Tag: lesbian

Impure Nuns (汚れた肉体聖女, Michiyoshi Doi, 1958)

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Shintoho had arisen as a new studio during the labour disputes that engulfed the film industry in the late 1940s and to begin with specialised in artistic fare by orphaned filmmakers such as Kon Ichikawa and Kenji Mizoguchi, but faced with several box office failures it was in red right from the very beginning. After several attempts at relaunches and reorganisations, the studio appointed Mitsugu Okura to work his magic. The owner of a chain of cinemas and a former benshi, Okura had a reputation for being able to turn failing businesses around. His ethos was, however, decidedly populist. He shifted the studio’s focus from artistic films towards the low-budget genre fare with which it became most closely associated such as racy dramas and ghost films.

To that extent, you could say that Shintoho was ahead of its time. Most of the other studios would shift in the same direction as the studio system went into decline, and many of the stars at Toei in the 1960s such as Bunta Sugawara, Tetsuro Tamba, and Tomisaburo Wakayama had their start at Shintoho. Michiyoshi Doi was one of the studio’s key directors, though he often worked on its higher-bow output of literary adaptations. All of which might help to explain the seeming mismatch between the salacious Japanese title of 1958’s Impure Nuns, “Holy Women with Sullied Flesh” (汚れた肉体聖女, Kegareta Nikutai Shojo), and its content, which turns out to be a rather sensitive, sympathetic love story set in a Catholic Convent.

Eri (Miyuki Takakura) is the daughter of the aristocratic Taira family which apparently has a long history of Christianity. She is particularly devout and shortly after we meet her, she genuflects in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary. Throughout the film the welcoming arms of Mary seem to be contrasted with violent images of Christ on the cross, a presence that seeks to oppress the women in the free embrace of their desire. While her brother’s friend, Tsuyama (Toshio Mimura), is visiting, Eri suggests going into town to get something, but her mother is against it due to reports of some kind of “trouble” plaguing the streets. Tsuyama offers to accompany her, and they are actually beset by a gang of street toughs intent on raping Eri. Tsuyama does his best to fight them off until a policeman eventually arrives and chases them away. But then he ends up raping Eri himself, after which she becomes pregnant and undergoes an abortion at the urging of her parents.

While her father is scandalised and angry, Eri’s mother is sympathetic, but still each of them decide that the best thing to do is send Eri to a nunnery where she can be reborn in Christ. Due to her experiences, Eri seems to have developed a fear of men, but is also known as the strictest and most severe of the nuns. As the captivating Anna (Mayumi Ozora) enters the convent, another woman is being kicked out apparently by Eri for an undisclosed indiscretion with another woman. The mild implication is that Eri’s frustrated sexual desires have been channelled into authoritarianism in the insistence on discipline and punishing its breaches. It may be this that first attracts Anna who, to begin with, seems to be trying to initiate a sadomasochistic relationship by continually doing things to get Eri to punish her, such as singing while working which is, contrary to expectations, considered very bad form for a nun. 

Anna is, however, hardly a typical bride of Christ and is forever dancing and being cheerful. Her influence seems to break Eri out of her asceticism, as she too begins to ignore the rules and become more of herself again. After the convent bizarrely agrees to organise a dance, Eri gives in to her desire for Anna and the two fall in love, sharing a passionate kiss. But Sister Kashiwagi (Junko Uozumi) is watching, not so much because of the scandalous nature of their relationship, but because they are rivals for a coveted opportunity to study abroad in Rome with Eri currently the front runner. The trip to Rome is positioned as the antithesis of Eri’s freedom in her relationship with Anna as a symbol of repression in committing herself to religion. 

But Anna also disrupts the convent as she becomes the centre of a love triangle, while another nun later declares her love for Eri, only to be rebuffed. Sister Kashiwagi is killed by falling down the stairs while physically fighting over Anna, whose affections sometimes seem to wander, while Sister Sone similarly falls in a bottomless swamp that seems to stand in for obsessive desire. The love between the two women begins to amass a body count as they struggle to maintain it. Though it might seem as if the arrival of male policemen might further disrupt the convent, they simply declare their work done when Anna tells them she was asleep when her roommate left and didn’t see anything. But for her part, Anna has already described herself as cursed, abruptly revealing that her mother killed her father and then herself and that everyone in her family meets a bad end. Even her brother (Shuntaro Emi), who turns out to be a rapist and eventually takes his own life, describes her as a kind of demon that ruins everyone around her, and there is something of that in the way that she seems to attract so much attention at the convent.

