Tag: 2020s

Ravens (レイブンズ, Mark Gill, 2024)

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“All I see are self portraits”, the hero’s by then former wife cuttingly remarks on visiting his comeback exhibition in the company of her new husband, seemingly a much more conventional businessman. Japanese films about photographers are similar to those other countries make about writers in that their protagonists are often very flawed people, tortured artists consumed by their own trauma and often turning to drink at the expense of their personal relationships. Tadanobo Asano has in fact played similar roles a few times before. In Yoichi Higashi’s Wandering Home, he played real life war correspondent Yasuyuki Tsukahara who passed away from kidney cancer at the age of 42 after years of alcohol dependency, while in 1999’s One Step on a Mine, It’s All Over he played Taizo Ichinose whose obsession with getting a photograph of Angkor Wat eventually results in his death.

Masahisa Fukase was one of the key photographers of the post-war era and also an incredibly troubled soul. The conceit of Mark Gill’s Ravens (レイブンズ) is that Fukase is accompanied by a giant, anthropomorphised, English-speaking raven (José Luis Ferrer) who gives voice to his darkest thoughts and impulses. A magazine profile describes Fuksase’s work as having dark and occult influences, which the film attributes to the fact that his incredibly conservative father (Kanji Furutachi) used to lock him inside a more literal dark room as a punishment when he was a child. 

Like many of his contemporaries, Fukase’s photographs often express the widening gap between the traditional and the modern in the changing post-war society and the film also uses many of his motifs such as his family photographs to express the changing dynamics between them. Fukase himself is caught in the nexus of this continuing battle in inheriting the legacy of his father’s war trauma. A heavy drinking, violent man, Sukezo insists that as the oldest son Fukase must take over their family photography studio and that taking photogaps is a commercial activity not an artististic one. Fukase’s wife and muse Yoko (Kumi Takiuchi) often says the same thing, undercutting Fukase’s sense of purpose in his work even while he also denies Yoko’s role as a collaborator rather than simply as a subject. “Any woman will do,” the Raven tells him though that turns out not quite to be the case. 

Yoko complains that that Fukase never really looks at her but sees the world abstractedly through the lens of his camera which is really just another way of avoiding reality. She thinks she begins to understand him after belatedly meeting Fukase’s family years after their marriage and witnessing one of his father’s drunken rages first-hand, but it only seems to push them further apart. Despite his claims of artistry, Fukase quickly becomes jealous of the attention Yoko attracts as the star of his photographs as if she has eclipsed him, the artist, and can no longer be controlled by his camera. He clearly wanted the fame and acclaim through his success only seems to deepen his self-loathing and desire for death. His father had told that a man who failed to achieve success by 40 should kill himself, though when Fukase does eventually attempt to take his own life he does so by hanging, hoping that his assistant will photograph it, rather than by using the sword his father shoved at him.

Though Fukase describes Yoko as a very modern woman she too is caught by this cycle in that her mother tells her it’s a wife’s duty to forgive her husband even after he wounds with a knife during a drug-fuelled psychotic episode. Despite separating from him, Yoko continues to visit Fukase in the hospital where he remains after suffering a traumatic brain injury until his eventual death in 2012. In its way, it’s a frustrated love story in which the relationship between them is disrupted by the intrusion of outdated social codes, generational trauma, and Fukase’s own demons which appear to have been with him since childhood. The conviction that Yoko comes to is that all his pictures are actually reflections of himself and that he is incapable of seeing the world through any other lens even as he tells her that the sky is just the sky and ravens are just ravens, nothing means anything. He tells his assistant that he thought he was in search of death the whole time, but maybe it was death that was looking for him. Dreamlike and ethereal, Gill weaves back and fore throughout Fukase’s life from his conservative upbringing to the heady 1970s and gradual comedown of his later years before finally discovering a melancholy sense of serenity as Fukase, finally, dares to gaze back into the lens.

Ravens screens 20th June as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

International trailer (dialogue free)

Last Mile (ラストマイル, Ayuko Tsukahara, 2024)

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“Customer-centric”, what does that actually mean? The Amazon-like US-based conglomerate at the centre of Ayako Tsukahara’s Last Mile (ラストマイル) prides itself on its customer-centric philosophy, but at the end of the day, what that really means is that they give us what we tell them we want through our purchasing patterns and browsing history. That would be that we want everything as cheap and fast as it’s possible to be and don’t really think about the wider implications or what a world of infinite convenience might be doing to the society around us.

At least from the perspective of corporate lackey Elena (Hikari Mitsushima), recently returned from the US, the reason Daily Fast pressures its delivery staff to lower costs isn’t to maximise their profits, it’s so they can go on providing lower prices to customers which to her is all part of their customer-centric approach. This doesn’t really gel with her off-the-cuff remark about the warehouse not having a safety net to protect the workers from accidental falls or, she ominously adds, prevent people from jumping. That she brought it up at all might signal that she knows something’s not quite with the way this company treats its employees, though as it turns out she may have something else on her mind. In any case, when she arrives on her very first day the entrance to the complex is little better than a cattle market with a man on loud speaker barking instructions about were to go to the 800 members of staff some of whom have only been brought in to bulk up for the upcoming Black Friday sale. 

