Tag: 2025

Hokusai’s Daughter (おーい、応為, Tatsushi Omori, 2025)

Posted on by

Is there something a little ironic about the title of Tatsushi Omori’s biographical drama, Hokusai’s Daughter (おーい、応為, Oi, Oui)? The Japanese title is a humorous allusion to how she came by her professional name, but once again the English centres her relationship with her more famous father rather than the woman herself. Yet, in a way, the film does this too in exploring the interplay between Oei’s own artistic ambitions, her father’s legacy, and the patriarchal society within which she lives.

By 1820, which is when the film begins, Oei (Masami Nagasawa) has already given up artistry to get married, but ends up leaving her husband, claiming that she couldn’t stand his terrible paintings. According to her, the reason they were so bad was because of her husband’s cynical mindset which manifested itself in dull, emotionally unengaging work, though perhaps it was more that she saw the man she had grown tired of reflected in his mediocre paintings which were never going to live up to her father’s or indeed her own. Returning to her father’s rubbish-strewn shack, Oei then faces the choice of whether to get married again or resume her artistic career. She seems to have a crush on the current top painter in Edo who is young and not bad looking, though perhaps it’s being the best artist that attracts her more than anything else. In any case, he is not romantically interested in her and tries to let her down gently, all of which just makes it worse for Oei. When her father Tetsuzo (Masatoshi Nagase), otherwise known as Hokusai, retrieves the hair pin she dropped in the well while preparing to meet the object of her affection, she tells him that she doesn’t want it back signalling her decision to give up on the idea of marriage and devote herself to painting.

Yet, the film is a little ambivalent on her decision, strongly implying that she is lying when she says she’s not lonely and must necessarily have a degree of regret in having rejected romantic fulfilment rather than allowing her to simply be fulfilled by her art. In this way, the pet dog that she adopts becomes a child substitute, rather than just a domestic companion. On the other hand, her unconventional personality and masculine behaviour mark her out as an outsider in Edo-era society who cannot really fit into any other milieu than the artistic. Tetsuzo keeps trying to kick her out because he thinks he’s stopping her from leading a more conventional life as a woman, before finally realising that wouldn’t suit her and giving Oei her own artist’s name as a seal of approval on her career as an artist.

Tetsuzo is however cantankerous and emotionally distant, unwilling to visit his younger daughter who is seriously ill seemingly because he doesn’t want to face the emotional reality of her impending death. Oei is not so diffident and more willing to confront her emotions head on as symbolised by her fascination with fire. When a samurai comes calling to commission a painting on behalf of his lord and becomes irate with Hokusai’s continued refusals, Oei calls his bluff by suggesting he attack her with his sword if he’s really serious about stabbing someone while her father looks on in silence. In some ways, the samurai is even less free than she is as he can hardly go back to his lord, tell him Hokusai said no, and expect to keep his life, so this gamble is all he really has left. Hokusai, however, resents both the samurai’s crass attempts to wave his money in his face and the entitled privilege of the samurai class in general who think they can order him about as they see fit.

Tetsuzo’s poor business sense as an artist is another of his quirks which simultaneously sees him painting pictures of famous actors Oei thinks are not among his best work, and living in an absolute poverty that leaves him constantly moving from one rundown shack to another until leaving the city completely. Though it’s true that Oei is his longest serving disciple, it’s clear that most of her artistic development takes places while he is off on one of his travels that can last several years. When he suddenly returns as a much older man, he remarks that Oei now has her own style, perhaps as an acknowledgement that she has in some ways surpassed him in coming into her own as an artist while his time is coming to a close. Even so, the implication is that it would not have been possible for Oei to become a professional painter had she not had a famous father who approved of her talent, and that an artistic career would not have been open to her as a married woman in the repressively patriarchal Edo-era society. Using mostly natural light, Omori echoes the light and shade in Oei’s work as she begins to seek out not only a style that is distinctly her own, but a way of living as an outsider in a regimentally ordered society.

Hokusai’s Daughter screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Chatterboxes (みんな、おしゃべり！, Ken Kawai, 2025)

Posted on by

Kazuhiko (Kazuyoshi Kezuka) has been running his electrical appliance shop successfully for many years, but finds his business frustrated by the local council’s attempts to rejuvenate the area and a subsequent feud born of a minor misunderstanding with the owner of the kebab shop that opens across the way. Ken Kawai’s down to earth comedy The Chatterboxes (みんな、おしゃべり！, Minna, Oshaberi!) examines the radiating effects of occasionally wilful miscommunication in an atmosphere that sometimes encourages fear and suspicion rather than acceptance or understanding. 

At least, there’s no real reason why Kazuhiko should immediately take against the Rifat (Murat Çiçek) and the Kurdish community who open a kebab shop nearby, but jumps to conclusions on noticing broken glass in his entranceway with Rifat standing over it. It was actually a little girl who broke a bulb on her way out and was too afraid to say anything, but Kazuhiko almost assumes Rifat has come in and broken something deliberately as an act of war. Kazuhiko’s reaction echoes that of the wider society which is not always accepting of difference, but is also ironic as Kazuhiko also feels himself to be an outsider not accepted by those around him because he is deaf. His shop has a sign saying that it caters to both hearing and non-hearing people, but it seems most don’t notice it and hearing people can sometimes behave insensitively at what they see as inconvenient service. One couple leave the store when Kazuhiko doesn’t respond to their question before he’s even had time to get out his sign out.

