Tag: 2025

Hallan (한란, Ha Myung-mi, 2025)

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Jeju Island had been at the forefront of the resistance to the Japanese during the colonial era and its transition into the new post-war reality had been more orderly than that of the mainland. Nevertheless, the Korea’s sovreingity had not been returned and the South remained under the governance of the occupying American military while the North was controlled by the Soviet Union. Many on the island objected to the proposed elections which were to take place in South only, fearing that it would lead to permanent division of the nation. Once police fired on protestors making the anniversary of the protest movement, an armed conflict arose between guerrilla fighters who took to the mountains and the police and military backed by the extreme right-wing Northwest Youth League that had been dispatched from the mainland to suppress the rebellion.

Ten percent of the island’s population are said to have died during the massacre, with many more fleeing to North Korea or Japan, though the events were suppressed during the long years of military dictatorships with their history little known. Ha Myung-mi’s Hallan (한란) aims to shed light on these historical events by following a collection of ordinary villagers whose peaceful lives are disrupted by a political conflict that some feel to be very distant and not particularly anything to do with them. To that extent, the film aims for a kind of political neutrality in which it depicts the South Korean soldiers and insurrectionists as little different from other. Sergeant Park is a crazed sadist who is drunk on his own power and obsessed with rooting out “commies”, while Jeongnam  is a paranoid authoritarian. Each of them kill members of their own side with little hesitation. Sergeant Park executes a local soldier who advised a collection of elderly people coming down from the mountain in response to a pamphlet promising their lives would be spared if they surrendered, that they shouldn’t trust the military and would be better to remain in hiding. Jeongnam kills a comrade who wants to look for his family fearing he will expose their plan to blow up an army base with dynamite left behind by the Japanese. The only innocents are the apolitical villagers who are caught between the two. 

But in characterising the rebels in this way, the film leans towards favouring the authorities if while denouncing their conduct and subtly implicating the American occupation forces for tacitly backing them. The only source of resistance comes from a conflicted Christian soldier who is racked with guilt over what he’s been asked to do, but still asks God to help him detect communists which suggests he does not necessarily think this actually wrong if the right people are being targeted. Rooting the resistance in faith further muddies the waters and perhaps just introduces a third source of potential authoritarism in the presence of organised religion, while simultaneously adding a subtly anti-communist sentiment.

Conversely, the presence of the village’s shamaness adds a slightly less problematic voice of moral authority as she does her best to protect the villagers while staying behind to fulfil her role in service to the gods. Much of the film focuses on a little girl, Hae-sang, trying to find her mother in the mountains after surviving the massacre in her village conducted in retaliation for losses on the army’s side. That she becomes mute after witnessing so much trauma mimics the way in which these events have been suppressed and continue to haunt the island into the present day. Hae-sang’s mother Ajin had wanted a “better world” for her in which she could be educated and wouldn’t necessarily be left with no other option than to be a diver like she was, though the film’s melancholy conclusion largely renders this desire along with the idea of Hae-seng has a historical witness rather moot. Nevertheless, the film takes it’s title from a local wild plant sprouting all over the mountain that comes to stand in for the local people whom the authorities may have attempted to ruthlessly weed out but instead have endured and grown stronger in the face of hardship and adversity.

Hallan screens as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (Korean subtitles only)

HIGUMA!! The Killer Bear (ヒグマ!!, Eisuke Naito, 2025)

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Last year Japanese society was sent into an existential panic due to a severe increase in the number of bear attacks as the creatures were forced to venture beyond their natural habitat due to climate change and the impacts of human behaviour on the rural environment. Eisuke Naito’s Higuma!! The Killer Bear (ヒグマ!!) then arrives at an apt time, though in this case, the bear seems to symbolise something else acting as a kind of karmic supernatural entity attacking those encroaching on its territory while drawn away from the safety of the city by greed and desperation.

The cities are, it seems, in quite a bad way. Eighteen-year-old Sora (Fuku Suzuki) is an aspiring game developer, though the complaints that his retro 3D-platformer is too hard with janky character design might equally apply to the challenges of modern life. He’s just got into university, but his happiness is short-lived as his father takes his own life shortly afterward having been scammed out of all his savings and therefore unable to pay his son’s tuition fees. While his mother tries to make the best of the situation and insists she’ll figure something out so he can continue with his education, Sora is resentful and angry until unwisely agreeing to a shady job ad promising a large amount of money for delivering “an envelope” to an unspecified location. It’s after this that he’s plunged into a confusing world of backstreet crime, scams, and exploitation that he cannot otherwise escape.