Yet even when the script seems to want to paint this same-sex love as something dark or evil, Doi resists the impulse and largely depicts the relationship between the two women as something real and true that has beauty and delicacy. There’s something poignant in Eri’s final plea to run away together, and Anna’s reply that there isn’t any point because there’s nowhere they could go where they could live happily together. It’s Anna who now seems unable to break free of the convent, unexpectedly turning on Eri and going back to her bell ringing. The bell may represent a kind of order, but it’s also ironically reminiscent of the original Shintoho logo. In any case when they eventually fall from the tower, the other nuns arrive with flowers and encircle them with sorrow as if in recognition that it wasn’t the love that was a tragedy, but its impossibility. Though its frankness may have shocked audiences at the time, the film avoids the exploitative content suggested by the title, featuring little nudity beyond a silhouette of bared breasts, and embraces overt melodrama, a touch of gothic horror, and the beauty of this love rather attempt to censure or constrain it.

Impure Nuns screened as part of this year’s BFI Flare.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Blind Love (失明, Julian Chou, 2025)

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There’s none so blind as those who refuse to see, as the old saying would have it. Though in Julian Chou’s Blind Love (失明, shīmíng) the problem is often more an obsession with the gaze of others that prevents its lonely protagonists from looking within and coming to an acceptance of themselves along with what it is they really want out of life. Set before Taiwan’s legalisation of same sex marriage, the film positions patriarchal heteronormativity as the cage in which the heroine willingly imprisons herself in fear and shame.

It’s telling that on being discovered with her girlfriend Xue-jin (Wu Ke-xi) when they were university students, Shu-yi (Ariel Lin) immediately jumps to the shame she feels in having done this to her mother. When the two women are together, it’s a bubble of perfect happiness, but on gazing at herself from the outside, Shu-yi feels only disgust in her feelings for Xue-jin and at some point evidently chose “properness” and conformity. Years later, when her mother has lost her sight and is living in a nursing home, she snaps at the nurse not to call her daughter because she’s married to a doctor and therefore very busy. Though it’s an odd moment, she says this with pride as if her own life were fulfilled by her daughter’s “successful” transition to wife to a professional man and mother to his sons. But it also seems as if this continual unseeing as manifested in her mother’s literal blindness is what later leads her to take her own life when forced to look inside herself while otherwise rendered dependent on Shu-yi and her unsympathetic husband Feng (Frederick Lee).

Feng is a selfish and unkind man who rules his home with an authoritarian iron fist. When Shu-yi tentatively hints that it might be better for her mother to live with them, he doesn’t answer but then immediately needles her, asking if she’s put on weight and whether the dress she’s supposed to wear to an important dinner will still fit. The domestic environment is rendered as a prison in which there is no natural light. The furnishings are cold and grey, as if there were no love or warmth here, and Shu-yi is under constant observation to ensure she plays her roles effectively. Feng sees his family only as tools or extensions of himself. He paints the picture of a perfect family to smooth his path to career success by ingratiating himself with the influential Doctor Gu and though Mrs Gu later sees through Shu-yi and is aware of the cracks within her marriage, chooses to unsee them and encourages Shu-yi to do the same by reaccepting her duty to dissolve herself within her husband’s ambitions even if her heart lies elsewhere. 

Feng exerts the same pressures on his teenage son, Han (Jimmy Liu Jing), by insisting that he study medicine though Han is now too old to submit himself to his father’s authority. You can’t let others decide for you, he tells a friend, and is told the same by Xue-jin whom he meets by chance and unwittingly falls for not knowing that she is his mother’s long-lost love. Xue-jin might seem like a more liberated soul having divorced her husband and accepted her sexuality while pursing her art as a photographer, which is of course the art of seeing, but her drink problem also hints at her loneliness and unresolved longing for Shu-yi. “You think what we do is wrong,” she tells Shu-yix with frustration, but Shu-yi can only answer, “How could be right?” before returning to her conformist life with all of its misery.

