Tag: New York Asian Film Festival 2025

MA – Cry of Silence (မ – Cry of Silence, The Maw Naing, 2024)

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After their factory withholds wages for two months, seamstresses decide they have no other option but to strike in The Maw Naing’s hard-hitting drama, Ma – Cry of Silence (မ – Cry of Silence). As the opening title cards explain, Myanmar has seen a series of military coups over the last few decades and is now in a state of civil war. The military’s burning of villages has forced young people into the cities in search of work and shelter, but also left them in a precarious position and vulnerable to exploitative conditions. 

Mi-Thet, at least,ƒ is haunted by memories of her village burning and lives in a kind of hell where smoke is always on the horizon. She has a job as a seamstress and lives in a dorm with other young women in similar positions, but the factory hasn’t paid wages in two weeks and the landlady is beginning to get fed up. She snaps at the girls and ironically asks if they want her to starve to death, laying bare both the domino effects of this world in collapse and the pervasive heartlessness of capitalism. At the factory, the Forman watches over them, ruler in hand and often strikes them if he thinks they aren’t working hard enough while they’re terrified of taking breaks or visiting the bathroom because he also peeps on them or tries to extract sexual favours which some of the girls grant because they need the money.

The foreman’s face is kept offscreen and even when the women confront him, he appears as a ghostly silhouette behind the plastic sheeting. The factory boss, even when he supposedly arrives by car, is never seen at all. It may be that the political situation makes it impossible to run this kind of business, but at the same time it seems more like the factory just don’t want to pay the women because they think they don’t have to. After all, they have money to hire thugs to break up the protests when the women decide to strike rather than just giving them what they’re owed. The foreman alternately threatens them and makes false promises of payment that the women can’t believe because they’re still owed so much money even though as Mi-Thet says, she spends her days between the factory and the dorm. It wouldn’t surprise her if she died at her machine, while one of the others quips they’d still keep them working after they died.

Mi-Thet remains on the fence about even joining the strike, as do many of the other women afraid of the repercussions and of losing the money they’re owed entirely though it doesn’t seem as if it would be paid anyway. Her neighbour U-Tun who is disabled and is covered in scars from the 1988 protests for democracy remains world-weary and not so much encouraging as fatalistic but offers Mi-Thet a series of books that help her commit to the cause though it’s seeing her friend who works as a maid be badly beaten by her employer that convinces her they have to act now. 

As U-Tun says, the country should have changed but it stayed the same, while Mi-Thet can’t figure out if they’re emerging from the darkness or walking deeper into it. News reports speak of torched villages and refugees but also of the food shortages the destruction has caused. Even the cook at the dorm complains prices have gone up so much she can’t get good food and says she’ll cook better when they pay her more. “Better” doesn’t really matter at the factory as long as the girls hit their quotas, but workers can’t work on empty stomachs and no sleep even as the foreman seems intent in working them to their deaths. Mi-Thet and the others attempt to stand up against this cyclical destruction, but discover that they have almost no power and the factory owners don’t care at all if they live or die because they think there’s an endless stream of displaced girls looking for work. Gunshots and the rumble of fire echo in Mi-Thet’s ears, but ultimately she discovers herself trapped within this historical loop but issuing a rallying cry to the youth of Myanmar to rise up against this continuing oppression.

MA – Cry of Silence screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Travesty (Гажуудал, Baatar Batsukh, 2024)

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“One man’s screams will not fix this social travesty,” according to an exasperated police officer sent in to quell a hostage crisis in a quiet rural town in Baatar Batsukh’s Mongolian crime drama. Led by chapter headings reading The Town, The City, the Nation, The State, the film pushes deeper towards the centre of corruption in an indifferent society in which the lives of citizens are barely valued and the authorities will do little to protect them. Indeed, the hostage taker’s claims that he will kill one person an hour seems to stand in for the slowly ticking time bomb of governmental indifference.

Or at least, that’s how it seems to Davaa whose teenage son keeps ringing him but he can’t help because he’s so far away on a case. His absent paternity seems to echo the ways in which the old have abandoned the young. The hostage taker turns out to be a young man who feels left out and hopeless. Rendered mute during his military service, he tried to sue the government but couldn’t while his mother, who worked for the government her whole life, ruined her health doing so and then was unfairly denied a loan to pay for medical treatment. The boy’s father appears to have been in the military, but is otherwise not around leaving him alone after his mother’s death having lost pretty much everything, which is why he takes revenge by holing up in the hospital with 20 hostages and asking 1 billion Mongolian tugrik a person. He’s clearly putting a price on a human life, but then so is the government when it declares I won’t pay.

