Tag: 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trailer (English subtitles)

I Am Kirishima (桐島です, Banmei Takahashi, 2025)

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In early 2024, an elderly man made a shocking confession. He told members of the medical staff at the hospital where he was being treated that his name was actually “Satoshi Kirishima” and that he was a fugitive from justice wanted for the terrorist bombing of Mitsubishi Industries in 1974 that resulted in the deaths of eight people. Banmei Takahashi’s I Am Kirishima (桐島です, Kirishima desu) attempts to chart the course of his lifetime on the run but may prove controversial in the depths of its sympathy for a man who was party to this kind violence and to a degree found it justified even if he could not justify that his organisation threatened the lives of ordinary people rather than simply the infrastructure of companies they believed to be fuelling corporate imperialism.

Takashi has visited this era before with 2001’s Rain of Light which like Wakamatsu’s United Red Army readdressed the Asama-Sanso Incident and the failure of the student movement in early 1970s of which both directors had been a part. In February 1972, five members of the URA fleeing a purge inside the group holed up in a mountain lodge taking the innkeeper’s wife hostage. The event was one of the first news events in Japan to be broadcast live and its aftermath exposed the cult-like depths of violence and abuse to which the URA had descended forever the souring the nation as a whole on the idea of left-wing revolution. Meanwhile, the fragmentary groups that remained shifted further towards the extremes such completing bombing campaigns to disrupt the new capitalistic prosperity of the economic miracle. Kirishima and his cell believe these large conglomerates, such as Mitsubishi, to be enacting a new kind of Japanese imperialism through exploitative labour practices often targeting migrant workers in much the same way they made use of the forced labour of Korean and Chinese people trafficked to Japan during the colonial period.

To this extent, Kirishima justifies acts of terrorism but thinks they should avoid ordinary people getting caught up in the blast. The film is keen to cast him as “a man behind the times,” an foolish idealist who is exiled from the modern society because of his outdated beliefs in equality and fairness. As such, it lends an elegiac quality to the tragedy of his life in which his 50 years on the run weren’t all that much better than prison given that he had to live under an assumed identity, forever watching his back and unable to put down roots. A tentative romance with a singer-songwriter is hinted at, but Kirishima forgoes his romantic desires out of a feeling that it would be irresponsible to marry without being able to reveal his true self. 

But the film equally seems to drawn a parallel with contemporary Japan in Kirishima finds himself working alongside a middle school drop out with openly xenophobic views who makes frequent racist remarks such as implicating a co-worker when he’s taken to task for being late by insisting that it must be the other guy’s fault because he’s Korean and Koreans always lie. He also says that the migrant workers whom he claims are working illegally should be grateful to be exploited in Japan and can always go home if they don’t like it. It’s all a little too much for Kirishima who sacrificed his life for an ideal this boy repudiates while Japan has become a nation ruled by capitalism and exploitation with the labour revolution he dreamed of now a distant memory. Watching a Shinzo Abe press conference in which he discusses revising the constitution, Kirishima throws a beer can at the TV in frustration. His old comrade dies in prison leaving only a book of poetry behind, while another is released after serving his time though he obviously can’t make contact with him without risking his identity being exposed and getting picked up after all these years. 

Indeed, the film romanticises this image of Kirishima as a man from a bygone age in which another Japan was possible but did not and now presumably cannot come to pass. In doing so, it gives tacit approval to some of the actions of the extremist groups of the 1970s while simultaneously declaring the end of an era as a “case closed” card is placed over the cheerfully smiling face of a young Kirishima which had graced wanted posters all over the country for the last 50 years. His life itself becomes a failed revolution, but also kind of victory in which he managed to “beat” the police by remaining a fugitive all that time even if in the end he seems to regret the life he was prevented from living along with the isolation and loneliness of which he may now at last be free.

I Am Kirishima screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

So Beautiful, Wonderful and Lovely (素敵すぎて素敵すぎて素敵すぎる, Megumi Okawara, 2025)

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Is it better to have a dream that will never come true or to have no dreams at all? That’s a question that Nozomi can’t help asking herself after her world comes crashing down when she discovers her boyfriend is randomly marrying someone else. Nevertheless, she comes to realise that her life is and always has been So Beautiful, Wonderful, and Lovely (素敵すぎて素敵すぎて素敵すぎる, Sutekisugite, Sutekisugite, Suteki Sugite) in Megumi Okawara’s quirky indie dramedy of endless heartbreak and constant absurdity.

