 1956)

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In the opening scenes of Hiroshi Shimizu’s Sound in the Mist (霧の音, Kiri no Oto), a young woman tells another that “as women, we need to create our own happiness,” though as it turns out it’s something that neither of them are really able to do. A classic melodrama, the film once again hints at Shimizu’s mistrust of romance and the frustrating inability of men and women to communicate or embrace their love for one another even when the seeming barriers preventing it have been removed.

To that extent, it’s interesting that the chief disagreement between unhappily married botanist Kazuhiko (Ken Uehara) and his wife Katsuyo is over her feminist politics and desire to devote herself to women’s emancipation under the new post-war constitution. The main bone of contention is that she wants to sell a mountain owned by Kazuhiko’s family to fund her political career though as he later says this mountain is his life. In any case he lets her sell it, believing there’s no point putting up a fight. He puts up even less of one in his relationship with Tsuruko (Michiyo Kogure), his assistant who is hopelessly in love with him yet after his wife’s angry visit decides to absent herself feeling as if she’s in the way.

It was her friend Ayako, a Tokyo dancer, who told her that women need to make their own happiness but in the end she couldn’t do it either. She was similarly involved with a weak-willed married man who continued to vacillate over leaving his wife offering the justification that he didn’t want to mess things up for his children. Eventually the pair find escape through double suicide which only emphasises the futility of their romantic connection. Tsuruko similarly makes several comments about the idea of death and dying, stating that if she were to die she’d want to go to a particular spot in the mountain which seems like heaven to her.

Though Katsuyo describes it as a “filthy” place the cabin does indeed become a kind of haven, a bubble of apparently chaste love and longing inhabited only by Kazuhiko and Tsuruko as the voiceover says hiding out from post-war chaos. Tsuruko seems to be the kind of woman Kazuhiko regards as the ideal wife in that she cares for him and supports his work even if he tells Katsuyo he just needed someone to run errands and do the grocery shopping so Tsuruko is there as his maid. Both are at pains to emphasise that no physical relationship exists between them but are otherwise prevented from acting on the their love because of Kazuhiko’s marriage along the existence of his daughter, Yuko (Keiko Fujita), who may be adversely affected by her parents’ decision to divorce in an age when such things were less common.

Kazuhiko continues to return to the mountain cabin which has since become an inn at regular intervals to see the Harvest Moon, as does Tsuruko though she also carries a degree of shame that makes her fear re-encountering Kazuhiko having become a geisha apparently solely to ensure her proximity to the mountain. Once again filming with the gentle lateral motion familiar from his later films, Shimizu focuses on the landscape and suggests that these lovers are only free to love in the natural world unconstrained by the petty concerns of civilisation which prevent them from embracing their desires. The sound in the mist is perhaps that of Kazuhiko’s latent romanticism and the implication that to him it may be better to suffer for love than to accept it. The same may be true for Tsuruko who is equally powerless if filled with regret that in the end she gave up so easily rather than fight for the love of her life.

On the other hand, the cabin seems to have given rise to a love match between Kazuhiko’s daughter Yuko and her husband who vow to continue the tradition of coming to the inn on the occasion of the Harvest Moon which marks both their wedding anniversary and the time they met. Yuko’s melancholy expression on coming to an understanding of her father’s “special memories” suggests a gentle sympathy but also that this younger generation is freer to love though no less romantic.The poignant closing scenes in which Kazuhiko wanders into the mist are nevertheless filled with irresolution, regret, and a longing that express only a deep sadness for the misconnections and misunderstandings of a less open past.

Sound in the Mist screens at Japan Society New York on May 23/30 as part of Hiroshi Shimizu Part 2: The Postwar and Independent Years.

Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (九龍城寨．圍城, Soi Cheang, 2024)

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In Kowloon Walled City, you give help, you get help. Sometimes described as a colony within a colony, by the late 1980s the settlement was largely ungovernable and literal law unto itself save for the triads who maintained what little order there was. Yet in Soi Cheang’s Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (九龍城寨．圍城) it’s a place of comfort and security, a well functioning community that as its leader Cyclone (Louis Koo Tin-lok) points out may be unpalatable for “normal” people but provides a point of refuge for the exiled and hopeless.

