Tag: 2020s

New Group (Yuta Shimotsu, 2025)

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If all your friends went and formed a giant human pyramid, would you go and form a giant human pyramid too? Parents used to caution against such dangerous group think, but it has to be said that perhaps they only complained when the group activity didn’t suit them or required some additional expense they didn’t really want to pay. If the group activity was studying hard at school to get into a good university and become a successful member of society rather than buying the later must have fashion item to fit in at school, then they’d hardly complain about that.

Yuta Shimotsu’s absurdist satire New Group is in many ways about the deeply ingrained patterns of thought that exist within a society to the extent that they are rarely ever questioned. Ai (Anna Yamada) is coming to an age in which she is beginning to feel hemmed in by a conformist society but at the same time does not have the courage or confidence to challenge it. When she sees another girl being bullied, she wants to step in to defend her but all she manages to do is give the bullies a hard stare. Her friend Haru asks her what university she’s thinking of applying to to, but Ai only says she’ll apply to the same one as her and study the same thing. She can’t even answer when she’s put on the spot about what she wants to do for the school festival for fear of picking the wrong one and being ostracised from a particular faction, so she just goes along with the first person who asked for her vote.

As her teacher says, though there is a strong groupthink in play, everything comes to a binary. It’s always “uchi-soto”, us and them. But what does it mean to be a member of the main group? Ai isn’t convinced she wants to give up her autonomy just to fit in and increasingly feels herself to be an outsider. Her name is of course reminiscent of the English pronoun “I”, though it’s true meaning is “love”. She’s pulled out of inertia by a boy named “Yu” who nevertheless is later pulled into the pyramid and tells her that “ai” is here, meaning both that the group is love and Ai, the individual, belongs with in it. She replies that he’s wrong, that isn’t love, and it isn’t her. There is no room for the individual within the pyramidic structure of the group.

Yu has recently returned from abroad and is living alone free of parental authority which is why he doesn’t fit into the carefully controlled harmony of the school. He is out of step at marching practice and less afraid to voice his true opinions. He intervenes to save the other girl from the bullies and chastises Ai that just watching makes you complicit. Yu might as well be one of the space aliens they keep talking about on TV, a subversive force out to destabilise the harmonious society. Yet Ai’s doubts seem to have arisen because of a personal trauma. As a child, she chose the group over her younger sister who was then killed in an accident. She feared being excluded and essentially sacrificed her sister for approval while also denying her affiliation to the group that is her family.

The quest of Ai and Yu is then to maintain their selfhoods while operating in a society that demands conformity. Controlled by the maniacal headmaster, their schoolmates all immediately start marching to the beat of the PE teacher’s whistle and dutifully take their place in the pyramid in which all they do is uphold the structure of the group. As the pair are chased by the zombie-like figures, Ai has to confront the fact that it might just be easier to go with the flow, even if that too comes at a price. Even so, in her efforts to resist, is Ai not just creating another group of her own that can only exist because of its opposition to the first? If there is “I” there must also be “you” and never the twain shall meet. A TV commentator played by the director Takashi Shimizu tries to speak out about the nonsense groupthink being conveyed through the innocuous medium of daytime television but is dragged off air while shouting at everyone to wake up and think for themselves. It seems that few are brave enough to switch off and think for themselves while the only path to freedom lies in loneliness and exile even if in the end it is “love” that saves us after all.

New Group screens as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Images: ©2025 “NEW GROUP” Film Partners

Sai: Disaster (災 劇場版, Yutaro Seki & Kentaro Hirase, 2025)

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We like to tell ourselves that if we do everything right and follow all the rules then everything will be okay. But the reality is that life is chaotic and you have no control. No one knows when, where, or who, will suffer a disaster, as one man puts it. But then again, in Yutaro Seki and Kentaro Hirase’s Sai (災 劇場版, Sai Gekijoban), there may be someone who does know and acts as some kind of harbinger of doom guiding the unlucky towards their unhappy fates.

