Tag: 2026

Magical Secret Tour (マジカル・シークレット・ツアー, Chihiro Amano, 2026)

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When her husband falls into a coma and she discovers he’s left them in huge amounts of debt due to an undisclosed gambling problem, an ordinary housewife finds herself at the mercy of an already strained society in which it seems everyone is struggling to the extent that they have no capacity to listen to other people’s troubles. Inspired by a real-life case in which a group of women was arrested for smuggling gold into the country in 2017, Chihiro Amano’s lighthearted crime drama Magical Secret Tour (マジカル・シークレット・ツアー) is a condemnation both of a society ruled by money and the various ways that women are still expected to clear up the messes of irresponsible men.

Wakako (Kasumi Arimura) is quickly made to feel guilty for not having noticed anything wrong with her husband or their family finances while also expected to shoulder the burden of the repayment plan to his former employer to cover the money he embezzled on top of his hospital fees which must now be paid in full because he was unemployed and had no insurance. When she tries to turn for her own family for her help, her mother is not happy to see her and seems put out that she’s turned up unexpectedly. It seems their family garage business is in trouble while they are already under strain due to needing to pay for their bedridden grandfather’s medical treatment. Her mother leaves abruptly before Wakako has the chance to explain the situation denying her the possibility of both financial assistance and emotional support. 

Apparently ineligible for any kind of government assistance, Wakako’s attempts at job-hunting fail because she is a mother of two with one only an infant and has also been out of the workforce for too long for any career experience to count. Even when her husband does eventually make a partial recovery, he blasts her for neglecting her responsibilities and overburdening his mother by asking for help with childcare. Despite having let her down so badly, he insists he’ll get a job once he’s better and discourages her from continuing to work even though she tells him that she enjoys it and finds it fulfilling. To that extent, her experiences have shown her that she did not really need to be dependent on a man for money as society somewhat encouraged her to be and could also look for fulfilment outside the home as an independent woman. 

Nevertheless, the only work she can find means turning to criminality, first by agreeing to a loan shark’s dodgy gold-smuggling scheme by taking the kids to Singapore for a few days and then returning laden down by gold bars they smuggle through customs to avoid importation taxes. While there she meets two other women in similar situations. Kiyoe (Haru Kuroki) is a scientific researcher in her early 40s who faces persistent sexism at work where her boss steals credit for her discoveries and faces no consequences for fiddling his expenses. Unable to find a new position thanks to a poor publication history, she wants the money to provide for her future. Mayu (Sara Minami), meanwhile, is trying to escape her toxic mother while pregnant herself and working as a bar hostess. 

The women justify themselves that what they’re doing is basically a victimless crime and just really a bit sneaky rather than morally wrong even if aware it’s illegal. A disclaimer at the end of the film implies the law has been tightened since 2017, but the stakes are also fairly low as it seems they’d mostly likely just be asked to pay the tax if they got caught, so trying to smuggle it seems like a no-brainer to them. Even so, the film skirts around Wakako’s involvement with the criminal gang from whom one would expect some sort of payback after she runs off with some of their gold after her own attempt to run a similar business inevitably runs into trouble. Instead it focuses on her sense of isolation in which the mother can end up being pushed out of both families, disregarded and taken for granted while expected to pick up her husband’s slack even if he hasn’t kept his part of the bargain by providing financial stability while otherwise absent from the domestic space. The only way to make a man play his part in child-rearing might ironically be divorce, though it seems likely it might just be him overburdening his mother this time. In any case, Wakako’s magical secret tour does seem to have led her to a more fulfilling place even it may in other ways be bittersweet. 

Magical Secret Tour screens as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Tokyo Nightfall (トーキョーナイトフォール, Yuto Shimizu, 2026)

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Struggling to deal with his feelings of grief and guilt following his younger sister’s suicide, a young man finds himself at an end of the world party for those who want to end their lives in Yuto Shimizu’s melancholy urban drama Tokyo Nightfall (トーキョーナイトフォール). The Tokyo these young people inhabit is one of loneliness and futility in which there is no real hope for future and the past holds only painful memories. 