Which is all to say, it wouldn’t be all that surprising if the fact that some of their parcels have been exploding on delivery were a concerted attack against their ultra-capitalist philosophy, though actively delivering bombs to people who didn’t order them is not very “customer-centric” in any case. Obviously, Elena isn’t keen on this either but is also convinced that it can’t really be their fault because they have strict and dehumanising security measures in place preventing the workers from bringing in anything inessential. Even after she works out that the bomber has actually warned them that there are 12 bombs out there, she wilfully withholds the evidence from law enforcement to avoid damaging their share prices while trying to minimise business interruption rather than do anything sensible like stop delivering people parcels until they’ve figured out what’s going on with the bombs, though the real mystery is why the police don’t really seem to have the power to do that and, in fact, end up working with the warehouse to check each parcel individually to keep the conveyor belts going.

From the aerial view, the city itself resembles the warehouse with the roads taking the place of the belts as delivery vans shuttle along them. Seventy-something delivery driver subcontractor Sano (Shohei Hino) once had a friend who used to say that they were the ones who kept the country running. Yacchan became the number one driver largely because he took 10 minutes to eat his lunch and worked every hour god sent for dwindling pay with the implication that his gruelling schedule contributed to his early death. Sano’s son Wataru (Shôhei Uno) has just started working with him on the van after being laid off from an electronics job. They made quality washing machines that were designed to be efficient and to last, but of course they couldn’t compete with cheaper brands so they went bust.

Elena berates herself for being “too Japanese” for the American company which is to say that she takes pride in her work. That’s not to say that everything about the American business culture is bad as she encourages her assistant, Ko (Hikari Mitsushima), to call her Elena and to feel free to speak his mind rather than equivocate to avoid causing offence. But despite their “customer-centric” approach, it’s clear that the company puts profits above all else and treats its workers, who are not actually employees, poorly, without concern for their wellbeing. Yagi (Sadao Abe), the boss of logistics first Sheep Express which is the prime courier for Daily Fast, laments that he’d love to hire more drivers to help them through this crisis but he can’t because they’re always squeezing his budget and no one will work for their terrible rates except for those who, like Sheep Express itself, have no other options and will have put up with it because they’re dependent on Daily Fast. And because they’re dependent on Daily Fast, it means we all have to keep buying stuff we don’t really want or need just keep the belts going because we’re terrified about what will happen if they stop.

There is a direct comparison between Wataru’s well-made washing machines and the cheap and fast consumerist model that’s gradually taken over that suggests things like craftsmanship and integrity have gone out the window in a world where no one really bothers to go the last mile anymore, though it’s his steadfast engineering that eventually saves the day while even Elena comes to rethink her career trajectory and advises the drivers to strike and end this culture of exploitation because it turns out Daily Fast needs them more than they need Daily Fast. But maybe we don’t really need Daily Fast either, and we’re as much to blame for letting them give us what we think we want without really considering what that actually means. Perhaps a “customer-centric” society’s not all it’s cracked up to be, especially when workers and consumers are often the same people stuck on conveyor belts knowing there’s only one way to stop them.

Last Mile screens 19th June as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Hakkenden (八犬伝, Fumihiko Sori, 2024)

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Kyokutei Bakin thinks he’s a hack who writes inconsequential pulp that will be forgotten faster than yesterday’s headlines. He’d never believe that people hundreds of years later would still be talking about his work. Yet he may have a point in his conviction that people crave simple stories where good triumphs over evil specifically because the real world is not really like that and a lot of the time the bad guys end up winning. But does that mean then that all his stories are “lies” and he’s irresponsible for depicting the world not the way that it is but the way he wants it to be? 

Fumihiko Sori’s Hakkenden (八犬伝) is on one level an adaptation of the famous tale probably most familiar to international audiences as The Legend of the Eight Samurai, and also a story of its writing and the private doubts and fears of its author. In dramatising the tale, Sori plays fantasy to the max and revels in Bakin’s outlandishness. An unusually picky Hokusai (Seiyo Uchino), Bakin’s best and he claims only friend and unwilling collaborator, points out that his use of guns is anachronistic because they didn’t come to Japan until 60 or 70 years after the story takes place but Bakin doesn’t care. He says people don’t notice things like that and all they really care about is that good triumphs in the end, so he’ll throw in whatever he feels like to make a better story. In any case, the tale revolves around magical orbs, evil witches, dog gods and good fairies, so if you’re worrying about there being guns before there should be, this isn’t the story for you. 