Yet at the same time, this otherworld feels oddly like a video game and is often framed like an old-school arcade scroller, classic first-person shooter, or RPG as Sora is dragged further into this morally compromised sector of society. After being witness to his boss scamming an old lady out of her cash card and ink stamp, he’s charged with retrieving a precious gem from an agent turned rogue that looks a bit like a rupee from the world of Zelda and feels like a video game MacGuffin. The young woman, a former SDF member, decided to keep it for herself having been offered only 30,000 yen to steal it though it’s apparently worth ten million. It turns out that she’s a kind of victim too. Not only was she kicked out of the SDF for punching a superior officer who was sexually harassing her, but has become hooked on a live-streaming host and fallen into financial ruin. This has become such a common problem lately that legislation has been introduced specifically to stop hosts exploiting women and forcing them into sex work. Though Wakabayashi (Wan Marui) knows intellectually that this relationship is entirely one-sided and not actually real, she feels compelled to keep supporting him in part because he was the only person who listened to her worries and accepted her as she was even though she knows this is just part of his job.

That her desire for connection and acceptance can only be fulfilled through a transactional arrangement speaks of an increasing sense of disconnection and alienation just as Sora is dragged into this hellish world through an online ad, never having met his handler who goes by the ironic handle of “Angel”. It’s the need to get rid of Wakabayashi that forces the gang out of their natural habitat and into the bear’s territory of the forest where the human civility that marks urbanity is largely dissolved. Yet there’s a sense of human solidarity that emerges between Sora and Wakabayashi in which they call each other by their own names as they try to battle the bear even if they also give in to their greed by staying in the mountains longer than they need to in order to retrieve the gemstone which the bear has swallowed.

Another kind of human connection is brokered by Sora’s interaction with a young boy who is playing the game he designed. The boy has been told not to talk to strangers or his games will be taken away, but decides to trust Sora and ironically gives him some bear-shaped snacks. He ends up fulfilling the role of a wizard in an RPG, gifting Sora some much needed special items after he manages to beat his own game. This newfound senes of achievement allows Sora to regroup and decide to do the right thing, not only calling his mother to explain what’s going on honestly, but going back to confront the bear and save Wakabayashi. On his way back to the mountain, he passes a collection of elderly people who are running an anti-scammer drill which seems to be organised much like the bear catching drills being run various cities, only in that case, Sora would also be a kind of bear. Filled with darkly absurd humour, the film seems to say man is the most deadly predator and the cities are the place of real danger, but allows Sora to overcome his sense of despair in using his unique and specialist knowledge along with a sense of human solidarity to finally beat back the existential threats of an exploitative society. 

HIGUMA!! The Killer Bear screens as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Furious (火遮眼, Kenji Tanigaki, 2025)

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A gang of child traffickers kidnap the wrong man’s daughter in Kenji Tanigaki’s non-stop action thriller, The Furious (火遮眼). Once again set in a fictional South East Asian nation, the film sees two men team up against a world of corruption as the last line of defence rescuing kidnapped kids and returning them to their families but in return incurring the wrath of the powers that be who are all too happy go along with traffickers for the financial benefits it offers.

Wang Wei (Xie Miao) is living in South East Asia while seemingly unable to return to China for unclear reasons with the implication that he is some kind of fugitive. His young daughter Rainy (Yang Enyou), who lives with her grandmother on the Mainland, has been staying with him for the summer and constantly begs Wang either to return to China with her or let her stay here with him. Wang rejects both of these options while insisting that Rainy learn kung fu so that she is able to defend herself in his absence, though she claims that she actually hates it and sees her training only as a means of being able to spend time with her father. 

In some ways, and a little uncomfortably, Wang’s desire to train his daughter for independence is depicted as a rejection of his paternal responsibilities while Rainy rejects it in favour of a more traditional femininity, reusing to get her hair cut short out of fear her classmates will make fun of her. It’s after an argument about the haircut that Rainy is lured by the traffickers having stormed out of the hairdressers while the neighbourhood aunties stop Wang going after her, assuring him that she’s just at that age and needs some space to blow off steam. Rainy’s skills might not be enough to protect herself against the traffickers and may even in a way endanger her when she actively tries to fight adult men much bigger and stronger than herself, but do perhaps give her confidence to continue trying to escape.