The bleakness might best be demonstrated by Anna’s (Utano Aoi) reply that her happiest moment in life was her parents’ divorce. The pair hint at a childhood marked by domestic violence, but any hope they might have had for a better future was cut short when Anna witnessed the suicide of a friend of her brother Amenashi (Iori Abe) who jumped from their eighth floor flat. This even seems to have changed Anna who relates that it wasn’t so much the horror or the blood but the fact that she saw a person turn into an object in real time. It made her feel as if being alive wasn’t all that important. 

Working a soulless job as a delivery driver where his clients are often similarly withdrawn or hostile, Amenashi blames himself for Anna’s death and wonders if there was something more he could have done to prevent it while drawn into the same kind of darkness she was. Amenashi’s friend, Hattori (Taiga Hironaka), even states that he is worried about him because his erratic behaviour reminds him of that of Anna shortly before she died. It seems that the party he goes to a gathering for those planning to end their lives where they can have one last night of fun before they go.

Amenashi goes to the party, but is followed by his friends Hattori and Nozu (Kosuke Tanaka) who don’t quite know what the party is, but just want to find their friend. While Nozu, otherwise a comic relief character giving lewd and disgusting answers to the questions put to him, Nozu too sets out to enjoy the night even bonding with a young woman, but is also drawn into the darkness of the evening and reconsiders his own life. Others in the club react with irritation, telling Hattori he should respect his friend’s decision and has no business being here. Haunted by visions of Anna, Amenashi remains uncertain not quite knowing whether to live or die. Another guest at the club tells him that he should forget about this cold world and stay with them, dragging him over to the side of death, while Hattori does him best to encourage him to live.

The video camera sequences play out as a kind of will as Anna, Hattori, and Nozu look back over their lives. Shimizu sometimes replays the same video only to let the conversation run to add more information that changes our impressions of what’s gone before. Speaking about their happiest and saddest moments, the friends paint a bleak picture of familial disconnection and loneliness but are saved only by their bond with each other as Hattori names his happiest moment as spending time on the roof with them.

The irony is that may not be enough. The ghost of Anna tells Amenashi that neither choice is wrong and the film is non-judgemental about the idea of suicide, perhaps feeling that those who make the deacon to leave should be allowed to do so while Amenishi wrestles with himself about the right thing to do. Others may have the decision taken away from them, but he does at least have the power to decide his own future. Hattori had told him that there may be no point in thinking. People are full of contradictions and don’t even understand themselves. “We are here for each other,” Nozu adds, offering the only possible source of salvation in a world that otherwise seems hopeless and devoid of possibility. As Amenashi cycles around the city, he looks on at young couples and is struck by a sense of urban disconnection and loneliness, but does perhaps begin to rediscover something of the will to live in the power of friendship and the memories of those he’s lost, if perhaps only too late.

Tokyo Nightfall screened as part of this year’s Raindance Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Memorizu (メモリィズ, Miiku Sakanishi, 2026)

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Trying to calm a nervous groom, ageing photographer Makoto (Issei Ogata) tells him that he also took his grandfather’s wedding pictures in a moment that speaks of several kinds of continuity all at once. Yet why is that we take photos? Is it for ourselves, as a kind of proof of existence “to remember we were here,” or so that we can share these moments with others and create shared memories to paper over the rift of absence?

The weight of nostalgia hangs heavy over Makoto’s photography studio, but the irony is that it’s son-in-law, Yuta (Tasuku Emoto), who’s come to look after him while he recuperates after breaking a leg, and therefore has no particular attachment to this place or the landscape given that it is not the place where he grew up. Nevertheless, this sense of distance is perhaps why Yuta finds himself taking photos on his smartphone and documenting his daily live in the peaceful rural environment as a means of keeping in touch with his wife, Yuki (Moeka Hoshi), and daughter, Hana, who were supposed to be coming with him but had to cancel at the last moment.

These photos are often spontaneous and sparked by the desire to share a moment or re-experience it later, whereas the photographs taken at Makoto’s studio are more deliberate. Someone has made a decision to have their photo taken either for a prosaic reason such as an application form, or because they too want to mark an important event like a wedding or the birth of a child. These are not events that anyone is likely to forget, but the physical object of the photograph becomes a repository for the emotions the subjects and photographer were feeling at that moment which might otherwise me transitory but can now be re-accessed through film.