He has many things in common with the Kurdish community, but at the moment cannot see common ground only danger. The Kurds have moved into the community through a local government initiative run by the well-meaning Okita who seems like he’s trying to do a good thing, but going about it in the clumsiest way possible. He turns up unannounced to film a PR spot with Kazuhiko as the poster boy of his campaign, but badly botches the transmission by ignoring his wishes about how he wishes to be identified. Though Kazuhiko identifies himself as “deaf”, the subtitles have “hearing impaired”, which he finds offensive because he does consider himself to have an impairment. As his hearing daughter Natsumi (Itsuki Nagasawa) points out, there’s nothing difficult about communicating through sign language in their home because it’s simply their normal.

At a meditation meeting, the Kurdish community have a similar problem in that Okita repeatedly refers to them as “Turkish” and has only hired a Turkish to Japanese interpreter who cannot speak Kurdish. Rifat is particularly attached to the Kurdish language and for a number reasons prefers not to speak Turkish even if he can understand it, though other members of the community prefer to speak other languages such as Arabic. Part of the problem is caused by Okita’s assumptions, something which to his credit he does try to rectify by listening to the concerns of each community, but still to an extent looks down on them while his plan to use minorities to rejuvenate the town economically while making the council look compassionate is also a little exploitative if not patronising. Meanwhile, by having all the shops in this area run by minorities, he may be excluding rather than including them by effectively segregating them away from the more prosperous part of town.

Kazuhiko’s daughter Natsumi and Rifat’s son Hiwa (Yildirm Firat), who was born and raised in Japan, end up caught in the crossfire while quicker to realise that they have a lot more in common than might first be thought. They have each been forced into the role of interpreter for their parents who cannot communicate with the wider society due to a language barrier, but also have differing views on their role with Hiwa thinking he should translate his father’s Kurdish as accurately as possible even if it causes a problem, and Natsumi deliberately softening what her father signs to avoid creating additional conflict. They nevertheless became interested in learning each other’s languages and culture and grow closer through a process of cultural exchange. 

Something similar happens to her younger brother, Shun (Ohki Fukuda), who may also be neurodivergent as his teacher complains that he pays no attention in lessons, preferring to doodle instead, and makes no attempt to communicate with the other children at his deaf school. Fascinated by picking up a note in Arabic dropped by one of the Kurdish men, he begins to develop his own language which he then shares with the other children who begin to contribute to it too. The way the teacher reacts is emblematic of the fear associated with the inability to understand what another community is saying as she clearly views the children’s secret language as a challenge to her authority. Kazuhiko also jumps to the conclusion that the Kurds have been putting funny ideas in his son’s head, but equally he and some of the other parents don’t fully trust the teacher because she’s a hearing woman. They worry she’s forcing the values of the hearing society on their children rather than allowing them to embrace their deafness. Just as Rifat is fiercely protective of Kurdish, so Kazuhiko worries sign language may die out with all the new implants and apps that are being developed.

He also complains about the discrimination he’s faced and that hearing people often justify their decision to exclude him as “consideration” when it’s really just that they find communicating in a different way inconvenient so prefer not to bother. Of course, his late wife was a hearing woman and so is Natsumi so some of his comments are hurtful to her while reflecting an us and them mentality Natsumi would like to reject, especially considering her growing friendship with Hiwa. Nevertheless, words are often unnecessary for basic communication. You don’t need words to make someone understand you want them to come quickly because you need their help, and Kazuhiko is eventually able to make a sale just through gestures to an old man who is no longer able to speak and cannot write either. Kazuhiko only starts to rethink his views when Okita tells him he’s leaving the Kurds out of the project to avoid controversy, uncomfortably echoing the various ways in which he’s been excluded. 

Once misunderstandings have been cleared up, the communities find a source of friendship and solidarity embracing cultural exchange that leaves them feeling less afraid of each other and more welcoming towards others. Kawai deliberately leaves some of the Kurdish dialogue untranslated, simply transliterating it in the subtitles to make it clear that what is being said is not being understood outside of the community, leaving the audience in the same position as Kazuhiko and hearing monolingual Japanese people like Okita, but equally proving that not understanding fully isn’t really that much of problem, while being ignored and excluded is. Warm, funny, and venturing into absurdity in its final stretches, Kawai’s film is a much needed counter to the growing animosity of our recent times and a reminder of how much better life can be when you open yourself up to world beyond that you already know.

The Chatterboxes screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Deadline (自殺通告, Kiwi Chow Kwun-Wai, 2025)

Posted on by

What does it mean to get “an education”? Is the school system only really there to brainwash the young into following accepted the path and prepare them to be receptive to authority, actively destroying both the ability and desire to think for oneself? The fact that Kiwi Chow’s Deadline (自殺通告, zìshā tōnggào) was not approved for release in Hong Kong on the grounds of “national security” may indicate the direction of its perspective on the interplay between the intensity of the education system and entrenched authoritarianism.