Hokusai is also shocked that Bakin has never been to the place where the story is set, but as he tells him it all happened long ago and far away so going there now would be pointless. Even so, Hokusai needs to see what he draws which is why he spends half his life on the road costing him relationships with his family. Whatever else anyone might say about him, and he admits himself to being a “difficult” person, Bakin is very close to his family even if his wife yells at him all the time for being rude to influential people and not making any money when he could have just taken over her family’s clog-making business rather than carry on with this writing malarkey. His biggest ambition is that his son become a doctor to a feudal lord and thereby restore their samurai status which on one level points to a kind of conservatism that doesn’t matter to Hokusai and singles Bakin out as a tragic figure because the age of the samurai is nearing its end anyway. 

In his fantasy, however, he hints at and undoes, up to a point, injustices inflicted on women in the romance between Shino (Keisuke Watanabe) and Hamaji (Yuumi Kawai) who is almost forced into a marriage with a wealthy man because of her adoptive parents’ greed but is finally revealed to be a displaced princess and returned to her father who is thereby redeemed for having accidentally killing his other daughter in a mistaken attempt to control her after accidentally promising her in marriage to a dog god without really thinking about what he was saying. A neat parallel is drawn in a brief mention of Hokusai’s artist daughter Oi and Bakin’s daughter-in-law Omichi (Haru Kuroki) who did not receive an education and is almost illiterate but finally helps him to complete the story by transcribing it in Chinese characters he teaches her as they go after he loses his sight.

As his literary success increases, Bakin’s own fortunes both improve and decline. He becomes wealthier and moves to nicer houses in samurai neighbourhoods, but his son Shizugoro’s (Hayato Isomura) health declines and he never opens his own clinic like he planned while remaining committed to the idea that his father is actually a great, unappreciated artist. In a way, completing the story gives Bakin a way to say the world could be kind and just even if it has not always been so to him. He needs to maintain the belief in a better world in order to go living even if he feels it to be inauthentic while his life itself is a kind of fiction. On a trip to the theatre, he ends up seeing Yotsuya Kaidan and is at once hugely impressed and incredibly angry. The world that Nanboku sees is the opposite of his own. People are selfish and greedy. The bad are rewarded and the innocent are punished. Yet perhaps this is the “reality” of the way the world really is, where as his work is a wishful fantasy. All he’s doing is running away from the truth. But then, as his son’s friend tells him, if a man devotes himself to the ideal of justice and believes in it all his life, then it becomes a reality and ceases to be fiction. There is something quite poignant about the dog soldiers coming to take Bakin to the better world he dreamed of where bad things happen but good always triumphs in the end, which has now indeed become a reality if only for him.

Hakkenden screens 13th June as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Detective Kiên: The Headless Horror (Thám Tử Kiên: Kỳ Án Không Đầu, Victor Vũ, 2025)

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Five years ago, headless corpses started washing up on the shores of the lake. Believing them to have been victims of the Drowning Ghost, the villagers simply accepted it as a part of their life and carried on as best they could. But Miss Moon (Ngọc Diệp) isn’t prepared to that and when her niece, Nga, goes missing with only her slipper left behind at the lake, she will stop at nothing to find her. 

Luckily, she knows a top detective, Kien (Tín Nguyễn), whom she met when he arrested her former husband for corruption, which is how she knows he’s very good at his job. In any case, Detective Kien arrives to bring a semblance of order to this 19th-century rural town ruled over by a governor who very much seems like he too is probably not really on the level. Though he doesn’t seem to put much stock in talk of the Drowning Ghost, Kien quickly finds himself plagued by weird visions of terrifying monsters and is respectful of the local shaman, who proves very helpful, even if continuing to look for more rational answers.

What he uncovers, however, is that the village can be unkind and judgemental. Nga was rendered an outcast because her mother left the family to be with another man not long after she was born. The other children wouldn’t play with her when she was a child and she’s still regarded as something of a pariah, while her father, Lord Vinh, has always resented her as a symbol of his humiliation. Miss Moon was the closest thing she had to a mother, though she had to leave her too when she was married to the corrupt governor only to return years later when Nga was already a grown woman. 

Detective Kien is open to the idea that Nga too may have simply left with a lover, but the truth is a little more complicated. The problem is that under the feudal order, no one is really free and the younger generation is forever oppressed by the older. Marriages are arranged in childhood and rooted in hopes for social advancement. Marrying a man with prospects is one way a woman can gain status and power, and some will go to great lengths to pursue it. Miss Moon, now no longer married, is something of an exception and operating outside of these patriarchal social codes in asserting herself to look for Nga when it seems no one else will. Detective Kien cautions her not to go with him because the villagers may gossip if they see her walking alone with a man, but she doesn’t really care about that and follows him anyway at which point he is forced to accept her rather than waste time arguing. 