Wang, meanwhile, tries to report Rainy’s kidnapping to the police but finds them entirely uninterested with the police chief actively telling him that his complaint is unimportant. Seeing a large wall full of missing child posters convinces him that if he wants his daughter back, he’ll have to get her himself. The film suffers from the decision to have a large part of the dialogue in English with several lines unconvincingly dubbed which is likely intended to play into the idea of this place being a melting pot of cultures and languages in addition to a hub for a crime network stretching across Asia with incidental dialogue from the trafficking gang offered in Tagalog. The implication is then that fail son-in-law Paklung was sent to the US for an international education but is unable to integrate into this gangster society, engaging in the taboo activity of child trafficking and causing his father-in-law to suggest making him the fall guy. Paklung, however, cannot accept this rejection and goes on a sociopathic rampage that ironically destroys the future he had dreaming of.

On the other hand, the resolution lies in a defiance of authority as an earnest police woman gains the courage to turn against the corrupt police chief partly thanks to rising public resentment generated by the disappearance of a reporter who was investigating the trafficking ring and live streams from her husband Navin who is trying to find her. Frustrated father son relationships become something of a theme with giant-baby like henchman Ho also seeking revenge for the death of his father, killed by Paklung’s arrow-wielding minion, Tak (Yayan Ruhian). 

The fact is that no had really cared much about these children because they were poor and were viewed as disposable, though it is surprising in a way that the gang wouldn’t just give up Rainy rather than go to the bother of dealing with Wang. Though he had refused to go back and help the old woman in the opening sequence, telling Rainy that it was none of their business, Wang’s sense of responsibly is reawakened by Rainy’s desire to go back and save the other kids while extending a hand of friendship towards the boy who tricked her in the knowledge that he didn’t really have much choice either and lacked the courage to resist because he was alone and was only trying to survive. The brutal and frenetic action sequences reflect the nihilism of the world of the world around them in which Wang and Navin face attacks from all sides and seemingly immortal opponents while mustering all of their strength and ingenuity to protect those closet to them.

Trailer

Climbing for Life (てっぺんの向こうにあなたがいる, Junji Sakamoto, 2025)

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A world-famous, record-breaking mountain climber faces the final ascent in Junji Sakamoto’s fictionalised biopic of Junko Tabei, the first Japanese woman to reach the summit of Everest. Here named Tabe, the highest mountain Junko (Sayuri Yoshinaga / Non) has to climb seems to be the patriarchal nature of Japanese society in the 1970s. The film does, however, mistakenly imply that sexism is an issue that has now been solved in the film’s contemporary setting of 2010-16 in which women hold positions of authority and are free to fulfil themselves outside the home on an equal footing with men.

Of course, this is not really the reality even if, in some ways, the situation may be much better than during the high prosperity era during which Junko was a trailblazer in more ways than one. When she decides to mount an all-female expedition team to conquer Everest, she’s mainly met with derision and scorn. While she and female reporter Etsuko (Yuki Amami / Mizuki Kayashima) do the rounds of various companies looking for sponsorship, the elderly male CEOs are incredibly confused and accuse them of being traitors to their sex. They questions whether it’s safe for women to do something like this without any men around (though in the interests of clarity, all the Sherpas appear to me male), and also what wonder what their husbands are supposed to do for the six months they’ll be away shirking their domestic responsibilities. Even when they encounter a man who is closer to their own generation and sounds supportive, stating that the era of gender equality has arrived, it turns out to be all talk. He does not take their proposal seriously and even asks which part of it he should read as if it wasn’t really important. In the end, his “support” doesn’t transfer into any investment.

In the present day, Etsuko remarks that there were a lot of useless men around back then, as if men are universally different now. She herself has become a senior reporter and is in a position of authority over younger male reporters in the newsroom. Likewise, Junko’s main physician in the later stages of her treatment following a cancer diagnosis is also female and makes a point of listening to her patient’s wishes and concerns. It does not appear that Etsuko ever married or had children, but no one of is critical of them for “abandoning” their domestic responsibilities to pursue a career in the way they were of Junko when she left her daughter behind to climb Everest. To that extent the film paints a rosier picture of the contemporary society than might actually be the case given the still persistent levels of sexism and gender bias that still present barriers to woman’s ability to find fulfilment whether within the domestic environment or outside of it.