The mysterious man (Teruyuki Kagawa) appears in different guises to different people and apparently disappears not long after they do. A policewoman, Domoto (Anne Nakamura), is becoming convinced that a series of unexplained deaths in which the bodies were missing a small piece of their hair is the work of a serial killer, though others tell her it’s a just coincidence. It remains unexplained whether the mysterious man is, as Domoto suspects, a very human serial killer travelling all over Japan and inserting himself into people’s lives before engineering their deaths, or else a more supernatural creature and embodiment of the very nature of “disaster”.

In any case, a bereaved husband says he’d rather think of his wife’s death that way. Just something that happened for no rhyme or reason, like a landslide or an earthquake. It doesn’t matter to him whether she killed herself or was murdered, because the net result is that she’s dead. People don’t die for no reason, Domoto insists, but there is a kind of crushing inevitability to each of the stories as the mysterious man works his magic often offering a listening ear or a shoulder to cry on. Other times he seems oddly impish, encouraging one’s worst instincts as he does with recovering alcoholic Kuramoto (Ryuhei Matsuda) by constantly tempting him with drink.

The lives of the victims paint a particularly bleak vision of contemporary Japan as a place ruled by loneliness and fear. No one can get what it is they want, and they don’t even want that much. Kuramoto seems to want to rebuild his life after killing someone drunk driving by giving up drink and working hard to be reaccepted by his community, but his wife doesn’t want to see him and according to her mother at least, his problems were more serious than he first suggests. Schoolgirl Yuri (Sena Nakajima) just wants to continue with her education and eventually become an architect but is saddled with toxic parents who couldn’t care less about her future. The first victim that we see, a young woman running a restaurant for fishermen (Yumi Adachi), seems to be caught between loneliness and humiliation following the sudden disappearance of her husband. A cleaner working at the shopping centre (Chika Uchida) is the only one to take her job seriously, but has no luck with men. An inn keeper (Jiro Ohkawara) takes to smoking marijuana after his wife leaves him for another man while struggling to maintain his family business.

When his wife left him, the inn keeper assumed the worst had already happened and he’s survived his disaster, but it doesn’t really occur to him there could be another one waiting. The sense of dread that Seki and Kentaro Hirase conjure is the manifestation of this anxiety that something bad is lingering on the horizon just out of sight but ready to strike at any moment. In editing down the original six-part TV drama into a feature film, Seki and Hirase intercut each of the stories rather than letting them play out in linear fashion. It’s only later that we get dates, making it clear that all of these stories are taking place at different times and happening in sequence rather than parallel meaning that they could, perhaps, all be motivated by the same person and the mysterious man is just that rather than a malevolent supernatural entity or walking disaster in human form. Perhaps that’s all he really is anyway, no different from an earthquake or a landslide, just something that happens to you if you’re unlucky enough to stray into his path. As much as Domoto might try to create some kind of order by pinning a narrative onto the unexplained deaths or trying to solve the mystery, the truth is that some things cannot be explained. Disaster lurks at every turn and strikes when least expected.

Sai: Disaster screens as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Open Endings (Nigel Santos, 2025)

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Is it acceptable to be friends with your exes? Charlie’s (Janella Salvador) bond with her friendship group made up of women who’ve all been romantically entangled at one point or another becomes a problem for her new relationship. Rafa (Rachel Coates) finds the situation altogether too weird, and even goes so far as to ask Charlie to cut her friends off. It might not be a good idea to date someone who tries to isolate you from friends and family, but Rafa claims these are just her boundaries and she can’t help feeling uneasy with Charlie spending so much time with women she’s previously slept with.

Then again, it’s not easy to be gay in the Philippines and this community is quite small. Can you really afford to cut people off just because of potential awkwardness? Each of the women is struggling in their own way, but tries to support her friends and is supported in return. The group only really formed as the exes banded together to look after Hannah when her partner passed away. Sundays have now become sacred to them as a time they can all come together and share their fears and worries no matter the various unresolved feelings that exist between them.