The mere fact that En Shan high school is described as “elite” already implies that it exists to perpetuate a kind of social inequality, though in other ways some might say that it also encourages social mobility in that the students come from all backgrounds and are selected for academic excellence rather than simply the ability to pay the fees. Education does seem to be life’s make or break. Students who don’t make it to university are perceived as being relegated to a kind of underclass from which there is no other escape. Yet at the same time, perhaps university isn’t right for everyone and not all of the pupils want to live a life dedicated to achieving conventional success that might otherwise leave them miserable.

Chun Chiu (Jimmy Liu) is one of the few brave ones who’s decided he doesn’t want to go to university and is happy enough pottering around with his plants. He doesn’t care if people look down on him because he knows he’s happy in himself, and they probably aren’t. Consequently, he’s also the only one to really see what’s going on at the school and to want to try to stop it. Despite its elegant name, there’s a kind of bloodthirstiness that underlines the survival of the fittest mentality at En Shan where they wear mildly fascistic uniforms and start the day with a haka-style dance in which they recite the school’s mantras about being the best of the best and that there’s no point coming second. These children are prevented from forming real friendships or developing social skills and empathy because they’ll always be rivals waiting for the ideal time to stab each other in the back.

The school reinforces this sense of judgment and hierarchy through adopting a social credit-style system in which pupils’ “privileges” are linked to their performance and obedience levels. Chun Chiu is at one point locked out of the garden because his scores have fallen so low he’s not allowed outside the prison-like school environment. Everyone at the school, including the teachers, is under constant surveillance with an AI programme responsible for assigning grades and points. Headmaster Kung wants to get rid of Mr Gao (Huang Di-yang) because the system says his performance is poor, while star teacher Mrs Tien tries to defend him. To begin with, Gao seems as if he might be resisting in another way by giving care and attention to struggling pupils like Heng (Bai Run-yin) who is taking medication for ADHD. But it turns out that Gao is so worried about losing his job as he has to pay maintenance for his ex-wife and child that he’s been giving the kids performance enhancing drugs in the hope of boosting his own approval ratings in the app.

Heng is also getting bullied by some of the other pupils, not just because he’s different but because they resent it that they think he’s being given special advantages by taking medicine that helps him concentrate and being given extra time to finish exams. This leads Heng to try and and cancel his accommodations in a bid to avoid being singled out and in a mistaken gesture of solidarity with the other kids to prove he’s not being given any extra privileges. Meanwhile, they’re all taking similar medication that’s designed to aid concentration and reduce the need for sleep for they can study for longer. But the drugs also prevent them from sleeping when they want to and suppress their appetites so they don’t eat. They cause low mood and suicidal ideation, which, coupled with the already high-stress environment, is a recipe for disaster.

To combat this culture, someone drops a series of ominous flyers threatening the school that there will be a suicide if they don’t “stop poisoning us” by ending the practice of holding exams under medication. While headmaster Kung appears oblivious to the monster he himself has created and has no real idea what’s going on in the school, to his credit he does seem keen to find out if there are any pupils in danger of harming themselves rather than solely trying to silence the whistleblower or save the school’s reputation. He has no idea about the drugs and is shocked on realising how prevalent they’ve become in the school. When they start doing drug tests and discover that over half the pupils are taking them, the director of the board of governors, who has the real power, tells him to stop the testing before they find any more.

But it turns out that this problem extends far beyond the school as in some cases it’s the parents who are making their kids take these drugs, and the head of the student council, Mo (Michael Chang), that’s been selling them. After a few deaths have occurred, Tien and Kung want to stop the exams, but are prevented from doing so, in part because the education system is a national machine. The kids can’t just take the exam on another day because they can’t come up with all new papers just for them at short notice. In a truly chilling moment, Mo gets up on his chair begins chanting the nonsensical mantra “exams are a human right” while insisting on being allowed to take them even if it means that more pupils end up dying. After all, that’s just less competition for him. They’re already locked into this system and refuse to be cast out of it, in part because they’ve learned how to manipulate it so perfectly.

Then again, obsessive study doesn’t leave you with much time to think about anything else even if you’re not also sleep deprived and malnourished as a result of long-term drug use. Chun Chiu’s friend Peiching (Tai Ya-chih), the current number one, becomes conflicted in part because she realises that she does not really know who she is and is incapable of determining what she wants out of life. She said she wanted to be a doctor because that’s what her parents were so she thought she was supposed to be too, but doesn’t know if that’s actually what she wants. Peiching seems genuinely worried about rival Ruoyan (Mimi Shao Yi-mei) who self-harms out of frustration and feelings of inadequacy, but equally only perhaps because thanks to the drugs she stands a real chance of knocking her off  the top spot. Mrs Tien may secretly be thinking of moving abroad precisely because her own daughter does not suit this rigid educational system, but remains largely unable to change it while the students have, it seems, already internalised its tenets unable to let go of a world in which everything is defined by numbers and ranking without the intrusion of independent thought or human empathy.