Nevertheless, Junko’s husband Masaaki (Kôichi Sato) is depicted as a shining example of confident masculinity in his support for his wife’s endeavours. A sister-in-law looks after daughter Noriko during the day with Masaaki on parental duties outside of his shifts as a mechanic. Even so, Junko’s success is seen to have a negative effect on her children who do feel a degree of resentment towards her. Noriko has largely taken it in her stride, but also feels a sense of regret that Junko is not just her mother but someone she has to share with the world. When this spurs her on to deepen their relationship in adulthood, younger son Shintaro (Ryuya Wakaba) who was born after Everest is hugely resentful and struggles to emerge from his mother’s shadow or the pressure of being the child of a famous person. He doesn’t like it that people have expectations of him because of who his mother is and feels as if he is held to a different standard because of it, causing him to become rebellious at school. The situation becomes so bad that he eventually moves in with relatives and transfers to the relatively more anonymous Fukushima where his teacher gives him some harsh lessons in humility, reminding him that he is not “Junko’s Tabe’s son”, but that Junko Tabe just happens to be his mother.

Shintaro’s views also seem to be more patriarchal than those of his father whom he verbally attacks insisting that he must also be resentful of Junko and that if it were not for losing his big toes to frostbite it would have been him conquering Everest, not her. While Shintaro appears to feel emasculated by his mother and looks down on his father for what he sees as weakness, Shintaro is able to put his personal frustrations aside and devote himself wholeheartedly to supporting Junko. It’s not until Junko’s illness becomes serious that Shintaro is able to reconcile with her and find a more stable path in life through helping with her programme to bring high school students displaced by the 2011 earthquake to climb Mount Fuji.

Mountains take on an almost sacred presence for Junko with Mount Fuji in particular becoming a constant motif. The film depicts her final battle with cancer as being yet another mountain to climb, though knowing your limitations is also part of the art of climbing and so when she comes to the realisation that she can no longer reach the summit, she decides to plan her descent. The poignant closing moments have her looking at a photo of the women’s team and insisting they will all go together, expressing a degree of sadness that the group fell apart after Everest with some resentful that Junko had progressed to the summit alone rather than postpone to regroup to call off the ascent to try again another time. All of the press attention fell on her alone forgetting the efforts of those who’d stayed at base camp and without whom Junko’s success would not have been possible. Female solidarity is also vulnerable to these kinds of pressures, the film implies, though Junko’s friendship with Etsuko endures right to the end. Though the conclusion is bittersweet, the closing moments at least focus more on a life well lived amid the majesty of the mountains rather than dwelling on its inevitable tragedy.

Climbing for Life screens as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Operation Hadal (蛟龙行动, Dante Lam Chiu-Yin, 2025)

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In recent years, Dante Lam has busied himself with a particular brand of Mainland propaganda actioner. Operation Hadal (蛟龙行动, Jiāolóng Xíngdòng) is intended as a kind of thematic sequel to earlier hits Operation Red Sea and Operation Mekong each of which featured the Chinese military springing into action to defend Chinese citizens from a plausible geopolitical threat while reminding the world at large that China will rise to defend itself and its citizens wherever they may be. 

All of which makes Operation Hadal a rather curious addition to the franchise. Unlike previous instalments, it’s set in the near future and revolves around round a completely ridiculous plot to blow up a volcano and destabilise East Asia with a series of what look to be natural disasters. Or so it would seem, the narrative is often incoherent and difficult to follow. If it were any other Chinese military propaganda film, it would doubtless want to show off the capabilities of the nuclear submarine at the film’s centre. The film even includes a quote from Chairman Mao in 1970 that the nation should hurry up and build nuclear submarines as soon as possible, but it’s not all that clear if this sort of submarine actually exists yet and the qualities the crew are most excited about on boarding the brand-new ship are that it’s much more spacious and comfortable to live in, while the fact that it’s much quieter and, therefore, can evade detection more easily is added as an after thought. 

Meanwhile, Captain Zhao Qing (Zhang Hanyu) is seen to make some questionable command decisions such as playing the harmonica on deck in a moment of crisis which is one thing that seems to have particularly upset the target audience. Zhang clarified that the tune he’s playing is a navy song and is intended as a call to arms for the submarine officers, though it doesn’t really play out that way and feels more like a misplaced homage to the western. Chinese technology is even eclipsed at times with the team finding themselves bogged down fighting robot dogs controlled by the other side, the so-called State of Siekerman, which at any rate seems to populated largely by people with American accents.

There is no clear reason why the State of Siekerman wants to destroy Asia with a series of “mid-sized nuclear bombs”, though there is division within the armed forces with some objecting to the plan because it will necessarily destroy the ecoculture of the area which is beneficial for the rest of the planet, leading to a mutiny by those who are in favour of blowing everything up. This sense of division is perhaps supposed to contrast with the intense unity of Chinese forces, in the same way as the friendship between Zhao Qing and the Admiral back on land is contrasted with that of the two State of Siekerman commanders who disagree about strategy.

