Tag: 2020s

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trailer (English subtitles)

Teki Cometh (敵, Daihachi Yoshida, 2024)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Ne Zha 2 (哪吒之魔童闹海, Jiaozi, 2025)

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

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

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

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

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

Ne Zha is in UK cinemas now courtesy of CineAsia.

UK trailer (English subtitles)

Harbin (하얼빈, Woo Min-ho, 2024)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

International trailer (English subtitles)

Silent City Driver (Чимээгүй хотын жолооч, Sengedorj Janchivdorj, 2024)

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Myagmar (Tuvshinbayar Amartuvshin) asks a teenage monk if he thinks atonement is possible. The monk, Sodoo, tells him that he thinks it is, but that it’s difficult and not many people can achieve it. The irony of Myagmar’s life is that he becomes a kind of ferryman, delivering the deceased to a kind of liberation he will never find while trapped in the eternal hell of Ulaanbaatar. Much less upbeat than his previous film, The Sales Girl, Sengedorj Janchivdorj’s melancholy character study finds its solitary hero consumed alternately by guilt and rage while trapped within a world of constant unfairness and inequality.

As Myagmar tries to explain, he’s not disabled, merely nervous though his stammer turns out to stem from extensive beatings during the 14 years he spent in “Dad’s house”, or prison, that have left him with brain damage and the melancholy stillness of one already dead. As he tells the friendly coffin maker at the funeral home where he is eventually employed as a hearse driver, he applied for countless other jobs but no one would give him one because of his criminal record and outsider status. Having lost his only living relative in his mother who died while he was inside, Myagmar lives alone with a pack of stray dogs that he’s taken in and cares for. He explains to the coffin maker’s daughter Saruul (Narantsetseg Ganbaatar) that some of them probably had families, but were abandoned because they got old or they were sick and it costs too much to care for a sick dog. Mostly though, they’re strays, like him, with no home or place to belong.

Myagmar extends this same kindness to Saruul having become captivated by her on seeing her come to collect her father from work. Coffin maker Sodnom thinks she’s a medical student, but Myagmar soon discovers that she works in the seedy underbelly of Ulaanbataar’s sex industry and is also at the centre of a political scandal involving a leaked tape of a politician said to have been uploaded by the woman herself as a last resort and means of revenge with a personal rather than political motivation. Myagmar follows Saruul around in a way which might seem creepy, but is emblematic of his shyness and lack of confidence in himself. Though Saruul eventually responds to his kindness and begins to return some of his affection, it’s largely because they recognise each other as two people who are trapped in this unending hell, he in his sense of futility and the trauma of his incarceration, and she within sex work and abuse. 

At a particularly low point, Saruul tells Myagmar that she wants to go to “that place”, the hell that haunts him though he no longer dreams. He tells her that it is not somewhere she wants to go, that there is no light there, no day and no night. It is a living death in which even his name was taken from him and replaced by a number, as Suruul’s will also be in a moment of grim irony. But all it seems to do is reinforce the fact that this is not so different from the life Saruul lives now. They already live in hell and there is only one means of escape. The monk, Sodoo, tells Myagmar that the best revenge is forgiveness and seeking vengeance won’t change anything, but he cannot overcome his sense of rage towards an unjust society. Still, Sodoo tells him that he did the right thing even if offers little sense of comfort to the melancholy hearse driver charged with transporting souls from this world to the next.

Sengedorj Janchivdorj lends the contemporary city a melancholy quality, a dark and lonely place peopled by the abandoned and downtrodden. Even Sodoo doesn’t quite know how old he is and marks his years by the day in which he was found. The more Myagmar begins to rebuild his life, the more he has to lose and the less it looks like he will be allowed to find happiness or the atonement he seeks for his crime. A gentle soul consumed by rage, he nevertheless has “capable hands” to which to entrust this justice and is capable of creating great beauty such as the stone lions he begins carving for the funeral home, but otherwise maintains a purgatorial existence unable to make a home for himself in a world of such constant cruelties.

Silent City Driver screens in Chicago 6th April as part of the 19th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Manok (이반리 장만옥, Lee Yu-jin, 2025)

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When Manok returns to her rural hometown in the wake of her mother’s death, the irony is that some accuse her of running away from the humiliation of the implosion of her life in Seoul, but in other ways she has unfinished business in Iban-ri and this time she isn’t going to let them drive her away. Lee Yu-jin’s warmhearted dramedy is at heart about a love of community, or rather communities that might not at first seem compatible or even mutually exclusive but are then integrated by the sheer force of Manok’s determination.