Deadline screened as part of Hong Kong Film Fest UK and opens in UK cinemas 16th October.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Meets the World (ミーツ・ザ・ワールド, Daigo Matsui, 2025)

Posted on by

Adapted from the novel by Hitomi Kanehara, Daigo Matsui’s Meets the World (ミーツ・ザ・ワールド) takes its name from the heroine’s love of a BL manga in which all the characters are anthropomorphised versions of various cuts of meat that can be ordered at yakiniku restaurants. But it’s also, in a way, an apt description of her experiences as she begins to open herself up to the act of living while considering where it is she belongs and what it is that will actually make her happy.

This comes about largely due to an encounter with the mysterious Rai (Kotona Minami), a beautiful yet melancholy young woman who rescues her one night while she’s drunk and disorientated in the street. Rai offers her a literal sanctuary, but also challenges Yukari’s (Hana Sugisaki) view of the world by constantly questioning and undermining things that she had assumed to be true but without telling her what she should think or do. Rai offers her these little nudges, but at the same time lives in an apartment strewn with rubbish and repeatedly says that she longs for death. Yukari begins by clearing up, reminding her that one’s living arrangements reflect the state of one’s mind, but she finds it much more difficult to clean up Rai’s mental state or relieve her internalised listlessness and lack of enthusiasm for living.

In some senses, it’s true that Yukari becomes more fixated on the idea of saving Rai as a means of saving herself than she does on her personal growth, but at the same time gains greater experience and understanding through interacting with Rai’s social circle at the aptly named Loneliness bar. The irony is that though she becomes frustrated that she can’t seem to truly connect with Rai or reduce her desire for death, she rejects the same kind of interest from her mother (Mariko Tsutsui) whose calls she is forever avoiding. Her mother only really wants the same thing that Yukari wants from Rai and would seemingly be happy enough with a few texts as proof of life, though it’s something that Yukari doesn’t want to give her for whatever reason. She says that she didn’t like living alone with her mother after her father’s death, but there’s the same kind of absence felt in Rai’s apartment which she previously shared with the only person she claims to have loved but is now no longer in her life.

It speaks to Yukari’s naivety that she thinks she could heal Rai simply by reuniting her with this person, while she comes to realise that romance may not be the answer she was looking for either. Yukari had enthusiastically begun looking for a husband at 27 despite never having dated before because she thought it was what she was supposed to do, yet what makes her happiest is her obsessive interest in her favourite manga. These kinds of hobbies are often looked down by the surrounding society and it’s clear that Yukari has a degree of internalised shame regarding her interest in them. Even at her mother’s house, she hides all anime merch behind a curtain out of sight and keeps it a secret from her colleagues at the bank where she works. When Yukari eventually does mention her love of anime, her colleague begins to smirk a little as if she thinks that explains quite a lot and is internally laughing at Yukari while remaining superficially polite. Yukari’s prim and proper supervisor, meanwhile, gives her a stern look though it isn’t clear if that’s because she thinks Yukari’s hobbies are inappropriate for a woman her age, or because she may have similar hobbies of her own. 

In any case, it’s true that through her friendship with Rai she learns to be open about her interests and be fully herself in all environments, accepting that love and dating may not be right for her or at least that she doesn’t need to force them to satisfy the demands of others. It could be said that what she has with her anime characters is a one-sided relationship, but that’s also true of those around her including the host Asahi (Rihito Itagaki) who sees his marriage founder as his wife grows tired of supporting him as the number one host while he can’t win her back just as himself. Ironically, these kinds of one-sided relationships are a professional hazard that can otherwise lead to toxicity and violence. A gloomy writer, Yuki (Yu Aoi), also recounts the postnatal depression that led to the end of her marriage and subsequent realisation that what she had was the kind of happiness that someone who thought themselves unhappy wanted to find, but did not actually work out for her. 

What they are is in effect a series of bubbles that occasionally float close to each other or perhaps intersect without really connecting. Nevertheless, they offer each other a gentle sense of solidarity just by existing. Matsui films in a 4:3 ratio that seems constrained, but also has a cosy, protective quality while implying that loneliness is a natural fact of life that can’t be entirely cured, yet even if someone is not actually with you physically, or may not even physically exist, one’s love for them can still endure and be a healthy source of comfort and support while everyone has the right to live as they please free from the judgement of others.

Meets the World screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Ranshima Bound (蘭島行, Yoshitaka Kamada, 2025)

Posted on by

A middle-aged man dejectedly sitting on the side of the street drinking glances at his phone and we notice that his mother is the only person on his call list with several calls on recent days lasting only seconds. He then receives a call from his brother informing him that she is in a coma after having apparently attempted to take her own life in the wake of a terminal cancer diagnosis she had not shared with either of them. 

Apparently autobiographically inspired, Yoshitaka Kamada’s Hokkaido-set drama Ranshima Bound (蘭島行) examines fracturing familial relationships and the subterfuge that is sometimes necessary to make them work. After receiving the phone call, Yoshio comes across the body of a woman floating in a river. Next thing we know, she’s travelling with him to Ranshima where he purchases a pair of wedding rings and dress in a pawn shop. Feeling unhappy about what he has achieved in life, he asks Maki (Yuko Kii) to pose as his wife so that he can show her off to his mother when she wakes up.