It’s difficult not to read it and Cyclone himself as embodiments of Hong Kong that is slowly disappearing. Dying of lung cancer, Cyclone is aligned with the fate of the walled city as someone whose time is running out, tired and world weary but still hanging on. In the opening sequence set 20 or so years before, we see Cyclone stand up to an apparent dictatorship and institute what seems to be a more egalitarian form of government though one obviously defined by violence. Nevertheless, when refugee Lok (Raymond Lam Wui Man) lands up there originally suspicious of Cyclone having been duped by local gangster Mr Big (Sammo Hung Kam-bo), he discovers him to be a stand up guy looking after those in his community and generally keeping the peace. Nevertheless, Lok’s arrival is the fatalistic catalyst for the opening of old wounds amid the free for all of the mid-80s society in which the Walled City, sure to be bulldozed, has just become a lucrative property investment.

Mr Big and his crazed henchman King represent this new order, amoral capitalistic consumerists who care little for the conventional rules of gangsterdom. Their bid to seize the Walled City has its obvious overtones as they seek to replace the (generally) peaceful egalitarian rule of Cyclone with something that appears much more authoritarian and ruthless. Believing himself to be a stateless orphan, Lok tries to keep his head down saving everything he can to buy a fake Hong Kong ID card which is also in its way a quest for identity not to mention a homeland and a sense of belonging. He finds all of these things, along with a surrogate father figure, in the Walled City only to have the new home he’s discovered for himself ripped out from under him because of a twist of fate. When he teams up with a trio of other young men who all owe their lives to Cyclone and the Walled City to attempt to take it back, it’s also an attempt to reclaim an older, more autonomous Hong Kong that exists outside of any kind of colonial control as evidenced by his final statement that no matter what happens some things don’t change.

This sensibility extends to the casting of the film which includes a series of Hong Kong legends including a notable appearance from the legendary Sammo Hung not to mention Louis Koo alongside a generation of younger stars such as Tony Wu and Terrance Lau Chun-him. Adapted from the manhua City of Darkness by Andy Seto, the film opens with a flashback to the original war for control of the Walled City that hints at deeper, extended backstories otherwise unexplored though equally mythologised by those who impart them to them Lok, a prodigal son and eventual inheritor of the City’s legacy. Even so, the comic book elements sometime distract from Soi Cheang’s otherwise evocative if hyperreal recreation of the Walled City slum or the political subtext that can be inferred in the presence of supernatural abilities such as those which seem to grant King near invincibility.

In any case, Soi Cheang looks back equally towards the history of heroic bloodshed in particular in his tale of brotherhood and loyalty in which the secondary antagonist is literally imprisoned by his own futile desire for a pointless vengeance on the descendent of a man who had wronged him but was already long dead himself. As he’d said, the future of the Walled City is in the hands of the younger generation who choose to end the cycle by setting him free rather than imprison themselves along with him while defending their home as well as they can. With some incredibly well designed action sequences including one that make its way onto a double-decker bus, Soi Cheang’s beautifully staged action thriller as its name suggests has a rather elegiac quality but also the spirit of resistance in its gentle advocation for the importance of supportive communities.

Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In is in UK cinemas from 24th May courtesy of CineAsia.

UK trailer (Traditional Chinese & English subtitles)

During the Rains (つゆのあとさき, Shinpei Yamazaki, 2024)

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At several points during Shinpei Yamasaki’s indie drama During the Rains (つゆのあとさき, Tsuyu no Atosaki) we encounter someone whose life has been disrupted by the economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic. The danger is, of course, that the pandemic itself becomes the problem which is also a way of glossing over all the problems that existed before and will likely survive whatever kind of sickness they encounter. Chief among those problems and impacting the lives of the women at the film’s centre is problematic men and the generalised disregard for women.