These relationships are often messy and ill-defined, but genuine and heartfelt. For Kit (Klea Pineda), friendship is most the beautiful of gifts and she fears acting on her feelings for Charlie because she doesn’t want to ruin what they have. Still closeted not wanting to upset her parents are religious and conservative, Kit is in an awkward non-relationship with a married woman who is also the mother of one of her pupils at the school where she teaches. Alexa (Yesh Anne Burce) is trapped with a heteronormative relationship she cannot escape because divorce is still not legal in the Philippines. Constrained by her own circumstances, she becomes possessive of Kit who is the only path back to her authentic self and the only person with whom she can be free. In other ways, however, perhaps the impossibility relationship suits Kit because she cannot be her authentic self either while unable to reveal her sexuality to her parents. 

The impossibility of divorce is also a factor when Hannah (Jasmine Curtis-Smith) suddenly drops the bombshell that she’s become engaged to a man. The group’s only bisexual, Hannah faces prejudice from her family who express relief that she’s finally got over her lesbian phase and rediscovered the right path, while the friends also see it as a kind of betrayal though perhaps only because she kept her new relationship secret from them for several months. Charlie is also subjected to homophobic violence when a man barges into the gay bar where she’s drinking and propositions her, insisting that she is “alone” because he’s only seen her with another woman. When he finally figures it out, he sees it as a challenge and quickly becomes violent. 

These kinds of petty aggressions remind the women of their precarious position within a hostile society that enforcers heteronormativity and traditional gender roles. Their friendship is a small bubble of resistance that gives each of the women additional confidence to continue being who they are. This atmosphere of hostility plays into Mihan’s insecurities, her far of commitment and inability to clearly declare her feelings. She resents Hannah for choosing to marry a man as if she were doing it because of social expectation rather than personal desire, while also forced to accept that this is all her fault. She had plenty of time to try and patch things up with Hannah, but never did. 

The open-ended nature of these relationships leaves Mihan with anxiety, but it also allows these women to continue being friends and supporting each other. The friendship doesn’t have to end just because the romance did. But at the same time, she has to accept that the risk of heartbreak is something that has to be actively embraced and her tendency to skip out on relationships the moment they become serious leaves her only with a lack of resolution. Painting a warm and funny portrait of contemporary queer life in the Philippines which nevertheless does not shy away from its difficulties, Open Endings celebrates most of all the joyousness and power of female friendship in the face of social hostility.

Open Endings screened as part of this year’s Queer East.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Cold War 1994 (寒戰1994, Leung Lok-Man, 2026)

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A compromised policeman finds himself caught between conflicting sources of authority in Leung Lok-Man’s action thriller Cold War 1994 (寒戰1994). A kind of prequel to Leung’s Cold War series, the film opens shortly after the events of the second films in 2017 with MB Lee (Tony Leung Ka-fai) being kidnapped amid a possible return to power under a new government. The events echo a case from 20 years earlier in which a prominent industrialist was kidnapped by Triads at the behest of arch kingpin Peter Choi (Daniel Wu).

The irony is the MB Lee (Terrance Lau) of 1994 finds himself in the same position as his nation as the Handover inches ever closer. Caught between the police force, colonial authorities, and Choi, MB begins to look for new ways to protect his men in  the new post-Handover reality, which makes him an awkward stand-in for Hong Kong itself as something distinct from the twin colonial powers of Britain and China. Just the Handover has produced a power imbalance allowing Choi to rise, a change of leadership at the Lo Yuen Triad society has provided an excuse for Tiger to pursue “independence”, which he largely seems to have done through an ill-advised involvement with Choi. 

Tiger is responsible for the kidnapping of KF Wong, the brother-in-law of the influential businessman William Poon (Tse Kwan-ho). The Poons are old an old money family who may have made their fortune doing things not so differently from Triads, but have maintained their privilege through loyalty to the British. All of the Poons have distinctively British Western names and apparently frequent visitors to Downing Street. Now times are changing, however, William Poon no longer wants to do business with the colonial authorities, while KF Wong’s Victoria Redux plan essentially attempts to maintain the conditions of the colonial era. Though he saw him as a successor, perhaps KF Wong’s kidnapping works out pretty well for Poon.