The same can be true of the photos and videos Yuta takes on his phone which enable a kind of time lapse communication between himself and his family in which one can be both present and absent at the same time. Yet there’s an implication that the ease with which we take photos in the present day has diluted has their potency. Yuki calls up the photo app on her phone is ad plunged into a sea of images, mainly of her young daughter, so many that she will likely never open most of them again while the vastness of the archive might discourage looking at any of them at all beyond the already visible thumbnail. 

Even so, there’s a degree of poignancy in Makoto getting out the slide projector to show Yuta old pictures of his later wife and Yuki as a child as we see the same images recreated by the adult Yuki and Hana making exactly the same trip with the images appearing in Yuta’s mind like photographs. As Shiori and the young Yuki move further and further away from the camera, there’s a sense of continuing in these repeated images like a film negative running through a projector as one generation slowly replaces another. Though Shiori is already gone, her presence is felt through its absence in the empty seat next to Makoto as he remembers the time they saw a burning field, or her coat still hanging on the wall now on its own as Makoto has given his jacket to Yuta.

The gift of the jacket furthers Yuta’s identification with Makoto, though as one might expect the situation is a little awkward to begin with. Nevertheless, as he settles into the relaxed pace of rural life, the pair begin to bond and develop a familial relationship of their own. Sakanishi bookends the film with scenes of open windows, the first that of a ferry looking out onto the sea. Its rounded corners give it the aesthetic of film while the scene constantly changes to explore how various people react to it. Some look out on the sea as they eat, others more or less ignore it or get on with their work. The closing shot, meanwhile, is a timelapse photo through Makoto’s bedroom window capturing the changing seasons. The lesson is perhaps that the human eye is also a camera and that our lives our made up of these small, barely memorable moments that can nevertheless amount to something greater than ourselves. 

Trailer (English subtitles)

Nameless (名無し, Hideo Jojo, 2026)

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A man who can kill with a seemingly invisible weapon goes on the rampage after being harangued by a religious woman in a cafe, leaving police and witnesses baffled in Hideo Jojo’s adaptation of the manga by actor and comedian Jiro Sato who also stars in the title role. The nameless hero, given the generic moniker “Taro Yamada” by the well-meaning policeman who discovered him in childhood, has a mysterious supernatural ability that causes things he touches with his right hand to temporarily disappear. They return when he takes his hand away, but living creatures appear to have been changed as if they existed in a state between life and death and then generally pass away soon after.

Taro (Jiro Sato) seems to have lived well into his 40s deliberately refusing to use his right hand, so what prompted this sudden turn toward nihilistic and indiscriminate violence? The answers may not be entirely clear, just as there is no concrete explanation of where Taro might have come from or how he acquired these strange powers. But it seems to be a reaction against a society that he feels does not accept him, or at least his failure to connect with it. After experiencing a betrayal by someone close to him, he vows that he’s going to stop trying to connect with people and this murderous rampage seems to be an expression of his loneliness and frustration. 

Then again, society did attempt to reach out to him in some ways even if it does not appear to have made much of an effort to understand his condition or to help him to live with it. Despite the Christianising religious overtones that hang over the film, Taro never seems to consider cutting off his hand or making it unusable. As a child, he bound it with wire, presumably to prevent himself lashing out with it instinctively or accidentally causing harm to other people. His only companion, an equally nameless little girl of unknown origin given the generic moniker “Hanako”, begs him not use it even to protect them, which suggests that he may have done so previously with negative consequences. Perhaps there is some benefit to it which is why he doesn’t try to neutralise his arm, but it’s never clear where things go when he touches them or why they comeback changed or depleted. 

The main issue is that he has a choice about using it. Originally, he didn’t want to, and perhaps didn’t want to kill all those people in the cafe either but ended up doing so. The irony is that he wants to connect, but is literally prevented from reaching out. He has these almost Nosferatu-like ticks and grimaces and is largely mute. He can hear and understand, but barely speaks and when he does, it’s with great effort. His voice his horse and the words come out awkwardly in a strange order. Yet the elliptical quality of the tale seems to hint at a desire to reconnect with his childhood self thereby closing the circle and making himself disappear.