It seems that Kotone was working in hostess bar that closed because of the pandemic while her no good boyfriend ran off with a necklace a customer had given her. Left with nowhere to go she’s noticed on the street by Kaede, a young woman who promises her a room in a love hotel but does so in order to recruit her for a threesome. Sometime later Kotone is working in a “cafe” where young women sit behind a glass window in numbered booths for male customers pick out and select though she also has a “daddy”, Kiyooka, who pays the lease on her flat and would be annoyed to discover she was still frequenting the cafe.

It’s the at the cafe that she meets Sakura, a naive young college student who was pushed into sex work when the place she was working before closed down because of the pandemic. Kotone at one point snaps back at her that she wouldn’t even be at the cafe if it weren’t for the pandemic as if suggesting she were in some way better than the other girls after she reacted with horror to Konone’s plan to find a “hardcore daddy” who’ll pay more for the right to break a few bones and cause other kinds of harm.

This might be ironic in a sense as Sakura is a Christian who carries around bible verses to calm herself down including the ones about turning the other cheek and blessing those who persecute you which don’t seem to be particularly good advice for the situations she finds herself in especially as the lesson she’s learned from them is that you should accept whatever abuse comes your way without complaining. Ironically that might be what Kotone has been doing in her almost total indifference to her circumstances. The Roomba in her apartment gets stuck in her hallway and shuffles in confusion between the walls after constantly butting its head unable to find a way out. Yet according to Kiyooka what separates Kotone and Sakura is that Sakura seems desperate in a way Kotone does not which is a quality he appreciates presumably because it gives him more control over her, something he knows he doesn’t have over Kotone who point black tells him she has no strong feelings about whether he dumps her or not after he discovers she’s still seeing other men and engaging in casual sex work.

The lollipops she’s always sucking on give Kotone a slightly childish edge as perhaps does her moodiness but she’s also cynical beyond her years and seemingly living the way she does almost as an act of self harm. She’s being relentlessly trolled by someone who accuses her of having a sexually transmitted disease while even the other girls at the cafe resent her, ironically calling her a slut and other misogyinistic insults. Later she’s even knocked down some stairs by a previous client who is resentful that she doesn’t really remember him while another of her regulars, Yata, paws at her insultingly as if feeling himself entitled to her body. Another customer whose wife and daughter left him after his business failed asks her why she does this, adding that he’s worried about his daughter which seems to be an incredibly ironic comment given the situation.

Even the girls at the cafe complain that they’re getting les work because of the influx of women showing up there after being pushed towards sex work out of desperation, but it’s almost as if the film would like to believe the pandemic was the problem rather than attitudes society has towards these women and indeed all women. Nevertheless, through her growing friendship with Sakura and an unexpected tragedy Kotone comes to realise that she can perhaps change her circumstances and does not necessarily have to continue turning the other cheek to a society that had largely turned its back on her.

Locust (蟲, KEFF, 2024)

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“Taiwan is doomed,” according to a middle-aged man taking the chance to emigrate in Keff’s debut feature Locust (蟲, chóng). A damning indictment of the island nation seemingly mired in economic disparity, political corruption, and generalised despair the film positions its mute hero as one who has been rendered silent but is caught between a life of subjugation and violent rebellion that may also in its way be a kind of conformity with the world around him.

Zhong-han (Liu Wei Chen) is not deaf but was left mute after a childhood injury and now works in a mom and pop noodle cafe which has seen better days. By nights, he supplements his income working as an enforcer for local gangster Boss Wang collecting debts on his behalf. But as his friend Kobe (Devin Pan) says, what’s the point of collecting money from people who don’t have any? Originally proclaiming himself a kind of Robin Hood, Kobe suggests they simply take it off people who do have the cash instead and particularly if they got it (in his view) unjustifiably such as through generational wealth or influencing. Zhong-han can sympathise with these goals, especially as it was a gang of influencers who made fun of his dancing at a local disco, but as time goes on it becomes clear Kobe is intent on a kind of class warfare that’s more about revenge against a classist society than sharing the wealth. 