When she tells her younger son Rui that all that matters is how other people view you and asks him why he can’t just be “normal”, it’s as if she’s talking to herself. As the three of them pass through the pride parade and Rui asks what’s going on, Feng tells him that there are two kinds of people, the “normal” and the “abnormal” and that the people parading want to be seen as “normal” though they are not. Shu-yi pushes hard on the accelerator in anger and frustration, but it’s a divide she’s internalised within herself and remains unable to see that her love for Xue-jin is normal and natural. A woman in the bathroom at Feng’s dinner suggestively offers her her lipstick, explaining that it’s “the best form of camouflage for people like us,” before kissing her and leaving having rewakened Shu-yi’s latent desire. Hiding within this world of traditional femininity is the way Shu-yi has chosen to sublimate her desires and the concurrent self-loathing, but is also, in its way, an act of self-harm and means of punishing herself that amounts to a kind of suicide.

Only while making love with Xue-jin does she become fully herself before the self-recrimination finally kicks back in. Their connection is raw and honest, filled with tenderness and yearning, yet Shu-yi struggles to embrace happiness or accept her authentic self by escaping from the patriarchal superstructure represented by her mother and her husband’s authoritarianism. Chou ends on an ambiguous note in which Shu-yi is perhaps learning to see the truth of herself, but her world still appears cold and grey as if suggesting that, in the end, this kind of happiness and fulfilment is still not permitted to her even if she has finally accepted what kind of life it is that she wants.

Blind Love screens as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Hidden Face (히든페이스, Kim Dae-woo, 2024)

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The obvious irony in the title of Kim Dae-woo’s erotic thriller Hidden Face (히든페이스), is that it refers both to the heroine, Su-yeon (Cho Yeo-jeong), who conceals herself within a secret bunker in her home to spy on her indifferent social climber boyfriend Sung-jin (Song Seung-heon), and to the sides of themselves that people choose not to reveal to others. As Su-yeon’s mother (Cha Mi-kyung) says, it’s what people see that matters, but the hidden corridors of Su-yeon’s home symbolise the ways in which she has imprisoned her true self or at least has locked a part of herself away from prying eyes while continuing to pry into the secret lives of others.

It’s in this forbidden space, apparently added to the house by the previous father’s owner who was a member of notorious Japanese Unit 731 during the war and feared exposure, that Su-yeon first kissed fellow student Mi-ju (Park Ji-hyun) with whom she’s been in a long-term, but apparently secret, relationship. While Mi-ju is patiently renovating the house she thinks they’ve bought together, Su-yeon has decided that she wants a “real life that people recognise”, which she evidently doesn’t believe a same-sex relationship can be. The forbidden space of “cold room” is then where she’s locked her queerness, and a manifestation of her fears of the consequences of exposure. The problem is that she doesn’t even like Sung-jin and the points of attraction he seems to hold for her are that he doesn’t like her either and is otherwise easy to manipulate because of the vast class difference between them. 

Part of the reason that Sung-jin keeps Su-yeon at arms’ length is that he resents the power that she holds over him. He resents both her and himself in knowing that he’s really only with her for material reasons, while simultaneously aware that his current success has nothing to do with his own talent and everything to do with Su-yeon’s privilege. Su-yeon’s mother congratulates him on working hard to build an image of himself, while otherwise needling him about his working-class background in which his mother ran a small restaurant and really knows nothing of this elite world of classical music, mansions, and honeymoons to resorts that charge some people’s annual wage for a single night’s stay. But the facade can’t really cover up Sung-jin’s insecurity and the fear that he couldn’t make it on his own though he so desperately wants to be a part of this world and to feel himself worthy of it. He feels emasculated and humiliated in assuming that other people can see that he’s just a puppet while Su-yeon, her mother, and their advisor discuss policy decisions he’s technically responsible for out in the open, he assumes to deliberately embarrass him and keep him under control. 

Yet the truth is that these kinds of hierarchal power structures of class and gender are less relevant when it comes to desire than otherwise might be assumed. Su-yeon refers to Mi-ju as her slave or underling and adopts a dominant role in the relationship yet eventually has the tables turned on her when Mi-ju decides to rebel. The power dynamic of desire is a push and pull between the desire and the desired mediated by the depth of yearning. It may seem to Su-yeon that she is in control, but equally Mi-ju derives power from her willing submission and can overturn the dynamic at any time she chooses upending Su-yeon’s delusion that Mi-ju is a mere plaything, or “tool”, she can take out and put away at will. 