The fact that it’s the hospital he takes over obviously has knock on consequences preventing local people from accessing health care, but the government does that too. As the doctor points out, rural hospitals are understaffed and under resourced. They can only offer basic services and send more seriously ill patients to the cities, but there aren’t enough beds there either so those like the hostage taker’s mother are sent back anyway. Meanwhile, a local crook’s ageing wife goes into labour with her fourth child which will earn them a medal from the government. The pregnancy is high risk and the doctor is worried about her because all of her previous births have involved complications which endangered the life of mother and child. But the woman insists she doesn’t care about the risks and is willing to die to get the medal from the government even though it appears they won’t care very much about her child after it’s born and fulfils their aim of expanding the population. 

Her husband is well known to the local police who’ve rounded up two other petty crooks who are listening intently to the unfolding crisis from their place in the cells. These middle-aged men, one of whom is a former nurse, don’t seem to have much to do except get into trouble. The police are doing their best, but like the hospital, they’re also under staffed and under resourced. A hostage crisis in their tiny town is an absurd development they have no idea how to deal with which is why Darvaa is dispatched to deal with it. The town can’t hope to raise the money the hostage taker is asking for, while the government could but it won’t pay despite Davaa’s please that they just give the hostage taker what he wants so he’ll stop executing people. When the authorities eventually turn up, it turns out they’ve lied. They didn’t bring the money and are planning to storm the building to end the crisis quickly without giving much thought to the hostages’ lives. Taken hostage himself, their representative grovels and pleads but refuses to offer the apology Davaa suggests as a last resort to appease the hostage taker with whom he has come to sympathise. 

A late twist makes the situation all the more tragic with the boy another victim of governmental indifference which would rather kill first and then refuse to answer any questions later. They try to fob Davaa off with a promotion in return for his silence, but he refuses while implying that he doesn’t really want to talk about this whole sorry affair either and would rather to get on with his job and looking after his family. In any case, the government representative seems more concerned that Davaa will embarrass him by exposing how he grovelled and begged for his life rather the fact they acted with callous disregard for the lives of the hostages and failed to take into account the fragile mental state of the hostage taker. The travesty is then not the hostage crisis but the state of the nation in which the citizens are themselves taken hostage by an indifferent and oppressive authority which extracts its ransom but offers little in return.

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

Trailer (no subtitles)

Deep in the Mountains (如意饭店, Li Yongyi, 2025)

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Such in the confusion in mid-90s China that the chaos has penetrated all the way to a remote village in Li Yongyi’s satirical farce Deep in the Mountains (如意饭店, rúyì fàndiàn). What begins as gritty Sino-noir soon turns into black comedy as the unfairly demoted policeman hero finds himself chasing a serial killer right into a traditional village community that seems to be home to some of the nation’s least astute people who are themselves caught between the old China and the New but also obsessed with their own status and petty vendettas.

The problems begin when middle-aged former detective Yao (Qiao Shan), now working as a vehicle checker after being demoted for chasing a woman he thought was a missing person while in his underpants which frightened her so much she ran into traffic, is knocked out by criminal mastermind Ge Wenyong (Wang Yanhui) and the pair are taken into custody by the current village chief’’s daughter. She hopes that by catching the “thief” before the public security representative she can secure her succession to the role. As such, she’s inclined to believe Ge Wenyong when he says that he caught Yao breaking into his restaurant while as Yao came out in search of his missing friend on his off hours, he doesn’t have anything on him that proves he works in law enforcement. The villagers’ inability to believe him signals their declining faith in the authorities, while Ge Wenyong signals the rise of the new merchant class which is in this case quite literally bludgeoning the workers to death. 

As a vehicle checker, Yao is immediately suspicious when one of the fog light caps he fitted on a now-missing lorry turns up on another one. The increasingly nervous driver tells him there’s an out of the way place where people sell parts from scrapped vehicles on the black market. Amid the economic reforms of the 90s as the nation transitioned away from the planned economy to a market one, many lost their jobs along with, at least as far as the film goes, their moral compass. Infected by greed, they climb over each other in search of material wealth. In some ways repentant lorry driver Yang is symbol of this newly materialistic impulse. His business went bust and he’s racked up massive debts which is why he ended up becoming a long-distance lorry driver. Even if his gift of pretty white shoes for his wife hints at this new consumerist society in their frivolity, the fact that Yang is dying of pancreatic cancer suggest that he too has been poisoned by the corrupting influence of capitalism. Now his only wish is to clear his debts so that his wife and daughter won’t be burdened by them when he’s gone. 