You might think Boss Wang would have a problem with Kobe’s apparent freelancing, but he later rises through the ranks to become his right hand man in a pattern that gets repeated in which those who once opposed those in power acquiesce when they’re given the illusion of sharing it. Something similar happens to bumbling local political candidate Jia-bao who tries to stand up for Rong (Yu An Shun) when his noodle restaurant is threatened but is later seen drinking in a hostess bar with Boss Wang and slimy businessman Bruce.

Bruce’s Western name might immediately mark him as the villain, a globalising entrepreneur who sees a noodle shop like Rong’s as an embarrassment, a symbol of an older, less sophisticated Taiwan that no longer belongs in the current society. It’s to Bruce that Rong’s childhood friend and sometime landlord Wen sells the building in which he lives and works and it doesn’t take a genius to realise he probably hasn’t bought it to maintain old-fashioned local community charm. In the news item playing in the opening scene, the reporters discuss the opening of a new French bakery with a brand new pastry christened the Taiwan Eclair which has become the latest must eat item with the queues around the block symbolising both an aspirant internationalism and the vacuity of consumerist desires. Yet it seems that Zhong-han’s greatest wish is to be able to take his girlfriend out for fancy cake only neither she nor he can afford it as they are each locked out of the cake-eating classes. 

Immediately before the item about the French bakery, the news had discussed the protests in Hong Kong which continue to reverberate through Taiwan as it processes its own difficult relationship with Mainland China amid constant fears of military incursion. Wen points to the land he once owned and suggests it won’t be worth anything if they end up going to war. In a slightly awkward way, the film aligns Rong’s struggle with that of the protestors though less towards authoritarian oppression than the tyrrany of amoral capitalism and men like Bruce who wear fancy suits but behave like thugs. The film paints both struggles as futile, though noble, and suggests that there is really no way that Rong can win against a man like Bruce and might have been better to take what he could get when he could get it.

Zhong-han’s situation is equally hopeless. Though he tries to move away from his destructive gangster past, the world won’t let him forget and his options will always be limited by his disability, lack of education, and socio-economic status. Rong tells him that he’d always thought of him as a son and intended to leave the noodle shop to him when the time came, but like so many other things in his life that future seems lost to him now and no other presents itself. The film seems to offer a similar prognosis for Taiwan itself, a land of despair and futility in which “it won’t make any difference” has seemingly become a way of life. 

Locust screened as part of this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

The Singer (소리꾼, Cho Jung-lae, 2020)

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A Pansori singer shames the world into giving him his miracle in Cho Jung-lae’s musical fable, The Singer (소리꾼, Sorikkun). If there’s one thing you can bank on in old Joseon it’s that there is intrigue in the court, yet the rot seems to have penetrated even more deeply into the fabric of society as the hero discovers while looking for his kidnapped wife only later realising that the people who are supposed to protect you from violent criminals are in fact violent criminals themselves.  

Set in 1734, the 10th year of King Yeongjo’s reign, the film opens with a cheerful scene as singer Hak-gyu (Lee Bong-geun) performs in the marketplace while his wife Gan-nan (Lee Yu-ri) and daughter Cheong (Kim Ha-yeon) watch from the sidelines. As the opening voiceover reveals, however, this is also a time of increasing chaos in which the accepted social order has broken down following successive incursions from China and Japan. The King has appointed a special courtier, Kim Tae-hyo, to investigate the so-called “Ja-mae gang” suspected of running a human trafficking ring while in collusion with corrupt lords. Of course, the king doesn’t know that Tae-hyo is one of the corrupt lords, but then there are so many of them to choose from. In any case, disaster strikes when Hak-gyu is late home after being accosted by a fan while returning some of the clothes Gan-nan had been mending to a nobleman and discovers his wife and child missing when he gets back. Gan-nan and Cheong have been kidnapped by the gang along with several others from the area. Cheong manages to escape thanks to her mother’s quick thinking but is badly injured and in a coma for some time eventually waking up to realise she has lost her sight. Hak-gyu along with his drummer friend Dae-bong (Park Chul-min) decides to take his daughter and search for his wife all over Korea if necessary. 