Others may in a way be trying to do the same, such as lead investigator Kunieda (Kuranosuke Sasaki) who suspects the case may be linked to something in his own past but has it taken away from him by the National Police Agency who question the team’s competency while themselves failing to make much of an effort to understand the reality of a man like Taro. Some joke that perhaps he is a ghost, and in a way he does seem to be a supernatural entity. His invisible weapons are visible in a reflected surface such as a mirror, but apparently not captured on camera. His tragedy, though, maybe that he doesn’t understand himself beyond the fact of his difference and is too afraid to open himself to potential rejection by those who might be able to help him if they wanted to, with the potential for exploitation by those with darker motivations. In that sense, his violence, depicted with bloody absurdity by Jojo, does seem to be an attempt at connection or to feel himself a part of this world. Nevertheless, the conclusion seems to suggest that in the end acceptance comes from within and in giving in to his basest instincts the adult Taro may only have disappointed his more innocent childhood self.

Nameless screens as part of this year’s Raindance Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Tokyo Strayers (東京逃避行, Ren Akiba, 2026)

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Amid increasing gentrification of urban centres, where are the kids supposed to go? Ren Akiba’s Tokyo Strayers (東京逃避行, Tokyo Tohiko) seems to suggest efforts to clean up Kabukicho haven’t actually been all that successful, while young and impressionable people for whom home is not or safe place or who feel themselves to be out of place in their hometown continue to flock to the city in search of a kind of grimy glamour that promises freedom in a conformist society.

At least, that’s why Asuka ends up in Shinjuku while in flight from a policeman father she resents for leaving their family for a younger woman. In truth, Asuka’s problems are more of the normal teenage variety and otherwise she appears to come from a more stable, financially comfortable home with parents that are invested in her welfare even if she finds them to be overbearing. The same is not true for many of the other runaways including Hiyori left home away after experiencing physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her father. It’s Hiyori who is currently writing the Tokyo Strayers blog that’s attracted Asuka and countless other young women to this hip and happening place, though it soon becomes clear that the diary is an idealised vision of Shinjuku life that doesn’t really exist.

The film seems to present two young men, Edo and Merio, as the angel and demon of Shinjuku. Edo runs a kind of shelter for runaway teens that provides a safe space for them where they can find food and start to rebuild their lives. Merio, meanwhile, gets young women hooked on drugs in order to sexually exploit them. The distinction between them would seem to be black and white, but in reality the two were once a team and Merio apparently only started working with a local drug dealer in order to get money to fund Edo’s sanctuary, which Edo eventually accepted, if unwillingly. In any case, Edo started the sanctuary with money he made as a host working in Kabukicho which means that it still arises from the sleazy underbelly of the red light district which is built upon the exploitation of women. 

Nevertheless, Edo is committed to keeping runaway kids safe, which is why he tells Hiyori to make sure Asuka gets home safely knowing that she likely means to sell her to Merio in exchange for drugs. Hiyori is only really doing this because she feels she has no other means of survival and the implication is that she began doing sex work as a kind of self-harm intended to wipe out the abuse she received at the hands of her father. Edo warns his runaways to avoid going out because of the increased police presence given that they will just send anyone they catch back home without considering whether that might be a safe environment for them. A policewoman later confesses her regrets about sending a girl back to her family thinking it was for the best and they’d patch things up over time only for the girl to take her own life shortly afterward. The film is then implicitly critical of an unthinking adult world that is failing to protect these children. Even if they try to report what’s happening to them, they are not believed or no action is taken because of a reluctance to interfere in domestic matters and an unshakeable belief in the sanctity of family. 

But this environment is obviously no good for them either, leaving them open to exploitation or falling into criminal activity as a means of supporting themselves. Edo’s initiative is one way of fighting back through youth solidarity, but it’s also rooted in the dark side of Kabukicho given the impossibility of running such an establishment without any kind of funding. Akiba seems to want to show the two sides of Kabuki, one seemingly glamorous and alluring, and the other seedy and depressing, while suggesting that the only real source of solidarity exists among the young people themselves if only they can find the strength to look after each other while simultaneously striving to escape the traumatic circumstances that have forced them onto the streets.