Just as Tiger and MB Lee attempt to break free from parental legacies, William’s son Simon (Wu Kang-ren) burns with resentment that KF Wong has replaced him as the heir to the Poon group while it seems that Wong also married the woman that Simon had been in love with. He then is also looking for a kind of “independence” in escaping his father’s control and taking the family business for himself. Meanwhile, others assume that kidnapping Wong was a means of destabilising the Poon’s economic empire while they attempt to shore up their power in the post-Handover society. MB wants to find Wong not only because it was his case, but as a means of reclaiming a kind of order and clearing his name after the botched operation raises questions about his loyalty.

Loyalty is a question for everyone with the implication that there may be rewards for those “loyal” to the colonial authorities even after the Handover. The film positions the UK as an antagonist then and in the present day as evidenced by a giant spy satellite trained on the island. MB Lee is pursued and constrained by Special Branch and its British investigators who later take his entire team into custody. After the Wong operation ends in failure, MB is courted by British authorities who tell him that they see him as a possible future commissioner if he agrees to remain loyal to the British and advance UK interests even after the Handover. The British actors deliver their lines with docudrama-style realism otherwise at odds with the rest of the film, but adding to a sense of historical veracity to their machinations. Despite his later actions, MB apparently refuses but uses his leverage to free his men and carve out a niche for himself at the OCTB which is, presumably, the third way he intends to pursue in limited complicity as a means of protecting the people of Hong Kong. 

Back in 2017, police commissioner Lau (Aaron Kwok) and lawyer Kan (Chow Yun-fat) remain unconvinced fearing that MB’s file has been tampered with in an attempt to rewrite history while the contemporary city remains shrouded in fog. Much of the film is seemingly a set up for its sequel, but succeeds in sowing the seeds of mystery in probing the complex relationships between local elites and colonial authorities along with the shifting balances of power in the pre-Handover society while providing the impressive, high-octane action sequences the series is known for.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

My Mother’s Eyes (マイマザーズアイズ, Takeshi Kushida, 2023)

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“To become a mother, I must move past sanity” the maternal figure at the centre of Takeshi Kushida’s My Mother’s Eyes (マイマザーズアイズ) eventually exclaims, but what exactly are the limits of the parental sacrifice? Should a parent necessarily have to give themselves over body and soul to the next generation leaving nothing of and for themselves, and should the child accept that sacrifice or not considering that it may, in turn, rob them of their own individuality?

Hitomi, whose name ironically sounds like the word for the pupil of the eye though the kanji it uses are those of “virtuous beauty”, clearly feels some level of resentment towards her daughter Eri despite the superficial closeness of their relationship which sees the teenage daughter still cuddling up to her mother in the night. Once a promising cellist herself, Hitomi now makes her living as a teacher and claims that she now enjoys writing songs for Eri to play more than playing herself. Yet it seems Eri too may be rebelling against the necessity of playing the notes her mother has set down for her. “Listen very carefully to the music your partner makes,” Hitomi gently advises on noticing Eri veering off script while rehearsing for a duet she asked her mother to play, “then we can become one piece of music together.”

This sense of reintegration or inseparability seems to be a longed-for quality though for Hitomi perhaps it amounts to an erasure as if she sought to bring her daughter into herself so that she might be free to pursue the career in music denied her by the demands of raising a child alone. Eri, meanwhile, yearns for acceptance, countering her mother’s resentment with her own revealing that even if she had not detected it in her mother’s eyes she clearly felt it in her music in the continual duel which being fought between them. Something Hitomi had kept from her is that she was losing her sight, a sudden entrance of darkness following Eri’s attempt to broach the subject of maternal rejection while driving along a tunnel clearly warning of dangerous curves ahead. The accident leaves Eri paralysed from the neck down, and Hitomi forced to face the reality of her fading sight. 

After contacting a blogger who’d previously written about an experimental treatment but was ominously warned off writing any more, Hitomi is whisked away to a Western-style mansion in the countryside occupied by a man scientist and his creepily robotic son, Satoshi. The treatment comes in the form of a high-tech contact lens which bounces additional light to Hitomi’s fading retinas that can be adjusted via smartphone app through which everything Hitomi sees can be observed by others. As a means of making amends, she agrees to give her life over to the bedridden Eri who sees through her eyes via virtual reality headset and speaks words for Hitomi to repeat just as she had written notes for Eri to play. 