At least, there’s nothing more absurd than being haunted by the spirit of your very much still alive boyfriend in the form of a slice of castella cake. Nozomi’s mother has been tearfully trying to perfect a party trick to perform at the wedding of her daughter to boyfriend Chitose, but unbeknownst to her, Chitose has married someone else. Gatecrashing the ceremony, Nozomi teamed up with Chitose’s brother Susumu to hijack the wedding photo and then run off with the camera though she ended up crashing into a castella cake delivery guy and landing in hospital with a brace around her neck. The neck brace is perhaps a symbol of the way Nozomi’s world has been narrowed, preventing her from turning her head to find new directions in life. But those would be hard to find anyway when you’re being followed around by a guy who looks like your ex but also claims to be a piece of sentient cake. 

To begin with, she tries to have fun with Castella-Chitose by going on influencer-style dates such as a visit to his “birthplace” (a castella cake shop) while trying to understand her relationship with the “real” Chitose who not is particularly nice and very pissed off about everything that happened with his wedding along with Nozomi’s lingering attachment to him. She seems to want to continue with the relationship as it was even though he treats her poorly and has already married someone else, while he just seems to be paranoid that she plans to expose their affair even if he does accept responsibility in having behaved badly by never mentioning that he already had girlfriend and for an unknown reason also keeping his wedding and marriage a secret from his colleagues at the school where they both work. 

After making an “affair”-themed video it seems designed to blackmail him into getting back with her, Nozomi (whose name means “hope”) decides to make a fresh start by getting a job in a stationery shop which also turns out to be staffed by people with broken dreams. Her eccentric boss Yoko and the other clerk apparently live in adjacent wardrobes at a rented apartment while Anita, a middle-aged man too timid to interact with customers, worries for his daughter who has broken dreams of her own. Surreal as it is with its weird customers who turn up to see the “new products” or try to buy crab rice which they obviously don’t sell, Nozomi begins to find a new sense of belonging and solidarity as she grieves her failed relationship with Chitose which is set to expire in exactly two weeks’ time when the castella finally meets its best before date.

But then what she discovers is that the thing about dreams that don’t come is that they never expire. Perhaps it really is better to have a dream that won’t come true than not have a dream at all. Or at least, that’s what her new colleagues seem to show her even the midst of their loneliness as they latch on to each other and remind Nozomi that as Castella-Chitose said she matters and that there are people who love and care for her in ways that the real Chitose obviously never did. She wishes most of her life were a dream, while her dreams never come true but still her life is and has always been so beautiful, wonderful, and lovely even if she’s only just really becoming able to appreciate it thanks to her new friends who are giving her the courage to dream new dreams and move on from her disappointing relationship with Chitose while watched over by the spirit of castella cake. Defiantly weird but also warm and wholesome, the final message is that it’s best to embrace life’s strangeness along with its joys and heartbreaks while continuing to dream even if those dreams may never come true.

So Beautiful, Wonderful and Lovely screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Tales of Kurashiki (蔵のある街, Emiko Hiramatsu, 2025)

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Beniko’s high school art project involves recreating a picture her mother left behind that immortalised a memory of a happy family moment during the rare sight of fireworks. But Beniko can’t seem to make progress with her artwork and she’s thinking of giving up art altogether along with her ambition of attending an art school because for her painting is intrinsically linked with her familial trauma and fears for the future. It is also, however, the force that keeps her family together though not perhaps in the way she intended.

The attempt to recreate her mother’s drawing is that to reclaim her family as it was though as she later realises attempting to recreate the past exactly is a futile effort. Resentful towards her mother for leaving and perhaps also towards her father for his emotional abandonment and the absurd jealousy that left her mother with no choice but to leave, she reinvents herself as a caretaker as a way of rooting herself in the domestic space by taking care of her autistic older brother Kyosuke, affectionately known around the neighbourhood as Kyon-kun. Looking after Kyon-kun is one reason she gives for not going to art school, but as her friend points out much to Beniko’s shame, perhaps that’s not really fair to him either if she’s exploiting his need as an excuse for her cowardice while denying him the right to his own life too. He is after all a little more capable than she might give him credit for, travelling to the correct station on his own and waiting for her patiently at the other end when she misses her regular train. 

Beniko’s childhood friend Aoi later realises that he did something similar. When Kyon-kun wandered off while Beniko was distracted and climbed a tree at the shrine to watch imaginary fireworks, Aoi and his friend Kiichi, who is the son of the shrine owner, promised to set off some real fireworks for him without really thinking it through or having much intention to actually do it. But as Beniko points out, Kyon-kun never forgets a promise so now he’s asking every day when the fireworks are and is continually disappointed. Chastened by Beniko, Aoi’s half-hearted attempt to keep his promise backfires and he realises that he too thought that it didn’t really matter because it was Kyon-kun and he wouldn’t know the difference. 