It seems that Yoshio (Tomoki Kimura) went to Tokyo to be a punk musician, play in a band, and change the world, but he is no longer living a punk lifestyle and his musical dreams seem not to have panned out. He tells his brother than he has a part-time job inspecting concrete to ensure it meets safety standards, but it is not clear if this is actually the truth. Satoshi, meanwhile, is a respectable middle-aged man with a successful career who is married with a teenage daughter. The two brothers seem to be somewhat estranged and not particularly well informed about what’s going on with each other’s lives, though Satoshi is still a little hurt and surprised that Yoshio has apparently got married without even letting him know. In any case, he tries to include Maki in all the arrangements while she does her best to play along.

She does, however, become unexpectedly upset when the two brothers joke about disposing of their mother’s ashes, perhaps because she comes to stand in for the mother’s absence. Reading his mother’s diaries, Yoshio comes to understand his mother’s wishes for after her death and also that she missed her sons who seemed not to have paid her much attention while she was alive. For unexplained reasons, she didn’t contact them when their father passed away and seems to have become depressed in her widowhood even before the cancer diagnosis. Both sons appear to feel guilty in different ways, Yoshio having avoided his mother because of his internalised shame and suspicion that she would have preferred him to become a regular salaryman like his brother. Satoshi, meanwhile, justifies himself that he prioritised his family, though as it turns out he maybe a victim of his own “success”. His marriage is failing largely because he is always away working and hardly every home. He and his wife are considering divorcing when their daughter finishes high school.

Neither of them particularly want their mother’s apartment, but they don’t want to deal with it either while they’d still have to go on paying the land taxes until it’s sold if their mother were to die. They’re also now responsible for paying the storage fees at the temple where their mother had interred their father’s ashes, though in her diary she states that she wants their ashes scattered at sea together. The request baffles the boys who aren’t quite sure why she wanted that or what sea she means before deciding it’s probably where they used to go holiday when they children, a once prosperous but now rundown resort area that seems to mimic their own sense of lonely despair. It seems that their mother wanted to return to a time when the family was at its happiest, while in the present day each has become mired in their own sorrow and insecurity. Though in some ways it may seem as if Yoshio is able to heal a rift through his fake marriage subterfuge, it cannot in the repair his family nor can the family really save any of them. Nevertheless, there is a vague sense of hope amid bleakness as the Yoshio returns to say goodbye to his mother with Maki still waiting at the train station rather than leaving alone.

Ranshima Bound screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Wind Breaker (WIND BREAKER／ウィンドブレイカー, Kentaro Hagiwara, 2025)

Posted on by

Throughout the fairly long history of delinquent fighting movies, they were mainly taken at face value as contests of masculinity conducted between adolescent men that may not always have had much to them beyond the battle to reach the top. More recent entries in the genre have, however, begun to reinterrogate its themes along with the kind of masculinity to which these young men subscribe. This is undoubtedly the case in Kentaro Hagiwara’s Wind Breaker (WIND BREAKER／ウィンドブレイカー), adapted from the manga by Satoru Nii, which pits the individualistic desire for domination against that for a healthier and more accepting vision of group unity that exists for the purpose of protecting the community.

This kind of duality is embodied in the hero, Sakura (Koshi Mizukami), who has just arrived in town with the intention of becoming top dog at Furin High School. Sakura has two-tone hair neatly divided down the middle while sporting a golden eye on his white side. His unusual appearance has made him a social outcast rejected by those around him, and so he has decided that violence is one way he can be successful as no one cares what you look like while you’re fighting. Similarly, his dilemma is manifested visually through repeated dream sequences in which he’s walking a narrow tightrope while facing rejection on all sides. 

He will, however, be disappointed to have arrived in this town as the delinquents of Furin High have already rebranded and are no longer interested in fighting for fighting’s sake. Rather they act as a kind of local community militia patrolling the streets to stop rival yellow-jacketed gang Shishitoren from hassling the mostly elderly shopkeepers. Most of the action takes place in a narrow high street-style shopping area which both gives it the feel of a Wild West town and harks back to an older Japan which is in reality already disappearing. Seen from above in the opening crane shot, it appears to be a slightly run-down former slum area, but we can see that it has already been repurposed into a kind of hipster paradise given a friendly feel by the orange and teal colour scheme and modern painted signage. Rather than markets or shops offering basic services like dry cleaning and key cutting, these mainly seem to be artisanal cafes. Nevertheless, most of the proprietors appear to be elderly people whom the young men are dedicated to both protecting and assisting. In return, they have been somewhat adopted by them with the shopkeepers freely giving out food and produce as a thank you rather an as protection. 

This does not sit that well with Sakura who resists making friends and only agrees to join the group in the hope of finally fighting its leader Ume (Shuhei Uesugi), a young guy with grey hair who fulfils the role of the wise old man. He’s set up a garden on the school roof and somehow installed a giant tree up there. His wholesome desire for a kind of pastoralisation or a managed ecological take over the urban space stands in stark contrast to the of Shishitoren whose territory is a mess of discarded paper strewn with makeshift fabric banners that echo post-industrial apocalyptic decline. Similarly, Shishitoren subscribe to a quasi-fascist philosophy which values only strength with gang leader Choji (Koki Yamashita) actively beating up and kicking out guys who lose fights. 