But Hitomi is in other ways free to guide her, transgressively straying into a sexual relationship with the decidedly odd Satoshi who like his father has an odd habit of just appearing out of nowhere or at any rate swiftly like a bird swooping down to land. Hitomi strokes his back like she were playing a playing a cello, making music to communicate to whom remains unclear. Satoshi’s father later says that music was his “light” too as his own sight failed though it seems he no longer plays, music like light to Hitomi, had become painful and he had come to appreciate only “haunting” melodies. Just Eri has taken control of Hitomi, Satoshi’s father is still controlling him partly through the lenses and partly through mysterious tranquilliser pills that might explain his otherwise uncanny manner. 

The relationships between them begin to blur in the incestuous cross currents in which Eri succumb to a phantom pregnancy as her mother becomes a surrogate to child that is somehow hers, Satoshi’s, and his father’s though he later tries to assume control of it roundly telling Hitomi she lacks maternal devotion and is unfit to raise a raise. Her battle is as much to reclaim her maternity as it is to reclaim herself while entering a kind of symbiosis with her daughter that included a notion of duplication and continuity. If every son must kill his father, then perhaps giving birth is paradoxically a cure for motherhood. Asking a series of questions about the use and misuse of such technology that infringes not only on a sense of reality but also the security of the self, Kishida channels a sense of anxious eeriness but ends at least on a note of harmony albeit “haunting” in its nature.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Girlfriends (女孩不平凡, Tracy Choi Ian-Sin, 2025)

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Now in her mid-30s, Lok (Fish Liew) feels as if she were perpetually standing at a crossing waiting for the light to turn green. She made her first film five years ago, but hasn’t been able to make another one since. A producer likes her script, but tells her that with this kind of content they won’t be able to release it in Mainland China or Malaysia, so they won’t be able to recoup their investment. As he says though, the script can always be tweaked and if she rewrote it including a role for an actress looking for a comeback they might be in business.

But Lok doesn’t really want to compromise. Tracy Choi Ian-Sin’s semi-autobiographical Girlfriends (女孩不平凡) is in many ways about the of fear of being railroaded into something that’s not what you really want. After an argument with her girlfriend Bei (Jennifer Yu), Lok begins to look back on her life in reverse chronological order inching towards the source of her insecurity in her Macao childhood. At 17, she faced intense pressure to conform. As a member of the debate team, she’s tasked with making an argument for something she doesn’t believe in and resents being forced to say what’s expected of her rather than how she really feels. Her parents expect her to go a local university and become a civil servant without really giving her much choice in the matter. The older sister of a classmate, Faye (Eliz Lum) is the first person who asks her what it is she really wants. 

Lok finds herself watching 2004 Hong Kong drama Butterfly and trying to sort out her confusing feelings for Faye while secretly taking the exam to study at a university in Taiwan in the hope of living a freer life, if only for four years. There seems to be a part of present-day Lok that still thinks she’s on an extended holiday and will one day have to return to Macao and become a civil servant after all. She’s incapable of thinking of the future and seems to be mothered, to a certain extent, in all her relationships as her respective partners take on the burden of practical considerations like financial planning. Each time things start to get serious, she begins to back away, even ghosting her Taiwan girlfriend to return to Macao alone without saying goodbye.

Both the Taiwan girlfriend and Bei seem to want move back to Macao with Lok without even really considering if she actually wants to go. This assumption seems to further fuel her desperation and send her looking for an escape route. Returning to Macao with a girlfriend does not seem to be an option for her because Macao represents conventionality and the life she doesn’t really want but still deep down thinks she is unable to escape. Never having fully addressed her lost love for Faye, she lacks the courage to commit or to believe in a long-term future. Her apartment seems to be full of reminders of old lovers, while she remains uncommunicative and insecure. Using sex as a means of avoiding confrontation, she has a tendency to storm out rather than have a conversation and has never fully accepted herself. When her long-term girlfriend Bei starts talking about serious things like marriage and children, she tells her that she wants her to have a “normal” life, as if she were preventing Bei from having one.