As the opening and closing titles remind us, Pansori gained popularity precisely because it told the stories of the common people and was often transgressively frank in its attacks on the class system, social inequality, and even the monarchy. Belonging to the lowest class of entertainers, Hak-gyu’s “lowborn” status is often used against him, the gang deliberately targeting those from the lower orders to enslave because they do not really think of them human, yet it is also in a sense his salvation in his innate ability to connect with ordinary people as he retells his life as fable gathering large crowds around him as he anxiously asks if anyone has seen his wife. He is joined in his travels by a “corrupt monk” he saves from drowning in a river, along with bumbling lower aristocrat supposedly bumming around too afraid to go home and tell his father he’s failed the civil service exam (again), providing an accidental microcosm of the current society. 

Yet what Hak-gyu didn’t know was that the gang is merely an extension of government oppression, corrupt lords flexing all of their muscles to fully exploit their subjects. Tae-hyo’s mentor reminds him that “politics is all about money” as the pair of them try to game the king pretending to hunt the gang that they are themselves running. A skilled seamstress, Gan-nan is firstly placed in the home of a local dignitary but later moved on to the mines for making too much trouble. She tells everyone she meets that she’s been kidnapped, but the nobles are all in on it and everyone else is too frightened to resist. Meanwhile, Tae-hyo and his fellow conspirators are also it seems in collaboration with the Japanese, buying up smuggled rifles to use in a potential insurrection. 

Drawing inspiration from his own life story, Hak-gyu re-imagines the gang as Chinese pirates and his daughter as a displaced princess determined to do whatever it takes to save her blind father, always leaving his audience wanting more with his cruelly positioned cliffhangers. He finds himself in an odd kind of trial by combat, given the opportunity to win back his life and his wife if only he make the heartless lords laugh or cry eventually saved only by his ability to move the hearts of others through the power of his sincerity. A Pansori fable in and of itself, Cho’s meta musical drama is fitting tribute to power of art to speak truth to power revealing its own truths in falsehoods and by it handing back the means to the people to demand justice and freedom.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Dancing Girl (踊子, Hiroshi Shimizu, 1957)

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The sudden arrival of a younger sister throws the despair and disappointment of an ageing chorus dancer into stark relief in Hiroshi Shimizu’s Dancing Girl (踊子, Odoriko). Chiyo (Machiko Kyo) is indeed a dancing girl, waltzing her way through post-war Japan with seemingly little thought for others or the consequences of her actions aware only of her ability to dazzle and what it might win her if used in the right way while her sister quietly yearns for a more comfortable, conventional kind of life.

Hanae (Chikage Awashima) apologises for Chiyo’s childishness when she suddenly gets up to marvel at the snow during in an important meeting with choreographer Tamura (Haruo Tanaka) who has offered to take her on as a trainee dancer but he simply replies that it’s what makes her special in the way Hanae herself perhaps is not. In that sense there’s something a little uncomfortable in Tamura’s first word on meeting Chiyo being simply “sexy” uttered as if he were already salivating over her when the key to her appeal seems to lie in the awkward juxtaposition of her naivety and curvaceous figure. In many ways, it’s childishness that is Chiyo’s defining characteristic. She follows her impulses and is incapable of thinking beyond them. In a repeated motif we see her eat heartily as if she had not for eaten days or else to be snacking on something or other at a time when food is scarce. We later discover that she’s some kind of kleptomaniac, stealing at every opportunity even when she has no need to, simply taking something she wants without considering why it might not be right to do so as if all the world belonged to her. Meanwhile she embraces her sexuality without shame, sleeping with whomever she chooses but also doing so in a calculated effort to advance her own cause. 