Yet as Ume says, fighting is dialogue and these physical clashes are also ways for young men to work out emotional problems they may not even have identified. Choji may be fighting a kind of ennui in having reached the top and realised there’s no where else to go, while his conflicted subordinate realises his desire to support his friend was misplaced and rather than going along with him the right thing to do would have been to discourage his obsession with physical strength and loathing of “weakness”. Sakura too comes to realise that true weakness lies in the inability to trust and rely on others. Fighting only has merit when it’s in service of something other than oneself. Thus masculinity is defined as something rooted in family, community, and brotherhood rather than in aggression and violence, though the only real way to win is not to fight at all. Anchored by strong production design and well-crafted action sequences, the film has an air of sincerity in its earnest messaging that perhaps cuts across the grain of contemporary debate and offers a more positive view of the future marked by progress and positivity rather than darkness and violence.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Kinki (近畿地方のある場所について, Koji Shiraishi, 2025)

Posted on by

“No one can be saved now” intones a victim of a curse having apparently accepted the futility of his situation. In Koji Shiraishi’s Kinki (近畿地方のある場所について, Kinki Chiho no aru basho ni tsuite), adapted from the writings by Sesuji later published in novel form, everything is indeed connected, though our heroes will spend the majority of the film trying to figure out how. Yet perhaps these breadcrumbs were dropped for someone to find, and in a certain kind of way the mystery in the end finds us no matter how we may try to hide from it or mistakenly believe that the truth will set us free.

A case in point, there are two mysteries in play. The first, the editor of a paranormal magazine has disappeared taking his laptop containing the draft of an upcoming article with him. His assistant, Ozawa (Eiji Akaso), calls in a freelance writer, Chihiro (Miho Kanno), to help him reconstruct the article using the materials Sayama (Atom Shukugawa) left behind. Finding Sayama is something of a secondary goal in that they are less interested in what happened to him and why he disappeared than they are in what he was investigating. They only want to find him to recover his article.

Yet the materials he left behind are strangely full of missing people and connected only by a series of strange images such as a woman jumping with her arms stretched out towards a tree, an eerie drawing of a figure under a torii gate with the symbols either for “woman” or “end” surrounding it, and references to local folklore that all point to the “certain place in the Kinki region” mentioned in the title. In the course of their investigation, Chihiro and Ozawa are also unwittingly exposing themselves to whatever Sayama may have seen, running the gamut from fragments of old TV programmes on worn VHS, to forgotten internet viral videos, and even a slightly creepy children’s animation based on a local folktale and intended to preserve local culture.

Perhaps some of these curses are indeed ridiculous. No one really believes in the power of a chain letter, as a gaggle of high school girls giggle over a viral text that says they’ll die if they don’t pass it on. But it’s hard to deny the eeriness that surrounds the disappearance of a ghost hunting vlogger who appears to have lost his mind after straying into an abandoned house, or the young student whose friend disappeared after watching a viral video titled “Watch this and die”. The young student later finds himself haunted too, but his attempt to enlist a Buddhist priest for help goes disastrously wrong, as does Chihiro’s to consult a psychic.

Whatever’s connecting this disparate series of strange events appears to be something dark and evil. But on the other hand, what lies behind it is maternal grief and the desire to reclaim something that has been lost. As part of their investigation, the pair come across a strange cult that promises its devotees that their loved ones will return if they worship their god. The local folktale, meanwhile, is about a heartbroken son who is devastated by the loss of his mother. A wizard who descends from heaven tells him that he cannot bring his mother back and should try to find a wife to ease his loneliness, which could he do by offering her a persimmon only no one is interested and he dies of loneliness. 

This might be the cause of the mysterious mantra “thank you for finding me” that is heard on several tapes, as if this presence, whatever it is, is happy to have been recognised though it otherwise spells doom for those coming into contact with it. It has, however, seemingly weaved its way into the fabric of society, pushing its way into the digital realm as a background presence in every creepy video that haunts the internet. “You could have warned me,” Chihiro exclaims after seeing something unpleasant in a video Ozawa played for her, but really there is no warning any more and you have no control when videos autoplay on your feed. Even if you choose not to look, they come at you from ubiquitous screens and short of going to live alone in the mountains, they’ve become impossible to avoid. For some, however, these disparate clues act like stepping stones towards a particular destination they will stop at nothing to reach. Yet the scariest thing of all may be that at the end of the trail there are no answers, only more questions, and a deepening sense of mystery in that which cannot be explained.

Kinki screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

BRAND NEW LOVE (Ryuichi Iwakura, 2025)

Posted on by

Are antique shops a sign of love enduring, or of our inability to let things go even when they may have outlived their usefulness? Whatever the answer, it’s the perfect place for the troubled couple at the centre of Ryuichi Iwakura’s Brand New Love to face a crisis in their fracturing relationship. The burden of forced politeness colliding with slowly accumulated resentment threatens to push the pair beyond breaking point, but at the same, perhaps they aren’t quite yet ready to part with an idealised vision of their past romance.