Bei is indeed under the pressure of conventionality, nagged by parents who still haven’t accepted her relationship with Lok to settle down and marry a man. Lok’s family in Macao seem to have already accepted Bei as her wife, but still Lok can’t get over the mental hurdle of believing that she has a right to a future of her own choosing. After her script is turned down, she goes to the cinema to see The Lyricist Wannabe and over identifies with a line in which the heroine is bluntly told that if she’s spent all this time waiting and still not got anywhere, perhaps it’s time to consider another career. Her lack of success further deepens her insecurity as Bei practically points out that they do actually need some money coming in, and perhaps they might have to compromise their artistic dreams as an actress and a director under the pressure of living in difficult economic circumstances while planning for their long-term financial future. It doesn’t sound very romantic, but in a way it is. It’s only by looking back over her life and failed relationships and returning to Macao to put her past to rest, that Lok is finally able to stop chasing the ghost of Faye and gains the courage to seize the future that she really wants.

Girlfriends screened as part of this year’s Queer East.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

The Distributors (유포자들, Hong Seok-ku, 2022)

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When Yu-bin (Park Sung-hoon) finds himself being blackmailed after being drugged in a club and videoed by an attractive young woman, he can’t help but feel hard done by. A teacher who once aspired to making films, he’s on the verge of marrying his fiancée Sun-ae (Kim So-eun) who is from an incredibly wealthy and very conservative pro-Japanese family, but if any of this gets out he can kiss his comfortable life goodbye. His focus is not, however, on how he shouldn’t have gone to his friend’s night club after promising Sun-ae he wouldn’t, but how he can cover all this up so she doesn’t find out he took two girls back to their flat when she was away on a business trip.

Hong Seok-ku’s The Distributors (유포자들, Yoopojadeul) never quite keys in to the fact that its hero’s a bit of a slimeball who nevertheless thinks he’s a good guy, and more often than not falls into his hard done by mindset. This might, however, echo the perspective of the average man in a society in which illicit photography has become a hot-button issue. As the film opens, Yu-bin is inflicting corporal punishment on two boys who’ve been caught taking inappropriate videos of women, which is perhaps not the best way to deal with this issue. Though he emphasises that they’ve done wrong, he’s also sort of on their side in that he agrees not to take this any further in case it damages their futures. Ji-ho, in particular, is on track to get into Seoul University and Yu-bin can’t really work out why he might have done something like this. The other boy Seong-min, happens to be his fiancée’s younger brother and predictably blames everything on Ji-ho.

It is then quite ironic that Yu-bin finds himself a victim of a video taken without his consent that shows him in a compromising position. Seven years earlier, he’d been accused of posting revenge porn after a former girlfriend broke up with him and had to pay her legal compensation. He claims that he didn’t intentionally leak it, but that his friend Sang-beom (Song Jin-woo) found it on his computer and uploaded it to the internet to make money on amateur porn sites. But again, his focus is more on how to make this go away rather than the harm he may have caused to Ga-young. She tells him that her life’s been ruined and that it’s pure hell to feel as if everyone’s looking at you wondering if they’ve seen the video. He, however, offers her money and suggests they settle this “like civilised people”, which is in itself not so different from blackmail while suggesting that she’s being unreasonable in not letting the matter drop.

Meanwhile, what Yu-bin might actually be worried about is that he’s made a tape of him and Sun-ae that she may not even know about or have consented to. In any case, his carelessness has meant that this video too might end up online ruining her life in the same way as Ga-young’s while the consequences for him are only mild humiliation and the breaking of his engagement. It’s not exactly clear how he and Sun-ae ended up meeting, but there’s a mild implication that he’s only really with her for the luxury lifestyle she provides while her father, who objects to the marriage because Yu-bin is not of their social class, also offers him career advancement in sponsoring a film department at the school. 