The irony is that her rise coincides with her sister’s fall. Hanae has passed the age at which she might have become a star and is beginning to age out of her career as a chorus dancer. She tells her husband, Yamano (Eiji Funakoshi), that what she wants is a comfortable life and to become a mother though the couple have been married for five years and not yet conceived a child leading her wonder if there’s medical issue in play though Yamano confesses in what turns out to be an ironic comment that he doesn’t really want children anyway. In any case, they are each becoming tired of life in Asakusa and their mutually unsatisfying careers. Crushingly they each fear they have disappointed the other, Hanae sorry that she never made it as a dancer and wondering if Yamano would have been better off marrying someone from a less stigmatised profession, while he feels guilty that he could not give her a better standard of life and has failed to progress in his own career as a violinist. Chiyo’s arrival reinvigates them both in different ways. Hanae shifts into a maternal mode otherwise denied her in looking after Chiyo as she begins her career as a dancer, while Yamano begins with her a sexual affair that rekindles his masculine drive. 

But Chiyo also remains flighty and elusive. Essentially lazy, she soon tires of dancing and decides to become a geisha because it requires less rehearsal, then to give that up too to become someone’s second mistress. She rejects the conventional, settled life Hanae has come to long for and describes that in the countryside as “boring” when she suggests moving there having selflessly offered to adopt the baby Chiyo has also rejected which maybe Yamano’s or perhaps Tamura’s or someone else’s entirely not that it necessarily matters. The closing moments of the film perhaps imply a moralising rebuke of the new post-war vision of liberated sexuality, a despondent Chiyo once again making a surprise appearance and wanting to see her child but being afraid to do so unable to match up to the unsullied maternity of Hanae. Shimizu lends her passage a kind of transient quality in his restless camera which is in constant motion sliding laterally from one scene to another often coming to rest on emptiness even amid the bustling streets of a neon-lit Asakusa and the false promises of its illusionary glow.

Dancing Girl screens at Japan Society New York on May 18 as part of Hiroshi Shimizu Part 2: The Postwar and Independent Years.

Nippon Connection Confirms Full Lineup for 2024

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Nippon Connection, the largest showcase for Japanese cinema anywhere in the world, returns with another fantastic selection of new and classic films screening in Frankfurt from 28th May 2nd June. This year’s Nippon Rising Star Award will go to Kotone Furukawa whose films Best Wishes for All, Secret:A Hidden Score, and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy will also be screening.

NIPPON CINEMA

  • (Ab)normal Desire – drama directed by Yoshiyuki Kishi following those who feel their desires place them at odds with mainstream society.
  • 18×2 Beyond Youthful Days – nostalgic drama from Michihito Fujii in which a man travels to Japan from Taiwan in search of the woman he worked with in a karaoke bar 18 years previously.
  • All The Long Nights – gentle drama from Sho Miyake in which a pair of co-workers bond over their respective difficulties in the workplace.
  • Best Wishes To All – a visit to her grandparents’ home forces a young woman to reckon with the price of “happiness” in Yuta Shimotsu’s eerie indie horror. Review.
  • Dreaming In Between – latest from Ryutaro Ninomiya (One Day You Will Reach the Sea) in which a medical issue unknown to those around him causes changes in a teacher’s behaviour.
  • Fly Me To The Saitama -FROM BIWA LAKE WITH LOVE – long-awaited sequel to the surreal 2019 comedy.
  • From The End Of The World – charged with the responsibility of saving the world, a teenage girl wonders if she should in Kazuaki Kiriya’s pre-apocalyptic drama. Review.
  • God Seeks In Return – genre mashup from Keisuke Yoshida in which a YouTuber seeking fame teams up with an events manager.
  • Ichiko – psychological thriller from Akihiro Toda (The Name) revolving around a woman’s absence.
  • KUBI – Nobunaga-themed jidaigeki from Takeshi Kitano.
  • Kyrie – musical drama from Shunji Iwai.
  • Let’s Go Karaoke! – musicial comedy from Nobuhiro Yamashita in which a teenage boy is forced to help a yakuza win a karaoke competition.
  • missing – heartrending drama in which the parents of a missing little girl turn to the media for help.
  • Penalty Loop – sci-fi drama in which a man becomes trapped in a time loop after taking revenge for his girlfriend’s murder.
  • PERFECT DAYS – laidback drama from Wim Wenders revolving around a man who cleans toilets for a living.
  • Ripples – A middle-aged woman becomes a devotee of a strange cult in order to restore order to her life in Naoko Ogigami’s quirky dramedy. Review.
  • Secret: A Hidden Score – remake of the Taiwanese tragic romance.
  • Takano Tofu – A sudden brush with mortality convinces an ageing tofu maker to marry off his middle-aged daughter in Mitsuhiro Mihara’s charming dramedy. Review.
  • Die Tänzerin (The Dancing Girl) – 1989 German-Japanese co-produced adaptation of Mori Ogai’s The Dancing Girl. Screening in original German version.
  • Die Tochter des Samurai – 1937 German co-production in which the son of a samurai family returns home changed after studying in Germany.
  • We’re Millennials. Got A Problem?: The Movie – comedy from Nobuo Mizuta (The Apology King) in which a slacker son’s family sake business, not to mention his marriage, is on the rocks.
  • Wheel Of Fortune And Fantasy – a series of chance meetings and a healthy dose of fantasy lead a collection of wounded souls towards a kind of liberation in Hamaguchi’s whimsical triptych. Review.
  • The Yin Yang Master Zero – fantasy film set in the Heian era in which a magic student and nobleman team up to investigate a conspiracy.
  • YOKO – an isolated woman begins to rediscover herself while hitchhiking to her estranged father’s funeral in Kazuyoshi Kumakiri’s quietly moving road movie. Review.