The case of a man who complains he had no choice other than to become a thief after being falsely accused of stealing because the social stigma made him unemployable further emphasises the ways those in power misuse it. Even the mysterious headless deaths at the lake may have a connection with an event 30 years previously in which a whole family were beheaded after being falsely accused of treason while standing up to the oppression of feudal lords. The wealthy elites act with a kind of entitlement in which they bully those below them to affirm their own status. So it is with Lady Tuyet who was seen arguing with Nga after refusing to pay for an order at her fabric stall claiming that it was incorrect. The two women are portrayed as a mirrors of each other, but where Lady Tuyet is haughty, jealous and violent, Nga is gentle and honest. When told she can’t have the only thing she wants in life, she fights back but only for the mildest compromise only for Tuyet to react with rage unable to accept that some may prefer Nga over her.

Detective Kien does what he can to right this wrong while trying to find out what’s happened to Nga and, if possible, save her. He gets a tremendous sword fight after tracking down the secondary villain while even Lady Moon has a hilariously unladylike tussle with her own opposite number as she tries to rescue Nga. The chemistry between them as they investigate the mystery together adds a charming and often quite funny touch to what is otherwise a horrifying tale of heartless cruelty and murder in which the “evil” in the village turns out to be something quite different from that first imagined and possibly much more difficult to exorcise.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Old Woman with the Knife (파과, Min Kyu-dong, 2025)

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There’s an acute vulnerability that comes with ageing. It’s not vanity or mortality so much as your body betraying you as even once simple tasks become increasingly more difficult. When you’re an assassin, a loss of speed or dexterity is cause for concern and Hornclaw (Lee Hye-young) is beginning to feel her age. Her hands have begun to shake uncontrollably and as she admits to a stray dog she finds herself taking in, you forget things when you’re old. There are those in the office who have begun to notice that Hornclaw is not quite as she was and view her as a thorn in their side, a relic of an earlier era preventing them from moving on into a hyper-capitalistic future.

The original Korean title of Min Kyu-dong’s The Old Woman with the Knife (파과 Pagwa) is “bruised fruit”. An old woman working at a greengrocers throws in an extra peach for free because it’s damaged and people won’t buy them, which is silly, in her view, because they’re the best ones and always taste the sweetest. On that level, the film is about ageism and the ways older people are often written off as past their prime, but on another also about Hornclaw’s bruised but not quite buried heart and the hidden empathy that defines her life even as a contract killer. It may also in its way refer to her opposite number, Bullfight (Kim Sung-cheol), a hotshot young assassin recruited by her less ethically minded boss Sohn (Kim Kang-woo) who despite his sadistic cruelty is really just a hurt little boy looking for a maternal figure in the legend that surrounds Hornclaw. 

She was a stray dog herself until someone took her in and gave her a home, much as Bullfight is now looking for a place to belong. Hornclaw comes to identify with the dog she rescues, Braveheart, because as the vet says it’s awful to be abandoned when you’re old and sick, but perhaps also when you’re young and lonely. As her mentor taught her, having something to protect also makes you vulnerable while as you age the people you’ve lost return. Like her underling Gadget who sees visions of his late daughter, Hornclaw too is drawn back towards the past in seeing echoes of Ryu (Kim Mu-yeol), the man who saved her, in altruistic vet Dr Kang (Yeon Woo-jin).

There may be something disingenuous in the insistence that each of us must save the world coming from a band of supposedly ethical hitmen who only knock off “bugs” that are actively harmful for society. After all, who is making those decisions as to what constitutes “harmfulness”? Everyone Hornclaw takes out is indeed morally indefensible, but as she cautions Bullfight, when you start seeing people as insects you become an insect yourself. Sohn wants to reform the agency to take on more lucrative contract killing jobs such as taking out a wealthy man whose only crime appears to be being a cheating louse, while Hornclaw insists on sticking to their principles and only carrying out missions of justice which are the cases Sohn keeps turning down like that of a religious leader who has been abusing his followers. 

The vision of Hornclaw as a resentful avenger echoes that of Meiko Kaji in the Female Prisoner Scorpion series. Often caught in silhouette, she too wears a wide-brimmed hat that hides her eyes and aids anonymity, while she at one point gives her real name as “Seol-hwa” which means “snow flower” and hints at Lady Snowblood but also to her own moment of rebirth after being discovered half-dead in the snow and rescued by Ryu who gave her a purpose and sense of self-worth, not to mention a home. The irony is that Hornclaw ends up creating a monster because of her own repressed emotionality and is then unable to understand why this figure from the past has returned to her because her way of seeing the world only allows her to interpret it in terms of vengeance.