The film’s biggest weakness is, however, a lack of characterisation among the Jiaolong team who are often indistinguishable due to the heavy equipment they are wearing. Interpersonal drama comes in the form of a man hung up on the death of a friend in a previous mission and his relationship with his fallen comrade’s son that is probably intended as a touching advocation of filial piety but largely gets lost among the chaotic action. The fact that everything comes down to one officer’s listening ability doesn’t seem like a very good advert for Chinese technology, if perhaps praising the abilities of rank and file soldiers to rise to the occasion. Subpar CGI often gets in the way of the action sequences which are the central draw, leaving the film quite literally all sea with no clear idea of what it’s trying to do. Where the violence of Operation Red Sea was realistic and horrifying, there’s a slightly camp quality with villains being dispatched by hatchets to the head or else popped by sliding doors. It’s not much of an advertisement for Chinese military prowess and never really discovers the sense of patriotic heroism that films like these generally rely on.

Operation Hadal is released on Digital in the US on 16th June courtesy of Well Go USA.

Trailer (English subtitles)蛟龙行动,

5 Centimeters per Second (秒速5センチメートル, Yoshiyuki Okuyama, 2025)

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Sometimes people come into your life for a short time and then move on. Perhaps you won’t see them again, though the effect they have on you remains profound. Takaki is still hung up on a girl he met during his childhood and subsequently lost touch with to the extent that he has become isolated and emotionally distant. In remaking Makoto Shinkai’s anime 5 Centimeters per Second ( 秒速5センチメートル), Yoshiyuki Okuyama homes in on a sense of urban alienation and a longing for something greater that transcends ordinary life before arriving at an acceptance that sometimes there is no greater meaning beyond a pleasant memory.

Takaki (Yuzu Aoki) feels as if he’s looking for the feeling he’s lost while living in a soulless urban environment and doing a job that, as someone later says, isn’t all that much fun but not particularly taxing either. It’s clear that he wants something more out of life, but at the same time has become afraid to connect with people. As a child, he moved around a lot and so developed a habit of avoiding getting into relationships in order to avoid the pain of separation. As an adult, he never stays in one place for too long and is always moving on, quitting one job after another and moving to new parts of the city. He has a kind of girlfriend, but keeps her at arms’ length emotionally and is not seriously invested in the relationship.

The irony is that he and Akari (Mitsuki Takahata) bonded over the experience of being transfer students, but where Takaki has become a kind of nomad, Akari has begun to settle down with a regular job in a book shop. Though the film is told mostly from Takaki’s perspective, it seems that she has decided their youthful connection is something that belongs in the past as a comforting memory rather than a promise that will one day be fulfilled. She may think of Takaki from time to time, but also hopes that he has moved on and is living in the present rather than being hung up on the romantic ideal of their childhood connection.

TV news broadcasts discussing space probes that are destined to continue travelling in different directions echo the course of their relationship. Takaki assumes it’s an orbit and that their paths are destined to cross again eventually, when really their childhood friendship was a kind of launch point after which the distance between them would only grow. Their paths do indeed cross at times with several near misses at reconnection, but they remain liminal presences in each other’s lives.

The implication is that Takaki has retreated into a fantasy of idealised romance to avoid dealing the emotional difficulties of adult life, while for Akari the memory of her childhood friendship with Takaki has allowed her to move on into a more settled adulthood in which she is willing to accept the possibility of painful separations while putting down roots and forging relationships with those around her. Living through the illusionary “end of the world” affords Takaki a kind of rebirth in which he can learn to let go of the past and begin to move on by opening himself up to those around him. 

Okuyama captures Takaki’s sense of alienation while finding beauty in the world that surrounds him, from the spaces of urban loneliness to the crisp white snow and cherry blossom tree that Takaki believes is his salvation. The environment both reflects his anxieties and feelings of isolation, and is at times a barrier to his reconnection with Akari, but is also a source of hope for the future that the impending end of the world will not in fact come to be. Takaki’s 30th birthday is rather a kind of coming full circle and the launch point for adulthood in which he can finally move on from idealised first love and begin to open himself up to all the joy and pain that life has to offer.

5 Centimeters per Second screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection

Trailer (English subtitles)

1st Kiss (ファーストキス 1ST KISS, Ayuko Tsukahara, 2025)

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Kanna (Takako Matsu) married Kakeru (Hokuto Matsumura) after a whirlwind romance and to begin with they were blissfully happy, but the pressures of modern life soon placed a strain on their relationship and 15 years later they had just signed divorce papers when Kakeru was killed in a tragic train station accident. Left behind alone, Kanna can’t help reassessing their marriage and wondering what went wrong. When she drives through a tunnel undergoing structural repairs and emerges on the day she and Kakeru first met, it seems like a golden opportunity to rewrite the past and possibly save both Kakeru and her miserable marriage.