Then again, the distance between them is evident in the opening sequence in which Kenichi walks one way while Yuiko continues in another. Kenichi was evidently going the wrong way, at least in terms of their current destination, though Yuiko didn’t bother to tell him, instead waiting for Kenichi to figure it out for himself. Kenichi seems to be in a bad mood overall because they were supposed to be taking a trip for his birthday, their first in four years, but cancelled to help Yuiko’s uncle out tending his antique shop while he attends a wedding. 

It might be a bad omen that the uncle, Goro, is divorced and the pair are staying in his former family home where he hasn’t finished packing up his ex wife’s things. In any case, Yuiko’s rejection of Kenichi’s assumption they’d be sleeping in the same room seems to signal doom for the relationship from the outset. But unexpectedly it’s Yuiko who takes a shine to a pair of matching tea cups that to her come to symbolise the couple’s relationship. The cups have technically been sold to a woman who’s coming to pick up her order the following day, but Yuiko can’t seem to bear to part with them.

The film is at it’s most interesting in Yuiko’s interaction with the other woman, Rei, who originally bought the cups in Italy with the intention of giving them to her partner, though they broke up before she had a chance. She got rid of the cups because they’d lost their purpose, but now she wants them back again, not to reclaim the failed romance but as a means of looking towards a new one. She intends to keep the cups until she finds someone worth giving them to. But on hearing Yuiko say she wanted to give them to her boyfriend, Rei surrenders them to her. 

The gift does, in a way, begin to repair their relationship, but in the act of doing so becomes broken beyond repair. In what seems like an ongoing flirtation with Rei, Yuiko vows to stick the cup back together to show her and as a kind of apology, while Kenichi decides to leave town but is prevented from doing so by a train outage during which he meets a man mourning the loss of his grandfather. Kenichi perhaps insensitively suggests he sell his grandfather’s camera if he doesn’t know how to use it, perhaps to the antique shop, before taking a moment to reflect on what he’s said and perhaps on his decision to exit the relationship. 

The cup is eventually repaired, though in an unexpected and not altogether aesthetically pleasing way which seems to suggest that the couple may be locked into this otherwise unhappy relationship for the rest of their days. Despite having dangled the promise of a “brand new love” for Yuiko at least, the film’s closing moments suggest the title may be ironic. Or else, perhaps the pair really have managed to find their way back to each other and past all the petty resentments and little niggles that creep into a long-term relationship, though they haven’t really done much to resolve any of those issues so much as reflect they may not be ready to walk away. Making fantastic use of natural light and a claustrophobic 4:3 frame, Iwakura subtly explores the growing distance between the couple in their silences and barbed remarks along with a quiet yearning that runs underneath all the resentment and frustration until all that’s left is the desire to save something that may already be beyond saving.

BRAND NEW LOVE screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Gosh!! (THE オリバーな犬、(Gosh!!) このヤロウ MOVIE, Joe Odagiri, 2025)

Posted on by

The world is full of strange things, according to the canine hero of of Joe Odagiri’s surreal comedy. GOSH!! (THE オリバーな犬、(Gosh!!) このヤロウ MOVIE, THE Oliver na Inu, (Gosh!!) Kono Yaro MOVIE) Edited down from a TV series, the film takes place in a kind of Lynchian dream space in which once can embrace one’s inner desires, while in the ostensibly “normal”, everyday world, Odagiri himself stars as a foul-mouthed, lecherous police dog burdened by the legacy of his legendary father whose disappearance remains unsolved. 

In another way, perhaps Oliver’s animalistic antics are a mirror for his handler Aoba’s (Sosuke Ikematsu) repressed desires or rebellion against his straight-laced personality. Describing himself as someone with a strong sense of justice, Aoba’s initial attempts to find his feet as an ordinary street cop were hamstrung by his clumsiness. He became a police dog handler hoping to find the perfect partner with whom he could find the “firmest trust,” only to be saddled with Oliver. Nevertheless, his ability to see him as a middle-aged deadbeat in a dog suit he can converse with in human language suggests a kind of synchronicity between dog and handler as is later praised by trainer Hagoromo (Eri Fukatsu).

The disappearance of Oliver’s father Rudolph, however, is one of the film’s central mysteries and linked with that of “Super Volunteer” Konishi (Koichi Sato) who has gone missing while looking for missing persons. Konishi seems to have been a regular salaryman before being struck by some kind of cosmic force that linked him with Rudolph and causes him to occasionally behave like a dog, in contrast to Oliver’s behaving like a human. He also ends up lost in a kind of other world with Rudolph’s former handler Mizoguchi (Masatoshi Nagase) who has become a freelance reporter and is recruited by his niece to investigate a sighting of a “little old man fairy” a boy she runs into is trying to catch. 

Each of these incidents is linked by the sound of glass smashing which echoes that in the Red Room-like cabaret of the dream space and acts as a means of breaking the spell. Playing out as a series of surreal episodes connected by the presence of strange red doors leading to other worlds, there is a definite blurring of the real world and that of dreams along with a meta dimension that allows those trapped within it to question their reality. A policewoman (Kumiko Aso) wonders why the whole room suddenly embarked on an elaborate dance routine when she arrived to confront her father but has no real answer, abruptly returning to a more concrete reality. 