The blackmailer, Yu-bin, and his friend Sang-beom all make ironic references to this being like a Hitchcock movie, though Yu-bin is not really a “wrong man” so much as one running away from his own cowardice and imperfections. In his film class, he shows the children Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid, which is certainly an ironic choice given that it ends with a direct message warning men of the dangers of adultery and to always remember their duties to their family as husbands and fathers. Even Yu-bin’s sadly looking out through a rainy window echoes Kim’s cinematography, though Yu-bin is still in the mindset of feeling sorry for himself rather than coming to the realisation that even if it’s not Ga-young who is punishing him, he has never really faced his role in what happened to her or accepted responsibility for his failure to safeguard her privacy. Only now, when it’s him, does he begin to understand not only that he’s been selfish but that he’s failed in his role as a teacher by not figuring out what was going on with the boys and the videos while focussing on protecting their futures rather than those of the young women around them who deserve safety and respect but are provided little of either by a male-dominated society.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Butcher’s Blade (手遮天, Liu Wenpu, 2026)

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Laws are meaningless if no one’s prepared to enforce them. According to the opening titles of The Butcher’s Blade (手遮天, shǒu zhē tiān), the Song had a complicated criminal code with lots of rules to be followed. However, in the real world, they only really apply to certain people. Xue Buyi (Liu Fengchao) has been a constable for 10 years but has become a bitter, broken man who feels himself to be a coward for remaining complicit with this corrupt regime.

A courtesan reports the local coffin maker for rape and violence having slashed her face and thereby not just physically and psychologically harmed her, but destroyed her livelihood. The courtesans complain they’ve reported him before and that no one helps them because they’re not the sort of people who matter in this world. Buyi announces he’ll get them justice and does indeed arrest the coffin maker, but the villagers then turn against him. The coffin maker is well connected and Buyi’s boss lets him go. The courtesans are unsurprised but disappointed, while Buyi’s self-loathing only deepens. His pride and masculinity are further eroded when he tries to help a woman selling noodles that he’s fond of fend off an exploitative landlord who’s been upping the rent in an attempt to coerce her into a sexual relationship. Wei simply asks him for the money instead, but Buyi has nary a penny to his name. Deliberately humiliating him, Wei makes Buyi drink flasks of soy sauce in exchange for reducing Erniang’s (Gao Weiman) debt which Buyi does until Erniang puts a stop to it.

Given all that, it’s easy to see why he might turn to the dark side and allow this world to remake him in its image. The war inside him is between his upbringing as a pupil of Eagle Hall, a brutal police training facility designed to churn out thugs who heartlessly carry out the will of the powers that be, and his natural compassion which baulks at the brutal torture and murder expected of him as a law enforcement official. Buyi is directly contrasted with former colleague Li Zhen (Yuan Fufu) who is keen to get him back on side and working for Eagle Hall, while Buyi struggles with himself over the degree of moral comprise he’s comfortable accepting to be one of Huang’s elite policemen. By remaining complicit, he hopes he can get the money to save Erniang’s noodle stall and protect her from Wei, but she quite obviously can’t stand what Buyi is becoming and didn’t envisage having brutal policemen as her main clientele.

There seems to be a subversive allusion to the present day in the world that surrounds Buyi which is filled with corrupt officials and supported by a rotten regime that policemen like him prop up with thuggish authoritarianism, serving the interests of the powerful over those of the people. Buyi finds himself at the centre of conspiracy when he takes a job guarding government funds intended for disaster relief in the hope of getting extra money to help Erniang only to be accused of robbing the place himself. Recruited by former mentor Huang (Chunyu Shanshan), he witnesses his indifference to the disaster victims who have largely fallen into exploitation at the hands of corrupt landowner Wei. Huang plans to sacrifice them for his own personal gain by framing them as a revolutionary army led by a rival official seeking to overturn the regime which he will then heroically surpress. 