There are a series of family photos that appear in the film besides the one that Yang keeps in his lorry beginning with the wedding photo which is dramatically shattered in the opening sequence. The “missing” woman we’re first introduced to is perhaps of this new China and looking for a more modern “freedom” in fleeing an abusive marriage to a man who tells the police that he didn’t hit her “that hard”. But unfortunately, she ends up running into Ge Wenyong who takes her prisoner and forces her to be a tool in his dark and exploitative criminal enterprise which involves knocking off lorry drivers and stealing their vehicles which are often carrying new consumerist goods such as televisions and video players. Yet, suave and manipulative, he manages to convince the villagers that he is actually an undercover public security agent while Yao is just a thief. 

Meanwhile, they squabble amongst themselves while ironically preparing to accept an award as a “civilised advanced village”. The title cards at the end of the film assure us they were all punished too for “obstructing official duties, picking quarrels and provoking troubles”, though they are perhaps symptomatic of the problems of the old China, which have not exactly gone away, in their petty politicking at the expense of the people they’re supposed to be protecting. Yao, however, is redeemed by solving the case, if not without a few casualties, and is rewarded with reinstatement as a detective. He continues to be plagued by anxiety about the “missing persons” of China’s transitionary period as a representative of an authority almost certainly a little less benevolent than it’s being made out to be if also positioned as the only real force of resistance towards the rise of rampant capitalism and heartless “entrepreneurs” like Ge Wenyong.

Deep in the Mountains screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Montages of a Modern Motherhood (虎毒不, Oliver Chan Siu-kuen, 2024)

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A title card at the end of Oliver Chan’s Montages of a Modern Motherhood (虎毒不) dedicates the film to all women who chose not to become mothers, and it’s true enough that the picture it paints of contemporary child rearing is relentlessly bleak. Governments in much of the developed world are fiercely trying to encourage more couples to have children, but few are really addressing the reasons why they aren’t while the ways people live their lives have undeniably changed rendering commonly held notions about parenting incompatible with the contemporary reality.

A case in point, Jing (Hedwig Tam) lives a long way from her birth family and is not surrounded by a supportive community network of other women in similar positions. Though her mother-in-law lives next-door and offers to help with the baby, it soon proves more trouble than it’s worth as she more or less takes over and runs Jing down in the process. Jing describes her to friends as “conservative,” and it’s clear that she disagrees with Jing’s parenting choices while also trying to exclude her from the family as if the baby were only her and her son’s. Ching, a fussy newborn who cries nonstop from morning to night, isn’t gaining weight and the mother-in-law immediately jumps straight to the conclusion that it’s because Jing’s milk isn’t good enough. According to her she doesn’t eat right, and going back to work may also have somehow caused a problem. Her unilateral decision to switch formula milk, tipping away all the breast milk Jing has been painstakingly expressing, without telling either of the parents is a huge overstepping of the boundaries and a betrayal of the trust Jing placed in her to look after her child, though of course the mother-in-law insists that she was only trying to do what’s best for the baby despite also having bathed her in burnt sutras.

The problem is compounded by the fact the in-laws seem to own the apartment they live in, which is why her husband, Wai, is reluctant to move closer to her family when she suggests it. As the oldest son, he is also supposed to be caring for his parents though in reality this of course also falls to Jing. As Ching’s crying is so loud and piercing, they begin receiving complaints from neighbours which eventually leaves Jing forced to take the baby outside in the middle of the night. This might not have been so much of a problem in the past before urban living environments became so cramped and people began having less children making the noise more obvious, but it’s nevertheless an unavoidable obstacle for the new parents who find themselves additionally pressured by the necessity of maintaining good relationships with their neighbours. 

To make matters worse, Jing’s husband Wai pats himself on the back for “helping” with the baby, which is after all also his responsibility so he should be doing his fair share. He still seems to operate with a patriarchal mindset that tells him the home and flat are Jing’s to take care of while his job is to earn the money. Both he and his mother seem to hold it against Jing that their baby is a girl. She asks him for more help, but he responds by getting a job that pays more but requires further hours. He spends evenings out with his friends and repeatedly fails to get the breast milk pump fixed despite frequent reminders before accusing her of “whining” too much when she tries to tell him how difficult it’s been for her stuck at home all day with the baby. Like his mother, his ideal solution is for her to give up work and devote herself to their home because they don’t “need” her money and her working is perhaps a suggestion that they might which offends his sense of masculinity.

But Jing wants to work for reasons of personal fulfilment and safety. As other women remind her, you need your own money in case there comes a time you need to leave, but also because some men keep a tight grip on the purse strings and often won’t give their wives enough housekeeping money. Jing was paying for a lot of the baby stuff herself out of the money from her job at a bakery, but after she loses it and her savings run out she has to ask Wai who isn’t keen to chip in. Ironically, her boss chooses to make her redundant when the bakery hits a bad patch because her colleague is single and at least she has her husband’s wage to rely on. Jing continues applying for similar jobs, but they all fall through when she reveals she is married with a newborn child. In the end, she lies that she’s single but the job only offers night work which is obviously no good for her situation.  