A quirky time loop romance, First Kiss (ファーストキス 1ST KISS) is essentially a portrait of grief as Kanna constantly returns to the past in an attempt to understand the present. The Kanna of the present day is a stand-offish middle-aged woman who hates people and animals. Though she still lives in the apartment she shared with Kakeru, it’s a cold cluttered space that seems to echo her internal depression. Her marriage began to fall apart when Kakeru gave up his dreams of studying dinosaurs to get a real grown-up job as a married man, having been told by his professor that a real man must provide for his family. His corporate persona slowly made him miserable to the extent that he bought a bed for the spare room and began sleeping in there. By the end, the pair were living parallel lives, eating breakfast separately and barely exchanging a word. 

Given this opportunity to reconnect with the Kakeru she fell in love with, Kanna becomes determined to save him by tweaking the timeline so he never goes to the station on that day, but each time she returns home to his photo on the altar. After an incredibly insensitive visit from Ritsu (Riho Yoshioka), a woman Kakeru was being lined up to marry, who basically blames her for making Kakeru miserable and failing to look after him, Kanna wonders if the best solution isn’t that he never meets her at all but drifts into a marriage with Ritsu, remaining at the university working with her father. That way, he’d still be alive, as if Kakeru choosing her were a deviation from the original turn of events and she were merely restoring it at the cost of her own romantic fulfilment.

But at the same time, she’s falling in love with Kakeru all over again with the unexpected bonus that he too is drawn to her 45-year-old self despite being unaware of their romantic history. Her inability to change the past in any significant way seems to suggest that there are some things that are fixed and can never be altered, but within that you are free to decide how you live now and what you do with your life. It’s not so much about when you die or how long you live so much as making the best of the time that is given to you rather than spending it mired in resentment and misery. Aside from the status of her mission, returning to the past begins to brighten Kanna’s life, allowing her to enjoy interacting with people and be a part of the world again.

These are all also ways of allowing her to deal with her grief while reclaiming her marriage and saving Kakeru in a different way by preventing him from losing sight of himself and giving in to misery. Falling in love is about finding things you like about each other, Kanna tells the youthful Kakeru, but marriage is about discovering all the ways you drive each other crazy. Kakeru’s tendency to pick at her about leaving lights on hints at the way financial concerns eroded their relationship along with the outdated social pressure placed on Kakeru to be a “real man” by supporting his family financially though a “proper” salaryman job. Kanna filing his death certificate next to an excited couple registering their marriage seems to ram the message home that, as Kakeru says, life is short and the most important thing is to use the time well. Whatever else happens, you do have a choice how you live today, and even if you suffer later, the pain will be easier to bear with fewer regrets.

1st Kiss screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection

Trailer (no subtitles)

Images: © 2025 TOHO.CO., LTD.／AOI Pro. Inc.

All Greens (万事快調〈オール・グリーンズ〉, Takashi Koyama, 2025)

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Consumed by rural ennui, three teenage girls set on a dramatic plan for escape in Takashi Koyama’s darkly comic youth drama, All Greens (万事快調〈オール・グリーンズ). The title turns out to be apt, not only in ironically referencing the drugs at the film’s centre, but also that the girls are all still fairly naive and just trying to figure out their place in the world. Whatever that may turn out to be, it’s clear that each of them is constrained by their circumstances from abusive fathers to absent parents and outdated patriarchal ideals.

The reduced horizons of their lives are evident in Hidemi’s (Sara Minami) description of the school as a place where everyone’s either given up on exams or is too poor to access better education. She and Mako (Mizuki Yoshida) seem to resent popular girl Milk (Natsuki Deguchi) and her seemingly perfect life, but are unaware that circumstances are similar to theirs or that she too is longing to escape this dead-end town. Hidemi is sick of her abusive father and submissive mother and finds release through rap music. Mako wants to be a manga artist, but is under pressure from her family who expect her to marry a man to take over their farm. And Milk has become a mother to her mother who appears to have had a mental breakdown following the death of her husband, a nuclear plant worker caught up in a radioactive incident. 