Nevertheless, the question is whether anyone could be content with this shadow life or if Su-yeon, vain, psychopathic, and probably incapable of understanding other people’s feelings, is content to imprison herself within the hidden corridors of her home which come to stand in for the need to conform to the heteronormative, patriarchal, class-based social codes other people see as “real” and “normal”. Sung-jin is apparently all too willing, considering just leaving Su-yeon trapped behind their walls to continue enjoying this life of privilege with a little more freedom without considering that without Su-yeon he has no entitlement to it as her mother later suggests after becoming worried on realising that Su-yeon hasn’t used her credit in days which is extremely uncharacteristic behaviour.

Sung-jin would trade his pride as a man, his sense of self-worth, and even betray his moral code to appear wealthy and successful and deny his working-class origins. Su-yeon would also, it seems, rather be in a conventional marriage to a man for whom she feels only contempt and resents for not liking her, than live an authentic life as a lesbian and face her internalised homophobia along with that of the wider society. Thus she confines Mi-ju to a forbidden space of her mind in an attempt to have her cake and eat it too, while Mi-ju seemingly fulfils herself in wilfully becoming a prisoner of love, even if it may only be in Su-yeon’s fantasy. Perhaps they get what they wanted all along, affirming the primacy of privilege, but only at the cost of their authentic selves and trapped inside the prison of their own self-loathing.

Hidden Face is released Digitally in the US on September 16 courtesy of Well Go USA.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Angel Guts: Red Flash (天使のはらわた 赤い閃光, Takashi Ishii, 1994)

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Sent to cover a pornographic movie shoot, a young woman finds herself confronted by the teenage trauma that continues to haunt her in the final instalment in the Angel Guts series, Red Flash (天使のはらわた 赤い閃光, Tenshi no harawata: Akai senko). Adapting his own manga, Ishii draws on giallo and classic noir as the heroine attempts to reclaim herself from the spectres that are haunting her even as Japan itself seems to be a land of predatory and dangerous men.

Nevertheless, as the film begins, Nami (Maiko Kawakami) seems to be holding her own aside from an apparent problem with alcohol that sees her drink far to much and end up in vulnerable, potentially dangerous situations. She has a job as an editor and ad hoc photographer where she’s regularly subjected to extreme imagery, while her sleazy boss is also sexually harassing her and in fact attempts to force himself on her in the lift. It’s being sent to take photos at a porno shoot featuring intense rape scenes that awakens her buried teenage trauma of having been abducted and raped on her way home from school.

Nami is haunted by the spectre of her attacker, though as her new ally Muraki (Jinpachi Nezu) tells her it’s only by killing this ghost that she might be able to “erase” the harmful memories of her rape and overcome the repulsion she feels towards sex with men. Perhaps problematically, the film then phrases Nami’s journey as one of repair in which the ultimate goal is being able to enjoy heterosexual sex which seems to be something Nami herself desires to the extent her inability to do so leaves her feeling as if there’s something wrong with her. Even so, it seems she is able to have successful and enthusiastic sex with bar owner Chihiro (Noriko Hayami) who seduces, or perhaps takes advantage of, Nami after bringing her home because she’d had too much to drink at the bar.

On another drunken occasion, Nami is ushered into a love hotel where she wakes up naked several hours later with no recollection of how she got there. Looking around, she spots not only a bloody knife in the sink, but the body of a middle-aged man hidden under the duvet, and camera which has apparently been filming the whole thing. The act of watching her assault, of which she has no memory, echoes the out of body experience of her rape in which she sees another version of herself save her by killing the attacker. What Nami is essentially trying to do is kill the attacker in her mind through discovering what really happened in the hotel room. As Nami has developed a fear of sex of men, she has a tendency to kick and punch violently in self-defence which, coupled with her drunkeness, lead her to fear that she killed this man after waking up during the assault. In another kind of haunting, Nami begins receiving unpleasant phone calls from someone using a voice disguiser who knows she was at the hotel and attempts to blackmail her in exchange for sexual favours. 

Her first suspect is Muraki, which makes sense because he was at the bar and saw her leave with the other customer so could easily have followed her and either observed her entering the hotel and put two and two together after seeing the crime on the news, or actually committed the murder himself while she was unconscious. She’s also been given a negative impression of Muraki by her jealous boss who tells her that his wife killed herself because his constant infidelities. But Muraki is also carrying traumas of his own in his guilt over his wife’s death which he acknowledges was influenced by his behaviour even if because of a misunderstanding or irrational jealousy rather than sexual or emotional betrayal. Thus, Nami becomes to him a means of atonement in the form of a woman he could save in place of the wife he could not.