But what her new mission tells her is that having something to protect is in many ways the point and the very thing that gives her an edge over those who have nothing left to lose. Wresting back control over the agency, she vows to continue their mission as it’s always been rather than allow Sohn’s amoral capitalism to win out over justice and righteousness. Truth be told, the superhuman quality of Hornclaw’s movements is slightly at odds with the otherwise realistic tone of the rest of the film in which, as the secretary puts it, the weight of all the years is beginning to take its toll. But ironically it’s in closing her escape route that she finds true liberation in putting her ideas into practice in a more direct way while opening herself up to the world around her. There’s still life in the woman with the knife yet, and there are still plenty of bad guys out there along with a stack of files in need of attention, which is all to say retirement is going to have to wait.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Forte (포르테, Kimbo Kim, 2025)

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A worried policeman nervously asks Yeonji (Im Chae-young) if the rumours are true. They say that everyone who works at Studio Forte ends up going mad or dying, but Yeonji has only just started working there herself and it’s too early for her to say whether that really is the case, though it’s true enough that the building has an eerie energy. Even a visiting film director remarks that the atmosphere is unusual, though it doesn’t seem to have put him off returning. The director, Jeonghwa (Lee Jung-eun), is one of the best after all which is why Yeonji took this job in the first place.

On arriving at recording studio Forte, Yeonji remarks that it seems like a great place for inspiration but the building itself is anything but inspiring. A block of concrete and glass, it stands ominously and incongruously in the middle of nature as a defiantly manmade structure intent on disrupting the natural order. It feels oppressive, rigid, and constraining. Not the sort of environment that best serves creative impulses despite the well-appointed interior with its modern design and copious light from the large windows. 

Yeonji walks the surrounding forest in wonder, but at the same time there’s something odd about it in a bewitching sort of way. Her colleagues seem to be haunting her, seemingly standing around and staring while she’s otherwise disappointed by the lack of faith Jeonghwa seems to have in her. At the first team briefin,g she neglects to give Yeonji anything to do and then tells her to help her colleague Haejoon finish his section of the score for an upcoming film. Only Haejoon already seems to be having strangely. He looks ill, and sometimes doesn’t even turn up for their work sessions to the point that Yeonji ends up working with another colleague, Dojin (Cha Se-jin), to get everything finished on time. 

“Everything that happened here is real.” Haejoon later says cryptically after screaming that something is “here” and means him harm. Yeonji begins having visions of the forest and an oily, muddy figure along with images of death and fire. In any case, even without the existential dread of lingering supernatural threat, it’s easy to see why this place might drive someone mad. Yeonji tries asking Dojin what’s happening with credits on the movie and he brushes the question off, replying only that Jeonghwa will sort it out, which sort of implies only she will actually be credited. When the director arrives for a test screening, Jeonghwa treats Yeonji like the tea girl and explains that she’s “new”, but the director asks for her opinion anyway and she gives it, honestly, though it contradicts Jeonghwa’s. The producer (Cho Sueun) claims she could tell that Yeonji wrote the tail end of the music because it was “different”, which gives her the feeling that her work may be good after all and that Jeonghwa is playing it too safe with her conventional approach. 

Though she had been somewhat mousy and earnest on her arrival, dressed in an elegant if constraining outfit, Yeonji gradually becomes bolder and wilder. She lets her hair down and dresses in darker, looser clothing while often talking back to Jeonghwa and contributing her own contradictory opinions. But in the end none of it matters. She realises that Jeonghwa is basically exploiting her, getting her to ghostwrite the score while taking all the credit. The director makes a drunken pass at her, and while confused by her reaction explains that this is her big opportunity. Both Jeonghwa and himself only got to where they are by playing the game, which means submitting oneself to this kind of quid pro quo. 

It stands to reason that Yeonji’s barely suppressed desires would eventually burst through as they eventually do in the bloody climax building towards a crescendo of emotion in which Yeonji appears to become smaller and smaller behind the piano as the music overcomes her as if she were possessed. Only now has she released her creative freedom, playing Jeonghwa’s piano with a furious abandon that threatens to burn the whole edifice to the gound. Drawing on 1970s folk horror in it its aesthetic the film has an intriguingly eerie, surreal sensibility deepened by its own unsetting score as the evil haunting the studio begins to make its presence felt if only in Yeonji’s mounting resentment towards an industry that does indeed view her as little more than an inconvenient ghost in the machine.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Square (광장, Kim Bo-sol, 2025)

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A young man with blond hair and blue eyes stands out in North Korea, though Isak speaks the language fluently, if with a Southern inflection, and tries to make friends with those around him but is generally kept at arms’ length by those who struggle to understand his motivations. As his boss tells him, foreigners are destined to be lonely, but that goes for the local community too. Constant observation has a curiously isolating quality, as if you were always under a spotlight with every word and gesture scrutinised for potential signs of dissidence, though ironically you are never really alone.