Tokyo Strayers screened as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)


One Last Love Letter (人はなぜラブレターを書くのか, Yuya Ishii, 2026)

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“Why do people write love letters?” is the question posed by the Japanese title of Yuya Ishii’s latest film, which turns out to be less about romance than the regret that stems from things left unsaid. Love letters, it seems to say, are written more for the writer than the recipient, but can, at the same time, bring about a sense of closure or peace of mind in having communicated something that would otherwise have lingered as an unresolved mystery.

The film is inspired by a real-life incident in which a bereaved family received a letter over 20 years after their teenage son’s death in a train accident from a middle-aged woman who’d had a crush on him at the time but never got a chance to say anything. It is, of course, also drawing inspiration from Shunji Iwai’s seminal 90s romantic melodrama Love Letter in which a young woman sends a letter to her late fiancé she doesn’t expect to be delivered only to get an unexpected reply. After receiving some upsetting news about a medical condition and being reminded of her own first love by her teenage daughter Mai’s (Airi Nishikawa) eerily similar experience, Nazuna (Haruka Ayase) is prompted to write a letter to Shinsuke (Kanata Hosoda), a boy she liked on the train, but eventually decides against sending it, only for it to end up being delivered anyway.

Her medical prognosis is, in some ways, the reason that Nazuna writes the letter, knowing that Shinsuke is already dead, and that writing it will allow her to sort out her own feelings. She says in the letter that there is no one else that she can talk to, though she has a husband and daughter she otherwise struggles to communicate with. She too afraid to tell her daughter that her medical condition has declined and is living in a kind of limbo state with something left permanently unsaid. To begin with, there are hints that Nazuna’s marriage is unhappy with her husband Ryoichi (Satoshi Tsumabuki) a perpetually gloomy presence who stays out late drinking alone after work presumably to avoid coming home. Likewise, his gruff instructions to Nazuna that she should give up her vegetable garden and cafe business come off as patriarchal and controlling, though his irritation later seems to be an expression of the pressure lack of communication is placing on the family unit. He wanted Nazuna to give up her vegetable garden out of consideration for her physical condition, but phrased it badly, and later changes tack to help out as he and Mai harvest the vegetables together. 

In that sense it’s a little ironic that it’s Mai who is the open communicator and directly asks her mother for romantic advice having also fallen for a boy on the train, though one in her class at school. Nazuna’s letter brings comfort to Shinsuke’s parents precisely because he had been an uncommunicative son and parts of his life remained a mystery to them. Shortly before his death, he had begun to open up, but they are still left with regret that they did not have the opportunity to talk more and left many things unsaid. It’s this realisation that prompts Nazuna to have a serious discussion with her daughter about her health and implications for the future, reducing the sense of distance and anxiety caused by a lack of communication and allowing them to come together as a family.

In the end, the daughter’s first love turns not to be such a big deal and is quickly forgotten in favour of the central messages of making sure you say everything that needs to be said while you can still say it rather than being left with lingering regrets. Mai comes to see her mother less as the “random weed” of her name, and more as a hardy plant that can grow anywhere meaning that Nazuna is still somewhere close by watching over her, so she feels secure in her maternal legacy and family history as she begins to embark on her own story. In its own way, the film itself is a kind of love letter from a daughter to a mother that brings its own kind of healing in bringing the past full circle.

One Last Love Letter screened as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Samurai Vengeance (木挽町のあだ討ち, Takashi Minamoto, 2026)

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The life of a samurai is to some extent dependent on ritual. It’s as much a performance as anything else, yet, unlike a play, these actions often have very real and destructive consequences that result in bloodshed or exile. Though absurd and arbitrary, it’s adhering to this code of ethics that makes one a samurai, and once set in motion the consequences of a particular action proceed with inevitability. One cannot, in the end, escape one’s duty or destiny even by resigning samurai status.

This is really the idea at the centre of Takashi Minamoto’s Samurai Vengeance (木挽町のあだ討ち, Kobikicho no Adauchi) in which a playwright conspires to take the blood out of revenge and finds largely that the conditions are met for the samurai world to continue on without incident. The fact that the act of vengeance is essentially theatre is clear from the opening sequence in which fallen samurai theatre director Kinji (Ken Watanabe) orders the spotlight-like lanterns to be turned on the scene of a young man who has raised his sword against an older one he holds responsible for the death of his father. The action takes place adjacent to a theatre where a performance of the 47 Ronin, one of the most famous tales of vengeance in Japanese history, has just concluded, and this is, in a way, a continuation of that. Attracted by the commotion, a crowd has started to gather around the two men that becomes both audience and witness to this act of performative justice.