Which is to say, Nami is pulled towards trusting the improbable presence of a “good” man even as Chihiro insists that they don’t exist. After they made love, Chihiro deepened the intimacy between them by revealing that she had been abused by her stepfather, though it does not prompt Nami to reveal her own traumatic memories of her rape and abduction. She is reluctant to go to the police not because she fears she is guilty of the crime and wants to avoid punishment, but feels ashamed and can’t bear the idea of the police watching the tape which would amount to a kind of second rape. She does eventually allow Muraki to watch it, but on realising that it may exonerate her is still reluctant to let the police see it while torn by her civic duty in knowing that she has evidence that may help catch the “real” killer. She and Chihiro wonder why it is men like to watch the rape videos she was sent photograph, but can’t come up with much of an answer though it hints and an ingrained misogyny, a desire for control and dominance of a woman and her sexuality. The fact that she was sent to photograph it all by this otherwise mainstream company again hints at a kind of desensitisation amid an overly sexualised atmosphere even as her boss tells her the UN has been critical of Japanese attitudes to sex. Nevertheless it seems that Nami is able to overcome her trauma, to an extent, through reclaiming her identity even if she still has the occasional red flashes of violent fantasy.

Angel Guts: Red Flash is available as part of Third Window Films’ Takashi Ishii: 4 Tales of Nami boxset.

Daughter’s Daughter (女兒的女兒, Huang Xi, 2024)

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Never having fully dealt with the trauma of her teenage pregnancy and decision to give her child up to be raised by a family friend, 64-year-old divorcee Jin Ai-xia (Sylvia Chang Ai-chia) finds herself in an eerily similar position on on learning that the daughter she raised in Taiwan has been killed in a car accident in New York where she was receiving fertility treatment. The process resulted in a healthy embryo of which Ai-xia now finds herself the “guardian”. She is given four options, keep the embryo in storage and pay to renew the contract when it runs out, find a surrogate to carry to it term, donate it to another couple, or have it destroyed.

The fact that there are eight months left on the contract that her daughter Zuer (Eugenie Liu Yi-er) signed makes this almost another pregnancy which Ai-xia must decide whether or not to continue. Keeping the embryo in storage only defers the decision and traps it in the same mental space in which Ai-xia thinks of Emma (Karena Lam), the daughter she did not raise and tried to put out of her mind. In its consideration of motherhood, the film does shy away from suggesting that it is a kind of burden and requires sacrifice whether willing or not. Later confronted, if gently, by Emma who has unbeknownst to her become a single mother who chose to keep her child, Ai-xia justifies herself that she was 16 and afraid. Most of all, she was afraid the baby would trap her in New York’s Chinatown and that her life would never change after that. She wanted more, so she went along with her mother’s proposed solution of giving her daughter to a childless couple to raise while she returned to Taiwan and never looked back.

Yet it’s Emma who seems to haunt her while she’s in New York trying to sort out Zuer’s affairs while mired in her grief. It’s clear that she feels that she failed both her daughters as her unresolved trauma over separating from Emma left her unable to fully bond with Zuer whom she raised at arms’ length. When Zuer and her same-sex partner Jia-yi (Tracy Chou Tsai-shih) decide to have a child, Ai-xia is against it. It seems there may be some lingering prejudice in her about their relationship as she tells Zuer that the baby won’t be able to explain their family situation, but it’s also partly that she doesn’t want her to be trapped by motherhood as she felt herself to be. She asks her why she and Jia-yi don’t just enjoy their life together rather than complicate with a child. Ai-xia tells Emma that she wanted to live her own life, while expressing the same desire now that she has become a second mother to her own mother, Yan-hua (Ma Ting-Ni), who is living with dementia. Once her mother passes away, she’s looking forward to enjoying her freedom for once. 

Ai-xia rails that no one ever really considered her feelings and that she’s been given this burden without ever really being given an opportunity to ask herself if she wanted it. There’s a minor irony in Yun-hua’s segueing back into the past to tell the 64-year-old Ai-xia that she can’t raise a child at this age as if she were still a pregnant 16-year-old. As an older woman, she reflects that Yun-hua probably didn’t make that decision solely because she was embarrassed by the stigma of teenage pregnancy but genuinely thought it was best for both her daughter and her granddaughter. But now Ai-xia is facing the same choice at the other end of her life knowing that if she chooses to raise Zuer’s baby she may not live long enough to see it to adulthood, nor may she have the energy to look after a small child even if she has the time. 