Set in the secretive Communist state, Kim Bo-sol’s melancholy animation The Square (광장, Gwangjang) is in many ways about the dehumanising effects of a surveillance state and the pressures of living in a society in which it becomes impossible to communicate with other people because every interaction has the potential to destroy your life. Everyone you meet is a potential enemy and betrayal lurks around every corner. To begin with, the perspective is Isak’s. He looks at North in the same way we do. Scenes familiar from North Korean travelogues such as the underground station and passages with social realist artwork featuring soldiers smashing capitalism dominate, but he also as an abstracted perspective in trying to reconcile this place with that of his Korean grandmother who followed his grandfather to Sweden before the Korean War. A Swede should eat Swedish food, she ironically tells him in a letter included with a care package full of tinned sausages, through he washes them down a few glasses of soju.

He tries to share them with Myeong-jung, ostensibly his interpreter though Isak is in the North to work as a translator himself and doesn’t really need one despite Myeong’s advanced skills in both English and Scandinavian languages. Myeong-jung always rudely rebuffs his attempts at friendship and appears displeased when Isak tells him he’s trying to get his stay extended. This is partly because of the tense situation, it would be difficult for Myeong-jung to be on friendly terms with a foreign diplomat without arousing suspicion, but also because Myeong-jung seems to have developed some genuine affection for Isak which makes his real job, monitoring him for signs of “harmful” behaviour, much more difficult. Myeong-jung lives in the apartment across the courtyard and has a camera trained on Isak’s window. Like the hero of the Conversation or the Lives of Others he’s become invested in Isak and has begun doctoring his reports to protect him after becoming aware that he has become romantically involved with a young woman who directs traffic for a living, Bok-joo. 

Asked why he tried to help him, Myeong-jung replies that perhaps he was just “lonely” though there is something of a homoerotic tension in his relationship with Isak. After Isak drinks too much on realising that the woman he loves has been disappeared, Myeong-jung steps out of the shadows to rescue him and Isak rests his head on Myeong-jung’s back as they ride home, just as Bok-joo had while riding behind Isak on his bicycle. If that really were the case, his love is as futile as Bok-joo’s or perhaps more so. In any case, he’s right when he calls Isak naive. If their affair were exposed, Bok-joo could be in a lot of danger. His pursuit of her is selfish, and perhaps if he really loved her, the most sensible thing would be to avoid seeing her again. Isak seems put out when Bok-joo tells him she won’t leave with him because she doesn’t want to leave her country or her family for the complete unknown, but were she to do so it would also be selfish. Her family would be made to pay in her absence.

Then again, the worst thing that happens to anyone in this film is being exiled from Pyongyang and other than their loneliness, they do not seem to be particularly unhappy in the North and have no real desire to leave though arguably that’s because they are already resigned its futility. Isak asks Myeong-jung why he doesn’t apply to travel with his advanced language skills but Myeong-jung brushes the question off and replies he’s barely been out of the city let alone another country though his interest in Isak maybe a reflection of his desire for the world outside of the North. Isak, by contrast, asks himself if he could stay in the North forever to live with Bok-joo and make the reverse decision his grandmother once made though in the end the decision is not really his to make. He has to accept that love is an impossibility under such a repressive regime let alone love between a citizen and a foreigner and that the division will forever keep them apart. Whatever choice his grandmother had, Isak does not have any. But despite the melancholy setting of Pyongyang in the snow, there is a kind of warmth to be found that these connections were made at all even as Myeong-jung spins his wheels, riding in circles like Isak and listening to the DiscMan Isak left behind like an echo of a far off freedom.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Winter in Sokcho (Hiver à Sokcho, Koya Kamura, 2024)

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A young woman is awakened from a kind of spiritual hibernation by the unlikely arrival of an incredibly brusque French artist in Koya Kamura’s adaptation of the Elisa Shua Dusapin novel, Winter in Sokcho. Like many, Soo-ha (Bella Kim) is waiting for spring, though it’s less this place that has her feeling trapped than an inability to find her place within it, or indeed anywhere, as she struggles with her own identity and the unanswered questions about the father she never knew.

In any case, it seems clear that Soo-ha as begun to resent herself on some level and is unhappy in her long-term relationship with a high school boyfriend, Joon-ho (Gong Do-yu), an aspiring model. It’s not clear why shy returned to Sokcho after studying French and Korean literature in Seoul, but she otherwise lives her life in peaceful monotony working at a small boarding house where the owner, Mr Park (Ryu Tae-ho), has recently lost his wife and is therefore in need to practical and emotional support. One night a week she spends with her mother (Park Mi-hyeon), a fishmonger specialising in fugu, though there’s a frostiness and frustration to their relationship in which neither seems quite satisfied with the other’s life choices. 

Soo-ha repeatedly asks her mother why she never attempted to look for her father, a Frenchman who worked in the fishing industry, though her mother doesn’t really want to talk about, it leaving Soo-ha with unresolved doubts and questions about her past. Her interest in French literature may be a way of trying to explore this side of herself in the absence of a guide, though the attempts at connection a frustratingly one-sided. When a Frenchman suddenly turns up at the boarding house, Mr Park encourages her to use her skills “the one time they’re useful”, though she herself is reluctant, giving Yan (Roschdy Zem) the smallest room in the adjacent annexe like a thought paused for later.

Yan asks her to show him her Sokcho, but as he later says, he’s just a tourist and like the father she never met is just passing through. There may be something a little exploitative in his working visit for though he’s come to draw inspiration from this place, he is willing to give almost nothing to it. He refuses to eat the food that Soo-ha cooks at the boarding house and instead badgers her to take him to restaurants while finding little to like there either. As his incredibly outdated, paper driving licence isn’t valid in Korea, he talks her into taking him to the DMZ which seems to echo the liminal space that exists between them. Soo-ha talks about how sad it is that people still yearn to be reunited with their relatives all these years later, though Yan is indifferent and later mentions a son that it seems he may rarely see. But as he tells her, she may be looking in the wrong place if it’s a deeper connection that she’s seeking or searching for something that will unlock the secrets of herself.

There are reasons for her to feel displaced even in Sokcho given that her unusual height makes her stand out as the nickname “beanpole,” makes plain. Her mother nags her for never eating properly or enjoying her food which may be another expression of her listlessness, but also reminds her not to eat too much and get fat. Joon-ho tells her get plastic surgery, as do a few other people, and though it’s even more insensitive and troubling given that Soo-ha’s father was French. It’s as if they’re telling her to erase these parts of herself, as if she were not “fully” Korean and should become so by adjusting her jawline and the shape of her eyes. Soo-ha’s internal questioning is expressed in brief animated sequences in the style of Yan’s ink paintings as she tries to conjure the image of herself.

There’s a woman at the guest house who’s there recovering from extensive plastic surgery that will give her a whole new face. She sits in the dining area, simultaneously anonymous and instantly identifiable by her bandaged face. Her story is never revealed, so it’s impossible to say whether her decision was motivated by a desire for conformity and conventional beauty or to become more herself and have her outside reflect the person she feels herself to be. Sokcho is also undergoing a process of renewal, as high-rise office blocks spring up everywhere and the traditional quality of the streets disappears as if this urbanisation were creeping up on Soo-ha and taking from her even the anchor of this place which no longer quite exists. 

Joon-ho assumes they will move back to Seoul together when his career takes off because “who doesn’t want to get out of Sokcho?” But Soo-ha may be beginning to feel that perhaps this place might suit her after all. A few cosmetic upgrades could breathe new life into the old-fashioned boarding house and brighten an otherwise gloomy existence. While showing Yan around town she describes a local legend, or perhaps concocts one for the occasion, about a bird who wanted to fly above the clouds but couldn’t. She, meanwhile, may have begun to soar amid the arrival of spring, finally ready to break out of her self-imposed winter in having discovered a way to become more herself rather than what others perceive her be.

Trailer (English subtitles)

A Century in Sound (百年の音色, Nick Dwyer & Tu Neill, 2024)

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Listening cafes are a phenomenon particular to Japan in which the music is the draw rather than the quality of whatever refreshments are available. Indeed, as Nick Dwyer and Tu Neill’s documentary A Century in Sound (百年の音色, Hyakunen no neiro) makes plain, they are spaces of community and identity in which people with similar tastes come together even if, as at classical music cafe Lion, they sit in silence to better absorb the music. Exploring three such cafes which are themselves a dying breed, the film also examines Japan’s complicated 20th century history and the shifting tastes that accompanied it.

This is evident in the first cafe visited, Cafe Lion, which opened in 1926 and catered to a then new interest in European classical music which in Japan was viewed as something new and exciting. The nation was still emerging from Meiji-era transition and at that time, before the war, entering a moment of fierce internationalism and creativity. The current manager is in her 80s and relates her own memories of another Tokyo before the fire bombing along with the ways the city changed afterwards. Cafe Lion was among the first buildings to be rebuilt and they pride themselves on the quality of their sound system, even deciding to stop serving food because it was considered too noisy and got in the way of the customers’ ability to hear the music. Her son will be taking over the business, so she’s hopeful that this tradition will survive and they’ll be able to continue spreading the love of classical music in the wider community.

The reason these spaces originated was that in the beginning records and sound equipment were expensive so people couldn’t afford to buy their own and would request music they wanted to hear at a cafe instead. Jazz Kissa Eigakan didn’t open until 1978, but though it may have arrived earlier, the owner, Yoshida, attributes the popularity of jazz to a desire for freedom in the post-war society as exemplified by the protests against the security treaty with the Americans and subsequent anti-Vietnam War movement. A former film director, he found the same energy in the Japanese New Wave and opened the cafe to share his love of jazz and film even going so far as making it his life’s work to construct his own sound system to get the best possible sound for his customers that won’t leave them feeling tired or overwhelmed. He also hosts film screenings demonstrating the various ways these spaces have become community hubs that provide a refuge for people with similar interests along with a place to relax and be welcomed in an otherwise hectic city. 

That seems to be the draw for Atsuko, a regular at rock music cafe Bird Song which mainly plays Japanese music from the 70s and 80s. In her teenage years, she’d been a frequent visitor to famed rock cafe Blackhawk before going travelling and then settling down to have a family. Now regretting that she gave up her love of music, she’s returned to Bird Song to rediscover it along with another community of like-minded regulars. While Yoshida discusses the era of the student protests, the owner of Bird Song cites Happy End’s 1971 album as a turning point in not only in Japanese music but culturally in moving towards the post-Asama-Sanso society and the consumerist victory that led to the Bubble Era. He posits City Pop as the sound of consumerism and while looking back on his time as an ad exec in the era of high prosperity does not appear to think they were particularly good times or at least that they lacked a kind of spirituality that his customers are looking to rediscover in music. 

Dwyer and Neill make good use stock footage and films as well as artful composition to compensate for the talking heads while fully conveying the richness and warmth of these spaces along with their welcoming qualities. Though it’s obviously much easier now to access music wherever and whenever one wants, the cafes provide an optimal listening environment that no home system can replicate while simultaneously providing a place where people can come together and shut out the outside world. Though they may be dying out in a society driven by convenience, the owner of Bird Song has to work a second job as a security guard just to keep the lights on, the cafes represent the best of what a city can be in recreating, as one customer describes it, a village mentality of care and community built on the back of a love of music.

A Century in Sound Escape screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Escape (逃走, Masao Adachi, 2025)

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Satoshi Kirishima’s incongruously smiling face was a familiar presence across on the nation for over 40 years until he finally made a deathbed confession revealing his true identity as a man wanted in connection with a series of bombings in the 1970s and that he’d successfully evaded the authorities until the very end of his life. What apparently appealed to director Masao Adachi, a former Japanese Red Army member, was the question of why he chose to come clean rather than enjoy his secret victory by taking the truth to his grave.

That might be a minor irony at the centre of the Escape (逃走, Toso) in that Satoshi (Kanji Furutachi) is essentially in flight from himself only to finally escape from his torment by accepting his original identity. As a young man, Satoshi had been a member of a left-wing cell that wanted to awaken the population at large to the ways Japanese society had not changed in continuing to discriminate against the Ainu, those from the Ryukyu Islands, Koreans and other minorities while modern corporations enact another kind of capitalistic imperialism built on exploitation. It was for this reason that they embarked on a bombing campaign targeting large companies, but due to a miscalculation with the explosives, the bombing of the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Building in 1974 proved more destructive than intended resulting in loss of life. 

Satoshi was not directly involved in that bombing which was carried out by another cell but was wanted for allegedly setting up a bomb in the Economic Research Institute of Korea which did not result in any casualties. Details of the real Satoshi’s life during his 40 years on the run are thin on the ground, but Adachi paints him as a man torn apart by internalised conflict and unable to make peace with the sense of guilt he feels for those who killed even if he was not directly responsible. The film’s Japanese title is a kind pun in that it’s a homonym which can mean both “escape” and “struggle” which for Satoshi become one and the same. He’s in flight from his younger self while simultaneously preoccupied with how he can continue the revolution in the name of his friends who were not so lucky. Adachi structures the later part of the film as a kind of self-criticism session as Satoshi engages in various dialogues with himself notably as a Buddhist priest interrogating him about his worldly attachments. 

These worldly attachments also obviously separate him from his true calling to revolution including a non-relationship with a woman he meets at a concert venue and is later told has two previous convictions for marriage fraud. Most of the people around him are also leading double lives or harbouring secrets of their own including a man that Satoshi once worked with whom he finds out years later was also another former member of the far left movement living life on the run. The implication is that this sense of isolation and aloneness in wilfully having to suppress his identity became a kind of prison, but that it also liberates Satoshi to a more intensive examination of the self. 

To that extent, his escape is also from contemporary Japan and an act of resistance towards an increasingly capitalistic and indifferent society. Hoping to stay below the radar, Satoshi works a series of casual construction jobs chiefly because of their anonymity. There was plenty to be built in this era and jobs like these were plentiful, usually offering basic accommodation in a company dorm. He experiences the hardships of the working man first-hand and lives a life of asceticism in which live music and drinking are his only outlets. “We’re all dying to survive,” he reflects, “trying to go home,” though he no longer has a home to go to and has become estranged from his previous identity. He meditates on fallen comrades who either took their own lives or spent them in prison while convincing himself that he’s continuing the struggle on their behalf even in the act of running away in perfecting his “escape”. Though Adachi’s approach is less sentimental than Banmei Takahashi’s in I am Kirishima, he is not immune to sentiment as in his depiction of Satoshi’s final escape from life as the ultimate form of liberation even as his ghost proclaims he will continue to fight, but nevertheless introduces a meta commentary of self-examination in Satoshi’s constant questioning if his long years of struggle have really been worth it.

Escape screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.