The attitude of Mako’s family may seem excessively old-fashioned, but seems to reflect the traditional culture of the village. When the teacher warns their class about a flasher, he tells the girls to travel in groups and avoid going home alone while ensuring their skirts are not too short as if that had anything to do with the likelihood of being flashed. The three girls are briefly united when they witness a woman and her small child being dumped in the middle of an intersection by an abusive spouse. They hear later that the woman snapped, killed her abusive husband and burnt his house down before drowning herself and her daughter in the river. Each of them fear ending up like this woman, as if the village itself were an abusive spouse from whom they can’t escape. Hidemi’s dreams of rap stardom are even disrupted when she’s offered a promising opportunity with a “beat master” who first tells her he’s quitting the business because he’s getting married and needs a more stable line of work, and then matter-of-factly says that the job is conditional on sleeping with him. He even tried to drug her drink, but Hidemi has a healthy level of suspicion regarding men who offer help, so she switched their drinks which is how she finds out he has a safe full of marijuana seeds.

The drugs offer a more literal kind of escape in the prospect of a small business the three girls could operate illicitly together without really thinking about the consequences beyond the hope of making enough money to leave town. Later they bring in two fellow students who need money because they are gay and want to move in together to escape their oppressive families, though Hidemi’s assertion that karma isn’t real may seem hubristic while playing into her sense of the world as a lawless place in which there are no real consequences for anything because she’s used to seeing bad guys get away with their crimes. In trying their luck in the big city, however, the girls find themselves out of their depth as their small-town gangster dreams implode in the face of the realities of urban crime. 

In the end, the only real answer may be to burn it all down, but the sense of solidarity between the girls has at least given them the courage to chase their dreams even if they may still prove elusive. As the fumes make their way through the school, it provokes a sense of liberation as the old codes of conformity begin to dissolve and people say what they really feel. It may be only temporary and perhaps lead nowhere at all, but for the moment at least the road ahead is wide open.

All Greens screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection

Trailer (no subtitles)

Tokyo Taxi (TOKYOタクシー, Yoji Yamada, 2025)

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Not all memories are nice, according to the heroine of the latest film by Yoji Yamada, Tokyo Taxi (TOKYOタクシー). A remake of the film Driving Madeleine, the action follows a glamorous older woman (Chieko Baisho) as she enlists a middle-aged taxi driver (Takuya Kimura) to drive her around Tokyo with the final destination being a care home that she has reluctantly decided to move in to. As such, it’s really journey through the stations of her life, but also about Japan as it was 60 years ago and the Japan of today.

After all, it wasn’t all plain sailing, Sumire insists as taxi driver Koji escorts her to a series of Tokyo landmarks each with a link to her past. It’s clear that one some level the care home has come to symbolise death for Sumire who has made the decision to go there, but still drags her feet. On their eventual arrival, she begs Koji to take her to a hotel instead while he ties to coax her like a child, certain that there’s no real point trying to postpone the inevitable. 

There is, however, something quite touching about this path towards the acceptance of mortality given that this is director Yoji Yamada’s 91st film, made when he was already 94. Star Chieko Baisho is similarly 84. The pair have worked together for over 60 years and it was apparently the desire to make one more film with Baisho that pushed Yamada to keep going despite no longer quite having the stamina to direct a major motion picture. The film also marks the 130th anniversary of Yamada’s home studio, Shochiku, bringing things neatly full circle.

Still, there’s a fair amount of sadness in Sumire’s passage from her father’s death in the fire bombing of Tokyo to losing her first love and experiencing domestic violence. Speaking of her youth, Sumire remarks that not everything was bad in those days, but a lot of things certainly were and some of them have not changed so much as one might hope all this time later. Back then, violence was something a wife was expected to endure and in itself not considered grounds for ending a marriage. Sumire’s husband picked her precisely because her circumstances made her an easy target for his bullying leaving her with few options for escaping her abusive relationship.

For his part, Koji too is somewhat lost as he meanders on the way to the care home. His daughter Nana (Runa Nakashima) may have the opportunity to attend a prestigious music college, but it won’t come cheap. He agreed before really thinking it through, and now can’t face the possibility of standing in the way of Nana’s dreams. But when he reaches out to his sister for help, she tells him that music school is just for rich people’s children with the implication that he’s getting above himself and should just accept that things like that aren’t meant for people like them. Reflecting a contemporary class divide, Koji’s quest nevertheless bears out a father’s love for his daughter as he racks his brains trying to think of ways to come up with the money so that she can chase her dreams in the way that he never could.