But Ai-xia carries Zuer’s ashes around with her holding them in front of her belly as if they were the embryo and she were already carrying it. Placing the square black container on the airport scanner and watching it travel through the tunnel is oddly like an act of rebirth. Attempting to come to terms with her own complicated maternity, she thrashes out the past with Emma but also really with herself in trying to decide whether or not to continue this maternal legacy despite the sacrifices and compromises it entails. For her, motherhood becomes an act of self-forgiveness in which she learns to understand both her own mother and her daughters along with their shared connection in this ever-increasing line.

Daughter’s Daughter screens 18th July as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Extremists’ Opera (過激派オペラ, Junko Emoto, 2016)

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Junko Emoto ironically explores Tokyo’s fringe theatre scene in adapting her semi-biographical novel. Shot with a roving, handheld camera, The Extremists’ Opera (過激派オペラ, Kagekiha Opera) situates itself within an all female, avant-garde experimental theatre company but quickly makes plain that even those with high-minded artistic intentions are not free of the usual human flaws as the borderline abusive, womanising female director finds herself sabotaging everything she’s built through a mix of hubris and wandering desire. 

Blanket Cult are a popular company on the fringe theatre scene with a small following devoted to their art. Former banker Ayako bursts into their office determined on an audition and subsequent career change precisely because she can’t get enough of director/playwright Nao’s experimental plays which, she explains, she believes can stop wars. Nevertheless, it’s not Ayako the team are struck by, but the intense young woman who came in behind her, Haru, who more or less demands to be taken on. Nao is captivated, hiring both women on the spot and vowing to write a new piece with Haru in the lead. Of course, she does this partly for not altogether altruistic reasons. Immediately after the first script meeting she asks Haru to stay behind and then propositions her, directly declaring her love with the justification that she’d rather be upfront rather than waste time during the rehearsal process. Haru tells her that she’s not into women, but Nao doesn’t take no for an answer seemingly oblivious to the fact that what she’s doing is harassment and really she’s no better than any other sleazy male director handing out parts to women she wants to sleep with. 

Nevertheless, her persistence even with its undignified pleading eventually pays off. Haru relents, either because she’s fed up of fending off Nao’s advances or discovering that she is on some level receptive, finding that she does in fact enjoy sex with another woman. She agrees to start dating Nao who declares Haru her muse and the pair move in together but their relationship is threatened by their working environment with its petty jealousies and temptations. Emoto opens the film with a graphic sex scene of two naked women 69-ing, rolling around in the empty environment of the garage the troupe uses to rehearse. The two women are Nao and her previous squeeze, a former leading lady she throws over because of her attraction to Haru whose own desire is perhaps signposted after she walks in on them going for a second round and makes a passive aggressive scene that leads the other woman to warn her that Nao is a heartless womaniser with a habit of bedding her leading ladies, sometimes in the wings. 

Yet it’s not only Nao’s misplaced desire that endangers the troupe but her arrogance and abusive directing style. After their play proves a success, she unwisely gives in to ambition and sells out by allowing a mainstream professional actress, Yurie, to join the troupe, a move which disrupts their dynamic while also inflaming Haru’s jealousy as she begins to wonder if she’s already being replaced. Nao snaps at her team and stops giving them proper direction in favour thinly veiled insults. She repeatedly instructs an actress to lose weight while increasingly allowing Yurie to dominate the rehearsals, accepting all of her ideas even while the other members sceptical. She even goes so far as to abandon her usual thriftiness, purchasing elaborate props such as a large vertical tank which leads her into another possibly inappropriate relationship with an older woman who had been pursuing her. Needless to say, the whole thing blows up in her face, ruining not just her relationship with Haru but that with her theatre company who are now all thoroughly fed up with her mistreatment and have entirely lost respect for her as a person and an artist. 