But then the film wrong-foots us slightly, and we realise the central mystery is not to do with the staged performance itself, but the true identity of the man who has come around asking questions about it. Kase (Tasuku Emoto) too is playing a role, in this appearing as a bumbling, Kindaichi-like presence claiming to be a friend of the dead man, Sakubei (Kazuki Kitamura), who to some extent did not really exist having been giving an entirely new persona to suit the narrative of the staged revenge plot. Though Kase claims to have been kicked out of his clan and become a ronin himself, which explains why he has no money and is always hungry, he is later revealed to be a clan investigator who has fallen foul of the authorities after attempting to expose the corruption of a senior retainer.

Though the rules of samurai society may be strict, they can be gamed by those ruthless enough to subvert them for their own ends. This seems to be something that Lady Tae, the mother of the revenge-seeking Kikunosuke (Kento Nagao), knew all too well and understanding the performative nature of samurai justice, turned to her old friend Kinji to save her son from falling victim to the cruelty of their class. At only 17, Kikunosuke is a slender and effete young man of delicate features and sensibility. He does not appear to be suited to the harshness of samurai mores and being forced to take the head of a man who not only saved his life but is someone he’s been close to since the day he was born would likely destroy him.

His fragility is signalled in the fact he first appears dressed as a woman in a beautiful red kimono passed down from a retired onnagata to the current holder of his name. As they say, the world of the theatre is like another country and a place where those who do not otherwise fit into Edo society can be accepted. Kikuosuke’s vulnerability and the unfairness of his plight endear him to the members of the theatre company who all feel an instinctive need to protect him. Indeed, Kikuosuke himself says that he is sorry to have to leave the theatre behind and will never forget the six months that he has spent there. It may be that he is much more suited to living in this environment which is the antithesis of samurai rigidity. In the end, the symbolic need for “vengeance” is satisfied without actual bloodshed. Though those in power know this to be so, they accept it and decline to ask further questions, but still the samurai world continues as it is and others will not be so lucky as to avoid paying with their lives for offending its exceedingly arbitrary values.

Samurai Vengeance screens as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Fujiko (Taichi Kimura, 2026)

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A young woman’s simple desire to be with her daughter sparks a quiet revolution in Taichi Kimura’s autobiographically inspired drama, Fujiko. Though set in the late 1970s and early 1980s, not that much has really changed in terms of the difficulties faced by those raising children alone even if they’re less likely to be told that it just isn’t possible or that they’ve brought their struggles on themselves by choosing divorce.

Fujiko doesn’t so much choose divorce as have it thrust upon her by her own feisty mother. The family she married into don’t see her as much more than a labourer and are then put out when she has a child because it means she has less time for them. The mother-in-law eventually coopts Fujiko’s infant daughter, while Fujiko’s husband Jiro does nothing, unable to stand up to his mother. Having lost Mari, Fuji goes into a kind of depression before being dragged to a women’s liberation rally by her boss reawakens her desire to fight.

Though Fujiko’s decision making may not be consciously feminist, it’s here that she realises that nothing changes if you just keep quiet. You have to fight for what you really want. But the battle doesn’t end once she’s retrieved her daughter. Life as a single mother is, as many tell her, all but impossible. Securing a place to stay thanks to her boss, Fujiko struggles to find anyone to watch her daughter so she can return to work. It’s only with the intervention of a friend that’s she’s able to overcome these issues and earn her own living.

The other employers’ refusal seems to be down in part as a reflection of social prejudice but also a fear that she’s breaking the rules that govern an employee/employer relationship in having something that will always take priority. Time and gain, it’s the kindness of strangers that saves her as she goes on to forge a more independent way of life. In need of money, she can’t be too picky about what the joy actually is and ends up accepting a position as a cook for an illegal yakuza gambling den only to see the money she’s saved go up in smoke when her placed is turned over. It may seem like the world is against her, but with every setback Fujiko only seems more determined to make it through. 