Now in her 50s, Manok (Yang Mal-bok) had owned a popular lesbian bar in Seoul and was at the forefront of queer activism in the city hosting the annual after party for the Pride parade for the last 20 years. But times have changed and the young queer community has begun to find new places to root itself while Manok struggles to adjust to the generational shift taking place. Finding out on the same day that her mother has died and her brothers don’t really want her at the funeral, she’s losing the parade after party and without it her bar will probably go out of business, and her long-term partner Geum-ja (Kim Jung-young) knew all along but didn’t say anything out of fear of her reaction, sends her into frenetic spiral in which she abruptly leaves town and decamps to the house her mother inexplicably left her back in Iban-ri.

Manok had left town to live a more authentic life having tried to accommodate herself to conventionality through marriage but finding it unbearable. She is not exactly welcomed back with open arms as her brothers repeatedly blame her for being a “nasty lesbian,” and using it as a justification for increasing their share of the inheritance to cut her out. Her ex-husband, meanwhile, has become the city chief and rules the local area with an iron hand while misusing his position to exploit the local community. Manok ends up coming to the rescue of his child, Jae-yeon, whose transgender identity he repeatedly rejects while Jae-yeon faces discrimination and harassment from his schoolmates.

Jae-yeon is in many ways the reason that Manok can’t simply leave again and try to reconstruct her life in Seoul because nothing’s really changed in Iban-ri and Jae-yeon is facing all the same problems she once did but without the well-earned armour the middle-aged Manok has managed to forge for herself that allows her to stare down injustice with a steely gaze. Then again, back in Seoul, younger members of the community had accused her of being self-aggrandising, that she was overfond of justifying her actions as being for their benefit when really she simply enjoyed the status of being a community leader. In Iban-ri, however, she gains some time to reflect and truly becomes a part of this community that she again wants to save, this time by challenging her ex to win the position of city chief herself and enact change through kindness and solidarity. While the young leave for the cities, many left behind are elderly and are in their way just as exiled as Manok with the city chief failing in his obligations to look after them.

Later Manok says that her ambition is to make Iban-ri a place where no one is lonely or feels the kind of isolation she once felt through being rejected by those around her because of her sexuality. As her ex pathetically tries to cling on to his patriarchal authority, Manok decides to do things the Iban-ri way by winning hearts and minds and eventually showing them that there’s nothing to fear as she too reoccupies her mother’s house with her partner in tow finally claiming her claiming her space in this place that had no place for her. As Geum-ja had said, Manok really does love her community and sets about making Iban-ri a happier and healthier town where people care for and about each other and no one is left behind. A warm and quirky exploration of small-town life and the power of authenticity the film’s infectious spirit is difficult to deny as the joy it finds in the queer identity even amid so much fear and hostility brokered by one woman’s determination not to back down because there are kids who need protecting in Iban-ri and they all they deserve a Manok in their lives.

Manok screened as part of this year’s BFI Flare.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Like A Rolling Stone (出走的决心, Yin Lichuan, 2024)

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A middle-aged woman’s decision to walk out on her abusive marriage and pursue a life of ultimate freedom on the road went viral in 2022 making her an accidental feminist icon in an overwhelmingly traditionalist and patriarchal culture. Yin Lichuan’s dramatisation of Su Min’s life, Like a Rolling Stone (出走的决心, chūzǒu de juéxīn), makes plain the various ways in which her life has been shaped by patriarchal forces that also continue to shape that of her daughter who is sympathetic to her mother’s plight but also perhaps still feeling herself entitled to her mother’s sacrifice while wary of making such a sacrifice herself.

As she says, Hong (Yong Mei) has been waiting a long time. A flashback to 1982 finds her as a fresh-faced teenager with hopes and dreams who wanted to go to university and travel the world. But her father pulls her out of school and forces her to work in a factory to support the family while devoting all their resources to her brother. She marries Dayong (Jiang Wu) to get away from her father’s oppression, chasing another kind of freedom but soon finding herself disappointed. In the present day we can see that Dayong is cruel and abusive. He continually runs Hong down, calls her stupid and lazy, and becomes violent when challenged. 