“If you want to pick a fight with society live in it first,” her benefactor irritatedly tells Nao after she’s thoughtlessly caused offence, reminding her that she lives in a kind of bubble that is the fringe theatre scene. Her only real interaction with someone outside of it is with the estate agent who finds her and Haru a flat and is extremely confused as to why they only need one room if they’ll be living together, concerned that female roommates are a liability because sooner or later one gets a boyfriend and leaves the other in the lurch unable to make the rent alone. Unable to learn her lesson, Nao has furiously energetic sex with an apparently wealthy starstruck fan and then immediately asks for money, perhaps getting a taste of her own medicine when she assures her there’s plenty more where that came from as long as she sees her again and also gives her a part in a play. Playfully ironic with its whimsical score and slightly detached gaze, Emoto’s refreshingly explicit drama is both a mild satire of the avant-garde fringe theatre scene and a takedown of its self-involved director whose inability to separate the creative from the carnal proves her downfall both artistic and emotional. 

Trailer (English subtitles)

1 Girl Infinite (Lilly Hu, 2025)

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There’s a moment in Lilly Hu’s gritty Changsha-set drama 1 Girl Infinite in which the heroine, Yinjia (Chen Xuanyu), watches as a fishmonger bashes a fish to death. He repeatedly smacks its head into the ground and, in a moment of foreshadowing, hits it with his meat cleaver while the fish flails around helplessly, gasping for air and twitching its tail. Yinjia winces and half looks away, but also sees something of herself in the way this poor creature is tossed around and eventually gutted in much the same way that she feels herself to be battered by her society.

Indeed, the film opens with her reading her suicide note in which she states that however she may die it has nothing to do with Xia Yutong (Lilly Hu), though in actuality it has everything to do with her. Abandoned by both of her parents, 19-year-old Yinjia has adopted a quasi-maternal role over Tong Tong who lives in her apartment and shares her bed, though the relationship, from Tong Tong’s perspective at least, remains curiously ill-defined. In the early light of morning, Yinjia silently gazes at her sleeping figure, but Tong Tong often rejects her gestures of intimacy. She won’t let Yinjia hug her in the street because she’s “too heavy,” and there is a clinginess to Yinjia that spills over into possessiveness and control that might be off-putting, but equally it seems that Tong Tong pushes her away because she herself doesn’t know how to process this relationship or her feelings for Yinjia. 

Then again, perhaps it is really about not having anywhere else to go as she unconvincingly tells her friends when they complain she’s brought “that girl,” again. Tong Tong tells them that Yinjia is just some girl who won’t stop following her around and acts like she’s a drag, but is at other times clingy herself and in rare moments of freedom expressing a silent affection for Yinjia. Nevertheless, there is a marked contrast between the more straight-laced Yinja and Tong Tong’s punkish friends who seem to represent two opposing worlds. Yinja glares at them constantly, resenting their indiscriminate use of drugs and the dangerous situations it could get them into, but appears to want to rescue Tong Tong who might not actually want to be rescued.

When Tong Tong gets involved in another ill-defined and possibly transactional relationship with local drug dealer Chen Wen (Bo Yang), it further disrupts their dynamic and pushes Yinjia towards the edge as she falls into a self-destructive obsession while convinced that she will lose Tong Tong. Tong Tong is convinced that Chen Wen will take her to America, which it seems clear that he has no real intention to do, where people live in big houses and everyone has a job. In this way, he represents a more literal kind of escape from the problems of contemporary China in which she is trapped in a dissatisfying socio-economic position from which she sees no way out. After she loses her virginity to Chen Wan, the camera cuts to a Burberry bag containing a designer dress that echoes Tong Tong’s need for consumerist affirmation. 

Tong Tong clearly aspires to his life of wealth and comfort, but it’s equally true that Chen Wen’s financial stability is rooted in illegality and moral dubiousness in his indifference to the harm his line of business causes. When the girls visit his apartment, there’s another woman there that is being fed drugs and is eventually manhandled out when her reaction to them begins to annoy Chen Wen and his henchman. She may be a harbinger of what may become of Tong Tong if she gives in to this bargain and a further provocation for Yinjia who is determined to prevent her from doing so by any means necessary. It’s never quite clear whether either relationship is any more than transactional from Tong Tong’s point of view, or whether she’s really aware of the realities of her relationship with Chen Wen which he clearly doesn’t view with much seriousness, though she continues to refer to herself as his girlfriend and evidently really believed he meant it when he said he’d take her to America. 