Fujiko finds a more positive example of supportive family by bonding with an old friend of her father’s who takes her in and helps her get back on her feet while helping her to see what she really wants out of life. Harbouring some resentment towards her mother for favouring her brother as the only boy, making her give up on art college so that he could go to Tokyo University, but equally disapproving of her marriage, Fujiko too struggles with the idea of conventionality that is projected onto her and the suggestion that she’s doing something wrong when the best option is simply remarriage. Given the option of marrying again and gaining a steadier home as a house, she once again has to decide if she’s going to fight for what she wants or be railroaded into settling for a more conventional success.

Rediscovering her father’s music helps Fujiko to get back in touch with herself and encourages her to follow her heart. Using psychedelic animation and propulsive rock music, Kimura lends Fujiko’s story a true punk rock spirit while staging much of the film as a flashback as Fujiko lays out her “sob story” for a prospective client having become an insurance saleswoman. Despite the difficulties she’s facing, the film remains upbeat and positive, seeing it all with a sense of humour as Fujiko does her best to escape the patriarchal net, refusing to be bound either by her first husband’s ineffectuality nor by what her mother insists her life should be. Instead she aims for an uncompromising independence, claiming her position as her daughter’s mother and doing her best to provide for her but also fulfilling herself in the midst of a patriarchal society which tells her that marriage and motherhood are the only rightful goals for a woman.

Fujiko as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (English subtitles)

We’re Nothing at All (我們不是什麼, Herman Yau, 2026)

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When a bus explodes in the middle of the city on Valentine’s Day, it opens a series of old wounds in Herman Yau’s self-financed state of the nation genre picture, We’re Nothing At All (我們不是什麼). The vision the paints of contemporary Hong Kong is indeed bleak. Radio and television reports talk only of economic downturn with businesses going bust while traditional spaces like wet markets are dying in the ever-changing city. Engaging with the idea of “lam chau” or mutually assured destruction, this is a Hong Kong on the brink of explosion.

Indeed, the bombers justify themselves that there are no innocent snowflakes in an avalanche and that, therefore, everyone else on the bus has contributed to the circumstances that have made their impossible. The largest of these is entrenched homophobia that has seen the two men exiled from mainstream society. Shy sketch artist Ike inadvertently hints at his sexuality in deflecting his parents’ marriage talk by snapping back that he cannot get married in Hong Kong which is another basic right he has been denied. He can only tell his family about his sexuality by writing a note and passing it through the letterbox. When his father reads it, he beats him and calls him a freak, telling him never to come home again. His family do not report him missing, and it seems it doesn’t occur to them that he might have been on the bus. 

Yau uses homosexuality more as a metaphor for marginalisation rather than a topic for exploration in and of itself. That said, it’s clear that their exclusion from mainstream society as gay men contributes to the poverty that otherwise defines their lives. Fai lives in a subdivided apartment and faces workplace exploitation when the construction site he was working at abruptly stops paying its labourers and his attempts to strike prove ineffective. He fares little better after getting a job at a restaurant with a similarly exploitative boss. Ike, meanwhile, is hassled by police while selling sketches with the implication being that law enforcement would rather go after ordinary people for small infractions while protecting the interests of large corporations. 

Ike at one point attempts to take his own life by jumping from a window in Fai’s subdivided flat, but is distracted by someone else jumping from a higher a floor. It’s at this point that Fai turns his anger back on society, asking him what the point of dying alone is and telling him that if they’re going to go, they should drag a few others along with them. Unable to see a way of transcending their circumstances, the two men can only envision freedom in death and stage a rebellion against the society they feel has rejected them.

The film obviously does not condone their actions, it also places the blame on societal and indifference particularly in the ways in which a wealthier middle-class world unsees men like Fai and Ike and prefers to move anything it finds unpleasant out of its line of sight. In the course of the investigation, the police move through an underground world of backstreet clubs where middle-aged women go to blow off steam and ageing sex worker Andrew desperately tries to stay afloat. Even veteran policeman Leung has his frustrations, admitting that he too came close to blowing the world to hell after he was forced out of the police force due to what he sees as an unfair double standard. 