Buyi, however, has to decide whether he can really continue going along with all this or rise up to resist it. Liu Wenpu frames Buyi’s intervention in heroic terms in which he’s surrounded by an eerie blue glow and the sound of firecrackers as he finally decides that he can’t let people like Huang continue with their authoritarianism and indifference towards the welfare of the people. His rebellion, however, seems to make himself something of an outlaw condemned to a life of wandering while ultimately pointless. Huang was just one many and now others are trying to use his fate as a means of advancing their own position. The elegantly choreographed fight scenes take on a symbolic quality as Buyi progresses towards his showdown with Huang while battling himself and his inner conflict, torn between the what it takes to succeed in a world as corrupt as this and his essential humanity before finally coming down on the side of justice for all rather than continuing to serve the interests of an exploitative elite.

The Butcher’s Blade is released on Digital in the US on May 4 courtesy of Well Go USA.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Y Vân: The Lost Sounds of Saigon (Khoa Hà & Victor Velle, 2025)

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How can it be that someone can be universally renowned, famous beyond their wildest dreams, but seemingly forgotten only fifty years later? Filmmaker Khoa Hà moved to the US at 17 and never met the grandfather who passed away before she was born leaving behind a forgotten musical legacy. Other family members have told her various things about him, but the one that fascinated her was that Y Vân had been one of the foremost composers before the war through none of his work apparently survives.

Y Vân: The Lost Sounds of Saigon is partly a mystery as Khoa decides to try retracing her grandfather’s steps, trying to bring his music back into the modern era. But it’s also an exploration of family, legacy, and the brutality of the war during which most of Y Vân’s work was either deliberately or otherwise destroyed. Not only does Khoa struggle to find anything of her grandfather’s music, but is repeatedly told that nothing much survives of music made before 1975 due wartime destruction and/or the new regime who destroyed anything they deemed to be decadent. 

The totality of the destruction seems shocking. That an entire era could just be erased as if it never existed is somehow chilling in its implications. Y Vân was one of a handful of major songwriters whose work was known by all. In those days, publishers sold sheet music for songs on a similar level to records so people could learn the song by following as they listened, and you’d think that something like this would stick in the collective memory as people keep the songs alive by singing them. The problem is, however, that without any of Y Vân’s records, Koha isn’t left with much to go on, not really knowing who any of her father’s collaborators might have been to try asking them for their thoughts and recollections. 

All she really has to rely on is family, though Y Vân himself had said that’s all you really need. Looking for her grandfather’s legacy enables Khoa to reconnect with her family in Vietnam including her great-aunt and uncle as well as Y Vân’s first wife from whom he eventually separated. After a while, he mother joins her on her quest, deepening their own connection as they delve into family history and travel all over Vietnam trying to track down Y Vân’s music.

It’s a family connection that eventually puts them on to a collector who, like Khoa, has been trying to reclaim something of the past. Before the war, his family owned a music cafe, and so he’s been collecting records to recreate his childhood. His desire to restore this lost past is a means of trying to heal the trauma of the war and push past this dividing line to reclaim the lost Vietnam that lies behind it just as Khoa is attempting to reconnect with the cultural roots she felt herself in danger of losing in the US. 

Y Vân himself seems to have been a casualty of these changing times. He was temporarily sent for re-education and prevented from using his stage him with the consequence that he gave up writing music while many of his songs were banned. He passed away at a comparatively young age with his musical legacy all but forgotten. The singers who performed his music went to the US where they were unable to continue their singing careers and had to focus on making new lives for themselves. Through uncovering and archiving her grandfather’s music with the help of the collector who agrees to help her digitise his tapes and LPs so that everyone can hear them, Khoa is helping to preserve this history for future generations. As she says, art has the ability to heal old wounds and bring people together, enabling her to reconnect with her family and restore something of what was lost. Told with true visual flair, the film’s soundtrack mainly uses 60s covers of American songs, while animated sequences help to recreate the pre-war society in which Y Vân became famous, though ironically his actual dream was to study maths rather than becoming a musical superstar. Chapter markers see Khoa walking through a desert searching for Y Vân’s music and eventually finding her way toward accepting herself and culture through the preservation of her grandfather’s legacy.

Y Vân: The Lost Sounds of Saigon screened as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival Spring Showcase.

The Road to Sydney (Benito Bautista, 2025)

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

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

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

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

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

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