Yinjia meanwhile glares at the world around her and strikes back self-destructively. She scores a partial victory in seeming to have impressed Chen Wen in the depths of her devotion and the lengths that she would go to to maintain control over Tong Tong, though it’s also somewhat hollow and ironic given that he almost certainly never meant to take her to America anyway nor keep her around very long. Left with no parental input or societal safety net, the two women are each adrift and left with only each other to rely on. Though locked in a somewhat toxic embrace, the relationship between them is the only hint of purity in their otherwise impure world of betrayal and exploitation.

1 Girl Infinite screens at Rio Cinema 3rd May as part of this year’s Queer East.

Manok (이반리 장만옥, Lee Yu-jin, 2025)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trailer (English subtitles)

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)

Albino (アルビノ, Toru Kamei, 2016)

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Two women struggle to free themselves from the abuses of a patriarchal and conservative society in Toru Kamei’s tragic lesbian romance, Albino (アルビノ). Though perhaps somewhat out of touch in its tacit implication that same sex love is inherently destructive, Kamei’s sensitive drama finds its marginalised heroines seeking mutual rescue but finding only temporary respite in the bubble of their love fraught as it is with danger and confusion as they each in their own way struggle to escape their respective prisons literal and self imposed. 

Butch plumber Yashima (Fujiko) has always felt somewhat ill at ease, that her inside doesn’t match her out, and the disconnect has made her reluctant to associate with others. On a job one day she encounters a strange young woman, Kyu (Satsuki Maue), wearing a high school uniform who can’t seem to stop gazing at her. Yashima fixes the problem with her sink which was clogged with paper tissue, but is surprised when Kyu calls back and says it happened again. On her return visit, while Kyu’s stepfather is out, Kyu asks Yashima to have a look at the bathroom where she gingerly seduces her, both women perhaps surprised by the depth of their desire. Problematic age gap aside, the two women embark on a passionate sexual affair but struggle to free themselves from the forces which constrain them outside of their intense physical connection. 

Hinting at a kind of gender dysphoria, Yashima lives as a man but feels pressured into conforming to conventional femininity. She’s the only woman at her job as a plumber, perhaps still stereotypically regarded as a male occupation, and simultaneously regarded as one of the boys made complicit in the misogynistic banter of her boss and colleague. Resented for her unwomanliness, she’s eventually assaulted by her skeevy vanmate who refuses to believe her when she says she has no interest in men. She implies that prior to her relationship with Kyu, she hadn’t considered other women but had perhaps thought of herself as male, and is immediately overwhelmed by her newfound desire. Meanwhile, she’s also dealing with familial trauma in her difficult relationship with her alcoholic mother who frequently turns up only to ask for money to spend on drink. 

Kyu, meanwhile, is more directly oppressed, trapped in an abusive environment with violent stepfather who repeatedly rapes her, his tissues the ones which eventually clog the sink after she tries to wash them away. She claims that the uniform is a fashion statement, though the implication seems to be that her stepfather does not allow her out of the house even to go to school if indeed she is still a student despite her claims to the contrary. That might also explain why she continues to clog the sink and call the plumber, potentially alerting Yashima’s boss not to mention the colleague who seems to have realised there’s something going on, rather than simply ring her directly even after she’s really only coming for sex. Kyu makes a habit of giving Yashima hard candies after each of their meetings, Yashima eventually realising that they spell out the word “help”, but she remains too traumatised to escape convinced that her stepfather would find her wherever they went. 

Somewhat awkwardly, the implication is that Yashima’s relationship with Kyu is the force which motivates her to accept her femininity, the younger woman transgressively kissing her after staining her lips with menstrual blood as if to ram the point home. Kyu meanwhile agrees that she too hates being a woman, though her resentment is perhaps more towards her constant victimisation, her utter powerlessness at the hands of the hands of the stepfather who abuses her and whom she cannot escape. Yashima too finds herself victimised as a woman, assaulted by her colleague who leaves by coldly telling her it was her own fault for refusing him, or perhaps simply for her “failure” to conform to conventional social norms, a crime for which he has punished her as means of correction. Yet they each struggle to free themselves, Kyu too traumatised to embrace her freedom despite her literal cry for help, while Yashima is continually punished for her atypical gender presentation. Only in sex do they find release. Shot with a detached realism which extends to the naturalistic though passionate, erotic love scenes Kamei’s melancholy drama offers little in the way of hope for either woman, subtly suggesting that their romance is a forlorn hope because there is no escape from the forces which oppress them in such a rigid and conformist society. 

Trailer (no subtitles)