Hong has long wanted to leave but is prevented firstly by a sense of shame in going against conventional wisdom. When she’d tried to leave him before, her family refused to help her and in fact encouraged her to return to Dayong and put up with her mistreatment. Dayong had also frustrated her attempts to work so that she would have nowhere to go and no way of supporting herself if she left him while simultaneously taking advantage of her financially. The couple had separate finances since early in their marriage, but while Dayong doesn’t like Hong spending on things that make her happy, he often helps himself to her possessions declaring that everything belongs to the family. 

But Hong bites her tongue and does as she’s told because that’s what she’s been taught she’s supposed to do. She’s sacrificed all of herself for her family and has even been working unpaid for her brother for over three years only to see him become surly when she eventually asks for her backpay. Her daughter, Xiaoxue (Wu Qian) resents her father for the way he’s treated Hong and is supportive of her liberation but at the same time she also over relies on her asking her to cancel a trip to see her old friends to be around during her pregnancy and then again when first loses and then gains a better job but is afraid to ask for time off in case it ruins her chances of being kept on.

Hong asks her own mother why she treats her the way she does and continues to prioritise her brother while telling her must allow herself to be exploited to serve the family but she doesn’t have an answer for her. There’s certainly a greater understanding between Hong and Xiaoxue about the patriarchal structures in which they are both trapped. When she loses her job, Xiaoxue’s husband encourages her to stay home with the children just as Dayong had discouraged Hong from looking for work. Xiaoxue wants a job to avoid her mother’s fate of becoming trapped within the domestic environment with no time for herself. While her husband seems nicer and treats her better than Dayong has treated Hong, he is not necessarily that much better and still operates on a patriarchal mindset. He praises women for being superhuman, but in doing so suggests that the domestic sphere is a woman’s concern alone. It does not seem to occur to him that he could do his fair share or that the division of their labour could be more equal. 

Things may be better for Xiaoxue which was all that Hong wanted, but they are far from perfect and when push comes to shove she too just expects that her mother will sacrifice her own desires to suit Xiaoxue’s needs. Everyone keeps telling her to wait, but Hong waited to escape her father, to meet a “decent” man, for Xiaoxue to grow up, get married, and have children of her own, then for the children to start kindergarten. If she doesn’t leave now, there’ll be another reason why shouldn’t. There is something quite empowering about Hong’s gentle progression towards achieving her freedom beginning with getting her driving license in her 50s despite the misogynistic banter of the instructors. When she gets her car, Dayong immediately gets into the driver’s seat and it takes a little longer for her to assume her space, but as she says no one can stop her now. She won’t be bullied or belittled anymore, nor will she allow herself to be taken for granted or guilted into sacrificing herself for others who rarely sacrifice anything for her. One of a recent series of films addressing ongoing patriarchal oppression, Lin’s film is itself a way of fighting back against the idea that unhappiness is something you just have to accept as a woman as Hong begins living her best life out on the road, finally free and very much in the driving seat of her own life.

Like A Rolling Stone screened as part of the 19th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Summer’s Camera (여름의 카메라, Divine Sung, 2025)

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Summer can’t bring herself to press the shutter button on the last four exposures left on the unfinished roll of film her father left behind. Her unwillingness to do so and seeming abandonment of their shared passion for photography hints at her difficulty to come to terms with his passing along with her own sense of adolescent confusion. But just as her father had told her she would, she learned to hear the shutter for herself and took three of her four remaining photos without thinking, all of Yeonwoo, the star of the school’s football team by whom she is unexpectedly captivated.

Well, perhaps not all that unexpectedly. Summer appears to already be aware of her queerness even if she hasn’t explored it yet and quickly finds that her interest is returned by Yeonwoo who immediately responds to her roundabout confession of love by asking her out. Which is all to say, this world is quite different from that Summer’s father Jihoon inhabited in his youth even if it’s rosier than the still conservative reality of contemporary South Korea. Summer’s direct announcement to her best friend that she likes girls is met with a simple “I know,” having noticed that she never took photos of guys and only a little hurt that she never said anything before and hasn’t let her in on her recent dating news.