Even so, his claim that he was saved by the love of a good woman reinforces a societal bias and suggests that the only path to success lies in self-repression. Despite his skills, Leung is depicted as something of a dinosaur with his desire to return to a world where smoking at the office was not only fine but encouraged. Aside from one young man, the other assistants mostly ignore him while he clashes with his more conventional colleagues, but in exploring the circumstances that led to the bus bombing, Leung begins to dig into a pressure cooker society and comes to the conclusion there were many such people like Fai and Ike or even himself who find themselves on the brink of explosion.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Cold War 1994 (寒戰1994, Leung Lok-Man, 2026)

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A compromised policeman finds himself caught between conflicting sources of authority in Leung Lok-Man’s action thriller Cold War 1994 (寒戰1994). A kind of prequel to Leung’s Cold War series, the film opens shortly after the events of the second films in 2017 with MB Lee (Tony Leung Ka-fai) being kidnapped amid a possible return to power under a new government. The events echo a case from 20 years earlier in which a prominent industrialist was kidnapped by Triads at the behest of arch kingpin Peter Choi (Daniel Wu).

The irony is the MB Lee (Terrance Lau) of 1994 finds himself in the same position as his nation as the Handover inches ever closer. Caught between the police force, colonial authorities, and Choi, MB begins to look for new ways to protect his men in  the new post-Handover reality, which makes him an awkward stand-in for Hong Kong itself as something distinct from the twin colonial powers of Britain and China. Just the Handover has produced a power imbalance allowing Choi to rise, a change of leadership at the Lo Yuen Triad society has provided an excuse for Tiger to pursue “independence”, which he largely seems to have done through an ill-advised involvement with Choi. 

Tiger is responsible for the kidnapping of KF Wong, the brother-in-law of the influential businessman William Poon (Tse Kwan-ho). The Poons are old an old money family who may have made their fortune doing things not so differently from Triads, but have maintained their privilege through loyalty to the British. All of the Poons have distinctively British Western names and apparently frequent visitors to Downing Street. Now times are changing, however, William Poon no longer wants to do business with the colonial authorities, while KF Wong’s Victoria Redux plan essentially attempts to maintain the conditions of the colonial era. Though he saw him as a successor, perhaps KF Wong’s kidnapping works out pretty well for Poon.

Just as Tiger and MB Lee attempt to break free from parental legacies, William’s son Simon (Wu Kang-ren) burns with resentment that KF Wong has replaced him as the heir to the Poon group while it seems that Wong also married the woman that Simon had been in love with. He then is also looking for a kind of “independence” in escaping his father’s control and taking the family business for himself. Meanwhile, others assume that kidnapping Wong was a means of destabilising the Poon’s economic empire while they attempt to shore up their power in the post-Handover society. MB wants to find Wong not only because it was his case, but as a means of reclaiming a kind of order and clearing his name after the botched operation raises questions about his loyalty.

Loyalty is a question for everyone with the implication that there may be rewards for those “loyal” to the colonial authorities even after the Handover. The film positions the UK as an antagonist then and in the present day as evidenced by a giant spy satellite trained on the island. MB Lee is pursued and constrained by Special Branch and its British investigators who later take his entire team into custody. After the Wong operation ends in failure, MB is courted by British authorities who tell him that they see him as a possible future commissioner if he agrees to remain loyal to the British and advance UK interests even after the Handover. The British actors deliver their lines with docudrama-style realism otherwise at odds with the rest of the film, but adding to a sense of historical veracity to their machinations. Despite his later actions, MB apparently refuses but uses his leverage to free his men and carve out a niche for himself at the OCTB which is, presumably, the third way he intends to pursue in limited complicity as a means of protecting the people of Hong Kong. 

Back in 2017, police commissioner Lau (Aaron Kwok) and lawyer Kan (Chow Yun-fat) remain unconvinced fearing that MB’s file has been tampered with in an attempt to rewrite history while the contemporary city remains shrouded in fog. Much of the film is seemingly a set up for its sequel, but succeeds in sowing the seeds of mystery in probing the complex relationships between local elites and colonial authorities along with the shifting balances of power in the pre-Handover society while providing the impressive, high-octane action sequences the series is known for.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)