Her father, meanwhile, had wanted to share a part of himself hitherto hidden from her that we later see fulfilled in the dream space. While this dream world appears to be somewhere that repressed desires are fulfilled, it seems that it may not have a wholly positive effect and as Oliver warns us at the film’s conclusion, there may be some doors that are best left closed. Nevertheless, making several homages to David Lynch including the discovery of a severed ear, Odagiri conjures an atmosphere of strangeness and mystery that goes beyond the weirdness of humanoid of dogs and alternate realities in which everything is the same but everyone is obsessed with takoyaki.

To that extent, Aoba becomes a kind of straight man frustrated by all this weirdness but unable to restore order to the world around him or accept the parts of himself that Oliver reflects. In his opening interview, he refuses to accept his fate, disrupting the interviewer’s questions by stating that he does not believe that his destiny is to be a dog handler, not because he is being modest about his abilities, but fundamentally because he resents his present reality and thinks he deserves better than being shackled to Oliver. There is, however, more to this world than we can fully understand with its various absurdities in which everything is strangely connected and “distortions in spacetime” can have profound effects on us all. Though some of its obscurity may stem from the film’s TV series origins with several seemingly pivotal characters appearing only for a few moments, there is a genuine sense of mystery and unease to be found within the noirish world that exists beyond a door some may wish they had never opened.

Gosh!! screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Take Off (飞行家, Pengfei, 2025)

Posted on by

A young man’s dreams of flight are stamped out by a harsh reality only to be rekindled by a looming crisis in Pengfei’s warmhearted drama, Take Off (飞行家, fēixíngyuán). Beginning in the late 1970s and ending with a coda set in the present day, on one level at least the film attempts to chart the course of an ordinary man’s life through the tumultuous years of China’s economic and societal transformation in the late 20th century.

Viewed as something of an eccentric, Li Mingqi (Jiang Qimin), like his father before him, is obsessed with testing parachutes and the idea of breaking the record for the world’s highest jump. During the Cultural Revolution, Mingqi’s father was criticised for conducting unauthorised experiments, refused re-education, and was killed during his final, failed test flight. Mingqi’s fatherlessness and problematic background might explain why he is still an ordinary factory worker despite his obvious talent for engineering and has to conduct his experiments independently and in secret. Nevertheless, when given an ultimatum by his future father-in-law, Mingqi agrees to give up the parachute flights in order to marry his steadfast fiancée Yufeng (Li Xueqin).

In someways, Mingqi’s philosophy might be seen as subversive. He says that flying higher gives you a different perspective that changes the way you think and that by changing your thinking, the world around you also changes. China is already changing around Mingqi who remains more firmly grounded but continues to experiment with jetpacks in secret. Mingqi’s desire for success through his inventions is contrasted with that if Yufeng’s brother Xuguang (Dong Baoshi) who is forever studying to get into university for a better life outside the factory system and their small-town environment. When he’s injured by one of Mingqi’s experiments;, he begins to hold him responsible for his own ruined dreams while Mingqi also gives up his hopes of powered flight and further grounds his expectations. 

But this decision to give up his dreams slowly starts to eat away at him even as the nation begins to move away from the planned economy towards a more capitalistic society. Mingqi and Yufeng open a dance hall as a “public-private” partnership in conjunction with the local factory and using donations from other factory workers who are supportive of their ambitions. Mingqi fills the place with various contraptions such as a novel system of delivering beer by machine, but after his jetpack is ridiculed by visiting foreign tech investors he begins to enter a depressive funk. A few years later the contraptions no longer work. Mingqi has taken to drink and gambling while the business founders as the factories begin to close and workers either leave the area in search of work, like Mingqi succumb to gambling, or simply have no money to spend on entertainment.

Xuguang too eventually returns from Beijing hiding the fact that he has failed in business amid the boom and bust economics of the day. He’s brought with him a “best friend” with whom he seems to have an unusually close, potentially queer coded connection, though Yufeng is right not to trust Dezeng (Dong Zijian) who turns out to be among the breed of amoral capitalists rising in conjunction with the economic reforms. Presumably having failed in someway himself if he’s bothering with this moribund factory town, Dezeng steals the dance hall out from under Mingqi’s feet by exploiting local workers’ desperation and then sells it to open a revolving restaurant at the top of a nearby tower designed for an economic elite which may not yet exist in this area.

The implication seems to be that increasing capitalism has poisoned Mingqi’s idealism, leaving him a broken shadow of a man who no longer has a reason to live now that he’s given up him dreams, but it’s better to live like this than be a man like Dezeng. A family crisis gives him the opportunity to rekindle his dreams by vowing to win a TV competition by jumping from Dezeng’s tower and landing at a spot a few kilometres away in return for a cash prize. Watched live on television, Mingqi’s attempt to fly becomes that of every other disenfranchised worker cast adrift by the 90s reforms as if giving them permission to stand tall and chase their dreams. It would not have been possible, however, without Yufeng’s support. She never wanted him to stop inventing things, just to be a bit more mindful of safety, and is happy to be reunited with the man she married. While the final message may seem contradictory, simultaneously encouraging the idea of dreaming big while emphasising solidarity, it is heartfelt and is clear in its advocation for the liberating power of dreams.  

Take Off screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (Simplified Chinese subtitles only)