NIPPON ANIMATION

NIPPON VISIONS

  • ABYSS – drama from Ren Sudo in which a man develops a relationship with a guy from his brother’s funeral.
  • Alien’s Daydream – surreal comedy in which a reporter investigates alien abductions in the local area.
  • Belonging – indie drama from Kahori Higashi in which the deceased are reincarnated as inanimate objects.
  • Hijacked Youth – Dare To Stop Us 2 – sequel to the 2018 drama set in Nagoya in 1983 as Koji Wakamatsu decides to open a cinema.
  • HOYAMAN – he tranquil island life of a pair of brothers is interrupted by the arrival of a mysterious woman in Teruaki Shoji’s quirky comedy. Review.
  • Inch Forward – an indie filmmaker experiences various setbacks while trying to complete her latest film in Su Yu-Chun’s cheerful dramedy. Review.
  • LONESOME VACATION – roadtrip drama in which a rockabilly private eye is tasked with investigating his the former lover of his girlfriend’s father.
  • Psychic Vision: Jaganrei – classic horror from 1988 in which it’s discovered the author of a hit pop song has been dead for several years.
  • PushPause – a small hotel becomes a refuge for those “struggling with the everyday” in Ryoma Kosasa’s heartwarming drama. Review.
  • Qualia – bitter family drama in which a chicken farmer’s wife faces constant humiliation.
  • SEPTEMBER 1923 – drama revolving around the pogrom against Koreans in the wake of the 1923 Kanto earthquake.
  • Visitors –Complete Edition– – drama set during the outbreak of a demon plague.

NIPPON DOCS

NIPPON RETRO

  • The Bad Sleep Well – Akira Kurosawa’s 1960 Shakespearean revenge tale. Review.
  • The Black Test Car – Yasuzo Masumura’s tale of corporate espionage.
  • Dragnet Girl – classic 1930s crime drama from Yasujiro Ozu.
  • Pale Flower – Masahiro Shinoda’s nihilistic New Wave 1964 crime drama.
  • Stakeout – Yoshitaro Nomura’s 1958 noir classic in which a policeman’s marital dilemma is played out by the melancholy suspect he is sent to surveil.
  • Take Aim At The Police Van – early Seijun Suzuki film in which a prison warden uncovers a network of corruption.
  • Youth Of The Beast – a stranger in town provokes a gang war in Seijun Suzuki’s 1963 crime drama.

Nippon Connection takes place in Frankfurt, Germany from 28th May to 2nd June. Tickets are available now via the official website where you can also find full details on all the films as well as timetabling information. Unless otherwise stated, films screen in Japanese with English subtitles. You can keep up with all the latest information by following the festival on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, Flickr, and Instagram.