It’s this simple desire that allows him to bond with Sumire who, as it turns out, was never someone who felt compelled to accept the status quo and was prepared to take drastic action to challenge circumstances that actively impeded her happiness. As they weave through a Tokyo that often seems entirely foreign and unrecognisable, simple human kindness and the connections between people have remained constant. Koji does his best to get Sumire safely to her destination while patiently listening to her story and gradually opening up with his own. Beginning in the stomping grounds of Tora-san and ending up in an idyllic setting by the sea, the film, in a way, elegises the careers of both director and star with the acceptance of an ending still to come, though perhaps not quite yet. “The sun is setting,” Sumire remarks with accidental profundity, but there’s beauty still to be found even this twilight in simple acts of human kindness and compassion that will never themselves fade away.

Tokyo Taxi screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection

Trailer (no subtitles)

Images: ©2025 “TOKYO TAXI” Film Partners, Remake rights: courtesy of Pathé-Une HIRONDELLE PRODUCTIONSBased on the film “UNE BELLE COURSE” written by Christian Carion and Cyril Gély directed by Christian Carion©2022 -UNE HIRONDELLE PRODUCTIONS -PATHE FILMS -ARTEMIS PRODUCTIONS -TF1 FILMS PRODUCTION

A Moon in the Ordinary (平場の月, Nobuhiro Doi, 2025)

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Back in the early 2000s, Nobuhiro Doi was a leading figure of the short-lived “jun-ai” or “pure love” boom with films such as Be With You, and Tears for You, as well as TV dramas like Beautiful Life and Orange Days. Adapted from the novel by Kasumi Asakura, A Moon in the Ordinary (平場の月, Hiraba no Tsuki) is a kind middle-aged take on the same material in which former classmates reunite 35 years later but discover that they aren’t really any better equipped to understand what love is than they were as teenagers.

The pair even bond over hearing Hiroko Yakushimaru’s Main Theme, the title song of the movie of the same name, in which the singer laments that they still don’t understand love even after living 20 years. Kensho (Masato Sakai) and Yoko (Haruka Igawa) have lived more than 20 years since they last saw each other and are each carrying their own particular baggage of failed or compromised romances. Each having returned to their hometown where they’ve reconnected with their former classmates, there is something of a return to childhood in their relationship even while tempered by the compromises of age. As one of Kensho’s former classmates says, he’s reached the age where doing new things is a bother and now the conversation turns on people’s health issues or those of their parents. 

Kansho moved back after his divorce to care for his mother but she now lives in a care home and has advanced dementia. Every time he reminds her who he is, she replies that “Kensho is dead,” but he just humours her. Yoko, meanwhile, has moved back after an ill-advised affair with a younger man left her broke. Widowed young, she harbours a degree of guilt over the circumstances that led to her marriage while also perhaps a little embarrassed to be working in the hospital cafe having graduated from a good university and holding a well-paying job in the city. Despite her initial reluctance, she bonds with Kensho over their shared sense of middle-aged despair as he awaited the results of some potentially concerning medical tests.

Health issues are, however, only a part of the problem. Yoko is also carrying childhood trauma and a low sense of self-worth that once made her determine to live life alone, which is a difficult habit to break. Following her experiences, she lives in a spartan flat she says she keeps tidy to make life easier for whoever has to deal with it after she’s gone and also makes sure to sleep on the bed so the mess will be contained if it’s a while before anyone finds her if she passes away. Even before encountering her own life issues, she seems to be living in a kind of limbo state until reconnecting with Kensho. The “impossible dream” she describes might be as simple as getting to grow old with the person you love, though it’s something she doesn’t really think she’s entitled to or deserving of.

As Kensho says, they’ve both been plenty hurt already, what if they just end up hurting each other more? His older co-worker advises him that getting hurt is just part of it and he’d gladly go through it all again, but romance is as hard at 50 as it was at 15. Some things have changed and others haven’t. It’s a little ironic, in some ways, that the film ends with a Chinese-style disclaimer reminding audience members that it’s illegal for two people to be riding the same bike given that the film’s main theme is the unchanging innocence of romantic connection. After meeting Kensho, Yuko starts to plant flowers in her makeshift garden rather than purely practical herbs as if she were welcoming joy back into her life, but she still feels herself to be a burden and has a tendency to pull away rather than expose herself emotionally while Kensho’s decision to allow her to do that seems foolish in the extreme. In the end, perhaps there is only loneliness and absence. In a flashback to their teenage years, Kensho says that he didn’t want to become a regular grown-up which he inevitably has, now filled with middle-aged regrets while Yoko never quite managed to move past herself and accept the possibility of love as another than an impossible dream.

screens as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (English subtitles)