Aoi’s desire to make good on his word is partly a sense of guilt and shame in his realisation of the way he’d thought of Kyon-kun, partly due to his feelings for Beniko, and partly adolescent insecurity in the acceptance that his unnecessarily harsh father has a point when he says he never follows anything through. Kiichi too is experiencing similar anxieties as his father threatens to leave the shrine to his more studious younger brother and is exasperated by his goodhearted goofiness. The trio are all really looking for new paths towards adulthood by trying to make peace with their younger selves and gain the confidence to follow their dreams even if it takes them away from the picturesque settings of provincial Kurashiki.

Beniko’s mother was fond of saying that there was a deity of waiting in the town, and there is a white-clad figure perhaps visible only to Kyon-kun who follows the youngsters around and looks on cheerfully as if embodying the sense of fun and warmth that lingers in the city. Kurashiki does indeed look like a nice place to live with its continual sunniness and traditional architecture though as someone points out that’s largely because the bombers flew past here and hit somewhere else instead. Fireworks are as apparent disruptor but eventual healer Kojo says a way of bringing people together, a source of joy happiness even amid difficult times just as they were during the pandemic. There’s something quite wholesome and comforting about the way the whole community comes together to make Kyon-kun’s dream come true, overcoming the obvious objections of the powers that be that it’s not a good idea to have a fireworks festival in a town that’s almost entirely constructed in wood to create a small marvel of human kindness and solidarity. It’s this that finally allows Beniko to remake her family, giving it her own light and colour while keeping a place for her mother having come to an acceptance of why she couldn’t stay and a conviction that she will one day return when she too has begun to heal her heart.

The Tales of Kurashiki screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Next Stop, Somewhere (別來無恙, James Lee, 2025)

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What does “freedom” actually mean? Will money buy it for you or just result in another kind of prison in which you cannot really say you’re free because you don’t feel like you have the choice to leave? Leaving is really at the centre of James Lee’s sensitive drama Next Stop, Somewhere (別來無恙, biéláiwúyàng) in which the protagonists of parallel stories have both left their homelands not altogether by choice in search of a greater freedom that they nevertheless struggle to find.

Hong Kong actor Huang (Anthony Wong Chau-sang) has left Hong Kong in search of political freedom in the wake of the Umbrella Movement, but is immediately constrained by coronavirus quarantine on his arrival in Taiwan. He is constantly trying to get in contact with a man called James who also seems to be in some political trouble and is not always able to answer, which is a problem because James is supposed to be handling the transfer of his money out of Hong Kong. Huang might be “free” of political oppression, but in reality one is never “free” without money and arguably not even then because of the necessity of acquiring it. That seems to be part of the problem for his maid at the hotel, Xiao Qian (Angel Lee), who feels trapped in a relationship that no longer seems to be working while unable to leave it because neither of them can afford the rent on their own.

Xiao Qian’s relationship is with another woman and perhaps it could be argued that in Taipei she at least has the freedom to live with the person she loved, though on the other hand she pointedly refuses to explain when her girlfriend Bae shows up at the hotel looking for her after she stops answering her calls or messages. Bae also seems to have mental health issues that also perhaps prevent Qian from leaving her, though she continues to treat her coldly and repeatedly refuses her requests for intimacy. It seems that Qian wanted to study abroad in America, but so far has been unable to go. A $100 bill to her represents another kind of freedom, though as she later says to Huang in the end freedom about having the choice to leave.

A $100 bill meant freedom for Kim (Kendra Sow) too, but like Huang she finds herself trapped by the realisation that the note did not represent what she was led to believe it would. Not entirely of her own choice, Kim leaves Vietnam to become the mail order bride of a Malaysian man who claimed to be a wealthy businessman in his 40s but in reality is a market trader quite a bit older than that. Mr Li (Mike Chuah) is totally besotted with his new brides, telling his friends that there were cheaper girls available but his is the prettiest. But in the end he’s trapped by this situation too. It’s clear he hadn’t thought through the reality and was acting out a kind of romantic fantasy. Young and naive, Kim recoils from his touch and building a relationship with her is impossible because she doesn’t speak Mandarin and he doesn’t know Vietnamese. They’re hassled by immigration officials and Mr Li’s irate mother who berates Kim insisting that they only brought her here to have a son and heir so she’s not fulfilling her obligations. For his part, Mr Li is partly sympathetic in that it’s clear he has no desire to force himself on Kim and hurt, if understanding, that she rejects him. When he eventually does try to force her, he can’t go through with it because of the sight of her tears. 