But what Summer discovers after taking one very deliberate photo of Yeonwoo and having the film developed is that her father also took pictures of someone he liked and that someone was a boy, Maru. Of course, this revelation is quite destabilising for her. She can’t get her head around her father’s relationship with herself and her mother if he was gay though as her friend points out, he may have been bisexual which actually didn’t occur to her. In a quest for answers, Summer approaches the now middle-aged Maru and eventually like her friends did of her simply accepts this unknown fact about Jihoon while finding in Maru someone who’s gone through the same things she’s experiencing and with whom she can discuss the things she can’t yet talk about with her mother or friends. 

In her recollections, we never see the face of the adult Jihoon. He always appears with her back to her or just out of frame reflecting the ways in which she no longer feels as if she knew her father and has lost sight of her relationship with him in the wake of her loss. Though told it was a traffic accident, Summer wonders if in reality he might have taken his own life and chosen to leave her behind. Through re-embracing photography, she begins to rediscover him and come into herself gaining not only the confidence to be who she is but to believe that loss is something she can bear while like Yeonwoo’s running hobby which apparently can alter the flow of time, photography is also a means of trapping a memory which means that nothing’s ever really gone.

With the universal love and acceptance that seems to surround Summer, the film implies that the world has moved on and if her father chose conventionality over love that’s a choice that she may not need to make. Even so, in Maru she finds a strong queer role model who even in his own sadness and grief in his lost love for Jihoon is able to help her move forward in showing her a different side of her father which she had never known. He helps her navigate young love and offers a safe space for her to be herself until she’s ready to confront the unresolved past and make peace with it. Though perhaps tinged with melancholy and longing, Summer’s world is otherwise bright and sunny. Filled both with the giddiness of first love and the deep sadness of a catastrophic loss, it is nevertheless warm and beautiful as Summer sees it through the camera lens. With the shutter button as her guiding light, Summer learns to see in new ways peering both back into the past and ahead into her future now less fearful and more certain of herself having reclaimed both something of the father she lost and the one she never knew.

Summer’s Camera screened as part of this year’s BFI Flare.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Hunter Brothers (獵人兄弟, Su Hung-en, 2024)

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Two brothers find themselves on opposite sides of tradition and modernity as they descend into a state of warfare over the future of the ancestral hunting grounds in Su Hung-en’s familial drama, Hunter Brothers (獵人兄弟). Exploring the complicated position of the indigenous community marginalised by an increasingly capitalistic urbanity the film also critiques contemporary visions of masculinity in the wider society as the brothers each try to find new ways of defining themselves amid changing notions of manly success.

In the opening scenes of the film, Teymu celebrates the fact that his son, Yuci, has become a doctor because now he will never have to do manual labour and will have a more comfortable standard of living. But in private, Teymu seems upset. He feels as if he has failed the ancestors because in the eyes of their community, Yuci is not a proper man. Many people tell him that he is “not cut out to be a hunter,” and he has no desire to be one anyway, but still suffers from a serious inferiority complex and wounded male pride. To find some kind of answer, Teymu forces Yuci against the wishes of his mother to accompany him to the mountains for one last hunting trip to prove himself by killing a wild boar and finally validating Teymu’s own fractured sense of masculinity that his son is indeed a “proper man.”

It’s during this trip that Teymu is killed in mysterious circumstances. Yuci’s brother Siring ends up going to prison for the crime, but unlike him had been more of the son his father wanted. Yuci had been clever and studious, but Siring is more of a traditional mountain man who lives for the hunt and has a very unreconstructed sense of masculinity. But he also loved and understood his brother, knowing this life wasn’t for him and trying to protect him from their father who was in other ways a failure. Teymu drank and was violent, objecting to his wife’s attempts to stop him taking Yuci to the mountain by threatening her and using incredibly offensive language. Yuci’s reaction against this traditional society is also towards his father and everything he represented. But this traditional world is the only one a man like Siring can live in. He has no real qualifications or other skills and cannot survive outside of their community. On his release from prison, Yuci is keen for him to get a job and against his return to hunting, but it soon becomes clear that isn’t a way that Siring can live.

In that respect, they represent opposing polls. Yuci is the modern man of science, a doctor, while Siring is a man of the forests and mountains, Then again, Yuci is a devout Christian and his religion also seemingly a challenge to traditional indigenous practices though also alien to the mainstream society. The boys’ mother is living with dementia and those around them tell Siring that she has most likely been cursed by the ancestors who are angry with them for doing something “dishonest” which might be why she starts insisting Yuci go to the police and that they made a bad decision that should be put right. Yuci, for his part, does not appear to feel guilt for the role he may have played but is anxious that the life he’s built for himself in which is accorded a man by his career success, marriage, and fathering a son, may now crumble if Siring will not fall into line.