Her job was the last thing that Jing felt connected her to her old self. With no one to talk to but the baby, she fears the erasure of her identity and tells her mother that she misses the time that she was a daughter rather than a mother. She gets some support from a kind retired lady who looks after Ching and tries to encourage her, reminding her that it was different for their generation because they could just leave the kids in the house and ask a neighbour to check in on them and no one thought anything of it. But Jing still feels herself inadequate, as if she’s failing at motherhood or breaking a taboo by asking to have some sort of life for herself without being completely subsumed by the image of “motherhood”. The in-laws keep a little bird in a cage with which Jing seems to identify, even as its chirping adds to the noise and the constant thrumming of the breast pump raises her stress levels. Left with no real support, there is only really one way that Jing can escape from a world of sleeplessness and anxiety as she tries to find the smallest moment of peace and tranquility free of social expectation and the crushing guilt of maternity.

Montages of a Modern Motherhood screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Somebody (침범, Kim Yeo-jung & Lee Jeong-chan, 2024)

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“A mother should do everything to protect her child,” according to one young woman, but are there, or perhaps should there be, limits even to a mother’s love? Adapted from a webtoon, Kim Yeo-jung and Lee Jeong-chan’s Somebody (침범, Chimbeom) is really about what it means to be a family and who it is that gets to be included in one more than it is about its otherwise outlandish premise or how we should deal with young children who have severe mental health issues accompanied by violent tendencies. 

Then again, as So-hyun (Gi So-yoo) herself says she isn’t like the others and in that sense not necessarily good or bad but only what she is. It’s obvious that she has no understanding of conventionally held notions of right and wrong and actively enjoys inflicting pain on others, perhaps because as she later says it’s when she feels people are being most honest. She’s only seven years old, but she’s already been expelled from several schools and nurseries for scaring the other children, and her mother now locks all the sharp implements away at night having previously woken up to So-hyun slashing away at her arms and legs. But in a paradoxical way, it’s abandonment that So-hyun fears the most in knowing that her mother cannot fully accept what she is, while Young-eun (Kwak Sun-young) does her best to “protect” her at the cost of her own mental and physical health. 

So-hyun’s parents’ got a divorce because her father felt she could be better cared for in an institution, while Young-eun was determined to care for her herself despite the fact that So-hyun’s behaviour is not improving even with therapy and she continues to be a threat to those around her. This is particularly true of other girls her age towards whom she becomes jealous when they approach her mother as if they meant to replace her in Young-eun’s affections and So-hyun would lose her home. The film’s Korean title translates more literally as “invasion”, and this fear of being pushed out and excluded that motivates the actions all concerned.

20 years later, we’re introduced to Min (Kwon Yu-ri), who is living with an older woman, Hyun-kyung (Shin Dong-mi), who lost her daughter, it’s implied to suicide, while her own mother lives in a psychiatric institution. Though she is reserved and emotionally distant, Min has taken the place of Hyun-kyung’s daughter only to find it threatened when they take on another young woman, Hae-young (Lee Seol), to help with their business clearing houses after lonely deaths. Min too fears invasion, that Hae-young has come to kick her out and take her place by monopolising Hyun-kyung’s position as their “mother” in this accidental “family” unit. Hyun-kyung too fears abandonment, knowing what it’s like to be left alone and only too happy to become a maternal figure to these two orphaned young women each in search of a place to belong.  

But there’s also a question mark over whether someone like So-hyun whose brain is wired differently can ever be accepted into a conventional family unit. She has no understanding of human empathy, but simultaneously longs to be loved and accepted and is resentful that she doesn’t feel herself to be even by her mother or other maternal figures whom she believes owe her all those things. Min too seems to have a dark past and on discovering that she has become pregnant by an apparently controlling and violent boyfriend struggles with the decision of whether to keep the child. She fears that she may turn out to be like her own mother and does not particularly seem to want to raise it, but at the same time reflects that the baby has done nothing wrong and therefore it’s unfair to prevent it from being born. 

So-hyun also insists that she’s done nothing “wrong,” though her understanding of what “wrong” means is obviously different from most people’s. She expects unconditional love from her mother, and Young-eun gives it to her to the best of her ability despite the fact that she is afraid of her daughter and ultimately at a loss as to how best to protect her and also the outside world. Though at times hamstrung by its webtoon origins, Kim and Lee’s handsomely lensed thriller explores this the irony in this need for maternal acceptance with a genuine sense of poignancy and more than a little sympathy for the “inhuman” So-hyun if also terror of the hell she creates around her in her constant quest to find a place where she can truly be herself.

Somebody screens 20th July as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)