As her mother-in-law feared she might, Kim finds release though a growing relationship with the immigration officer who’s closer to her in age and also an outsider, rejected by Mr Li’s mother on the grounds of his ethnicity. Through love, she finds another kind of “freedom”, but with it constraint and it remains unclear how this situation will play out even as, like Huang, she surrenders the $100 bill to someone who needs it more. To pass time in quarantine, Huang orders a copy of Mishima’s Temple of the Golden Pavilion, a book about a young monk who sets fire to the temple because he can’t bear the existence of something so beautiful in this profane world. Having not yet finished the book after Huang lent it to her, Qian asks him why the boy did it and he replies that perhaps he felt trapped and that only by burning the temple down could he be free. To that extent, for each of them “freedom” means burning the world behind you and never looking back, if only in a purely symbolic sense in finding the courage to leave a dissatisfying situation, no matter how impossible that might seem, along with the willingness to look for happiness somewhere else. 

Next Stop, Somewhere screens as part of this year’s Cinema at Sea.

International trailer

Detective Chinatown 1900 (唐探1900, Chen Sicheng & Dai Mo, 2025)

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The Detective Chinatown team head back to turn of the contrary San Francisco in the latest instalment of the mega hit franchise, Detective Chinatown 1900 (唐探1900, Tángtàn 1900). Like many recent mainstream films, its main thrust is that Chinese citizens are only really safe in China, but also implies that diaspora communities exist outside the majority population and therefore can only rely on each other. Nevertheless, there’s something quite uncanny in the film’s ironic prescience as racist politicians wax on about how here rules are made by the people rather than an emperor and plaster “make America strong again” banners on their buses. 

The crime here though is the murder of a young white woman, Alice (Anastasia Shestakova), the daughter of Senator Grant (John Cusack) who is attempting to push the renewal of the Chinese Exclusion Act through government and destroy all the Chinatowns in the United States. An older Native American man was also found dead alongside her. Some have attributed the crime to Jack the Ripper as Alice was mutilated before she died and some of her organs were taken. The son of local gangster Bai (Chow Yun-Fat), Zhenbang (Zhang Xincheng), is quickly arrested for the crime while his father hires Qin Fu (Liu Hairan) to exonerate him believing Qin Fu to be Sherlock Holmes. 

What Qin Fu, an expert in Chinese medicine recently working as an interpreter for the famous consulting detective, finds himself mixed up in is also a slow moving revolution as it turns out Zhenbang is involved with the plot to overthrow the Qing dynasty (which would finally fall in 1912). As the film opens, corrupt courtiers to sell off large golden Buddha statues to American “allies” who are later seen saying that they plan to fleece China and then renege on their promises to protect it. Meanwhile, the Dowager Empress has sent emissaries to San Francisco to take out the revolutionaries in hiding there including Sun Yat-sen.

Of course, in this case, the Qing are the bad guys that were eventually overthrown by brave Communist revolutionaries that paved the way for China of today which is alluded to in the closing scenes when Zhenbang’s exiled friend Shiliang (Bai Ke) says that China will one day become the most powerful country in the world implying that no-one will look down on the Chinese people again. But on the other hand, they are still all Chinese and so the emissary tells Qin Fu to “Save China” as he lays dying having met his own end shortly after hearing that the British have invaded Peking signalling the death blow for the Qing dynasty. 

Nevertheless, there is a degree of irony in the fact that the secondary antagonist is an Irish gang who have signs reading “no dogs, no Chinese,” mimicking those they themselves famously face. The Irish gang is in league with Grant and content to do his dirty work, while Bai is supported by another prominent man who speaks Mandarin and pretends to be a friend to the Chinese but in reality is against the Exclusion Act on the grounds he wants to go on being able to exploit cheap Chinese labour. In this iteration, Ah Gui (Wang Baoqiang) is “Ghost,” a man whose parents were killed building the American railroad and was subsequently taken in and raised by a Native American community. In Bai’s final confrontation with the authorities, he takes them to task for their hypocrisy reminding them how important the Chinese have been in building the society in which they alone are privileged while “equality” does not appear to extend to them.

Through reinforcing these messages of prejudice and exploitation, the film once again encourages Chinese people living abroad to return home. Though set in 1900, the scenes of protest can’t help but echo those we’ve seen in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic when racist hatred towards Asian communities has become much more open and pronounced. Qin Fu and Ghost do at least succeed in solving the mystery through scientific principles while ironically assisted by an earnest American policeman who says he thinks it’s important to uphold the law even as we can see the head of the golden Buddha sitting behind the victorious politician’s banquet table and realise that in reality taking out Grant has made little difference for the Exclusion Act will still be renewed (it was repealed only in 1943). They may have saved Chinatown, but Bai must sacrifice his American wealth and return to China much the way he left it having reflected on his life in light of the revolutionary course charted by his more earnest son. As Ghost and Qin Fu remark, if things were better there no one would want to come here though they themselves apparently elect to stay, solving more crimes and making sure that their descendants know they were here and where they were from.

International trailer (Simplified Chinese / English subtitles)