Tensions come to a head when Yuci decides to sell their ancestral hunting grounds which are earmarked for a development that would destroy the mountain altogether. Siring obviously objects, this world is the only one he can live in, but can do little about it. He resists his brother’s modernity and becomes estranged from him, but they are both in their way exiles and neither of them can fully live in this society. The natural affection they hold for each other as brothers is not enough to bridge this divide and merely leaves each of them lonely and alone, mired in futility and unable to move forward in any meaningful way. The ebb and flow of their lives is reflected in the way they are alternately called by their indigenous names and Mandarin equivalents, each of them living in two worlds but never really at home in either while fever divided from themselves.

Hunter Brothers screens in Chicago 29th March as part of the 19th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Indera (Woo Ming Jin, 2024)

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“Let’s leave this place,” a father tearfully tells his daughter, “we’ll find a better home,” but it seems the girl has found her home already and no longer wishes to leave in Woo Ming Jin’s eerie folk horror, Indera. In many ways about coming to terms with loss and grief, the film also explores tensions within the contemporary society through allusions to the 1985 Memali Incident in which political tensions in the country culminated in the siege of a village resulting the deaths of 14 villagers and four policemen.

The film begins however nine years earlier with Joe driving his pregnant wife Anisa down a country road only for the engine to overheat. Joe gets out to find some water leaving his wife alone, but his stabbing of a beetle for his collection on the way back seems to provoke some strange event. On returning to the car he finds Anisa gone, and flashing forward to the present day we can see that he is now a single father to Sofia who has been mute since birth but is able to hear.

Ironically, present day action opens with her refusing to open a door though she will later be told not to listen when a mysterious force calls her name only to ignore the warning. This time she avoids answering because she suspects it’s debt collectors. Lost in his grief, Joe appears to be living in financial difficulty and is far behind with his rent. They’ve run out of food, which is why Sofia has eaten only sweets, which she seems to be rationing, for breakfast. Joe tells her that they have to protect their castle like in the fairytale Sofia is fond of reading, but in fact the pair are soon kicked out with otherwise sympathetic landlord Haji giving them a tip off about another job as a live-in handyman for a Javanese shamaness living way out in the country. On their arrival however, it’s clear that there is something very odd going on that neither of them really understand.

Nevertheless, the old woman’s home is a kind of liminal space that comes to represent Joe’s unresolved grief. The old woman, who asks to be addressed as “Mother,” asks him if he’s heard about what’s going on in Memali, and he admits he has but that it’s none of his business. Mother agrees that there’s no need to become involved in the affairs of others, but also ominously points to her birds and asks if a blind bird knows that it is caged. The same could be asked of Joe as his fate and that of the King in Sofia’s fairytale become intertwined while she progresses towards a destiny that is out of his control. Encountering a spirit that seems to be that of his late wife, Joe is forced to face his paternal anxiety and the fact that on some level he may have been responsible for what happened to Anisa while also resentful towards Sofia as a child he may not have wanted whom he also blames for her loss.

Perhaps Mother knows all this already, telling Joe that everyone has their sickness and she’s worked out what his is already though he cannot seem to see hers nor what the ominous hole she seems to be worshipping may represent. She claims that the children she has with her in the former orphanage that is her home were all “unwanted,” as Sofia may also have been and Anisa too, but has a dark purpose for them that Joe is ill equipped to understand. The hole comes to represent the bottomless pit of his grief and regret, but the spirits are also echoes of the forces of authoritarianism haunting Memali in which the children are told not to look back or answer if something calls their name and on no account ever to venture near the hole.

Still, Sofia can’t help being curious and the hole may come to represent something else to her while Joe struggles to understand his relationship with his daughter, seeing her perhaps as a manifestation of his own transgression and ultimately an embodiment of evil that it is his duty to destroy. Eerie in its palpable sense of dread, Woo Ming Jin’s oblique folk horror is pregnant with political allegory and locates its most chilling moment in Sofia’s insistence that “this is our home” in the suggestion that in the end there is no “better home” to go to but only this inescapable hell. 

Indera screens in Chicago 28th March as part of the 19th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer