Always a staunch champion of East Asian cinema, the International Film Festival Rotterdam has revealed its full lineup for 2018. You can find full details for the complete program on the official website, but there are plenty of films from China, Japan, Indonesia, Korea, Philippines, Taiwan and Thailand to feast on in this year’s selection.
China
- Dragonfly Eyes – Chinese artist Xu Bing assembles a modern story from China’s myriad CCTV cameras in which a young woman leaves a Buddhist monastery and meets a young man…
- Impermanence – A monk with a shady past, a haunted innkeeper, and a lonely retiree are drawn to a remote Buddhist temple where their karmic debts are weighed in the debut from Zeng Zeng.
- Mrs Fang – Winner of the Golden Leopard in Locarno, Wang Bing’s hardhitting documentary charts the last days of an ordinary woman in rural China.
- Silent Mists – A small town is plagued by a series of violent rapes but no one seems very interested in catching the culprits in Zhang Miaoyan’s gritty drama.
- Stammering Ballad – portrait of itinerant folk musician Ga Song.
- The Widowed Witch – A widow is raped by her brother-in-law and takes to the road with her husband’s deaf brother.
- Youth – Feng Xiaogang takes a nostalgic look back at turbulent ’70s China through the story of the revolutionary ballet division. Review.
Japan
- Ambiguous Places – Akira Ikeda’s third feature follows the adventures of a woman who wakes up on a beach and finds an insect stuck to her head…
- Funeral Parade of Roses – Toshio Matsumoto’s avant-garde classic in its new 4K restoration.
- Hanagatami – a project 40 years in the making, Nobuhiko Obayashi tells the story of a generation about to be engulfed by the oncoming storm of war.
- The Hungry Lion – Takaomi Ogata’s understated drama focusses on a teacher accused of sexual misconduct with a student and the school girl who is rumoured to be in the leaked sex tape.
- Night is Short, Walk on Girl – Masaaki Yuasa returns to the surreal world of Tatami Galaxy’s Tomihiko Morimi for another drunken night in Kyoto as a girl chases her future and a boy chases a girl. Review.
- Outrage Coda – Takeshi Kitano returns for the third in his “Outrage” series of violent yakuza action movies.
- Radiance – The latest from Naomi Kawase, Radiance stars Masatoshi Nagase as a photographer slowly losing his sight.
- Sweating the Small Stuff – Ryutaro Ninomiya stars in a semi-autobiographical tale of a small town loner dealing with the long buried trauma of the death of his mother from illness when he was a child. Review.
Indonesia
- Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts – A woman takes to the road seeking revenge after her ranch is raided in Mouly Surya’s Eastern western.
- Satan’s Slaves – Joko Anwar remakes an ’80s Indonesian classic in which a young woman and her siblings are left alone in a creepy old house following the death of their mother and soon begin receiving mysterious visitations…
Korea
- The Day After – One of three films Hong Sang-soo released in 2017, The Day After focusses not on an egotistical film director but on an egotistical publisher who takes on new girl Kim Min-hee after having to fire his last assistant because his wife found out about their affair… Review.
- The Fortress – Lee Byunhun stars in Hwang Donghyuk’s historical epic in which the King has retreated in order to protect himself from the encroaching Qing but is left only with a choice of graceful defeat.
- Hit the Night – Jeong Gayoung’s Bitch on the Beach followup promises more Hong Sang-soo inspired sorrow and soju but infused with the actor/director’s characteristic bite and flair.
- I Have a Date With Spring – Baek Seungbin’s hopeful drama follows three people as they each receive visitations from someone who returns something important to them and thereby holds off the end of the world.
- A Lion in Winter – the latest from Lee Kwang-kuk (Romance Joe, A Matter of Interpretation), A Lion in Winter follows failed writer Gyeongyu when he’s kicked out by his girlfriend on the same day a tiger escapes from the zoo…
- The Villainess – a young girl is raised as an assassin but starts to fall in love with her cover life just as the past returns to haunt her in Jung Byung-gil’s impressively choreographed action thriller. Review.
Philippines
- The Ashes and Ghosts of Tayug 1931 – Christopher Gozum looks back to a tragic episode of Philippine history in the failed revolt of 1931.
- Neomanila – Mikhail Red tells a story of youth betrayed on the streets of Duterte’s Manila.
- Nervous Translation – a shy girl in ’80s Manila hears tell of a magical pen that will make her life wonderful…
- Respeto – underground rapper Hendrix tries to make it in Pandacan while the Duterte regime hovers all around the edges…
- Those Longhaired Nights – transgender sex workers Tuesday, Amanda, and Barbie live their ordinary lives in Manila’s red light district.
Taiwan
- The Bold, the Corrupt and the Beautiful – ambitious widow Tang Yue-ying’s world threatens to come crashing down in Yang Ya-che’s Golden Horse winning drama.
- Father to Son – a 60 year old man is diagnosed with a serious illness but decides to travel to Japan and look for the father who abandoned him rather than get treatment.
Thailand
- Homogeneous, Empty Time – documentary examining the rise of Thai nationalism.
The International Film Festival Rotterdam runs from 24th January to 4th February at various venues in Rotterdam city centre. Tickets are available from 8pm (local time) on 19th January via the official website and you can also keep up to date with all the latest news via the official Facebook Page, Twitter account, Instagram, and YouTube channel.
The 
Yo Oizumi stars as a high school teacher investigating the disappearance of a friend in another darkly comic, twist filled farce from Kenji Uchida (
Kazuya Shiraishi (
When a schoolgirl falls off a roof foul play is suspected. Who better to investigate than her fellow members of the literature club at an elite academy catering to the daughters of the rich and famous?
A young reporter (Satoshi Tsumabuki) investigates the brutal murder of a model family whilst trying to support his younger sister (Hikari Mitsushima) who is currently in prison for child neglect while his nephew remains in critical condition in hospital. Interviewing friends and acquaintances of the deceased, disturbing truths emerge concerning the systemic evils of social inequality. 
Based on a best selling romantic novel which captured the hearts of readers across Japan, Initiation Love sets out to expose the dark and disturbing underbelly of real life romance by completely reversing everything you’ve just seen in a gigantic twist five minutes before the film ends…
A young woman goes missing and unwittingly becomes the face of a social movement in Daigo Matsui’s anarchic examination of a misogynistic society.
A brother and sister are orphaned after a natural disaster and taken in by relatives but struggle to come to terms with the aftermath of such great loss.
Miwa Nishikawa adapts her own novel in which a self-centred novelist is forced to face his own delusions when his wife is killed in a freak bus accident. 
When the statute of limitations passes on a series of unsolved murders, a mysterious man (Tatsuya Fujiwara) suddenly comes forward and confesses while the detective (Hideaki Ito) who is still haunted by his inability to catch the killer has his doubts in Yu Irie’s adaptation of Jung Byoung-Gil’s Korean crime thriller Confession of Murder.
Toma Ikuta stars as maverick cop Reiji in Takashi Miike’s madcap manga adaptation. Reiji has been kicked off the force for trying to arrest a councillor who was molesting a teenage girl but gets secretly rehired to go undercover in Japan’s best known yakuza conglomerate.
Yoshihiro Nakamura (
Yuzo Kawashima would have turned 100 in 2018. A comic tale of life on the Osakan margins, Room For Let is a perfect example of the director’s well known talent for satire and stars popular comedian Frankie Sakai as an eccentric writer/translator-cum-konnyaku-maker whose life is turned upside down when a pretty young potter moves into the building.
Embittered 55 year old OL Setsuko gets a new lease on life when introduced to an unusual English conversation teacher, John, who gives her a blonde wig and rechristens her Lucy. “Lucy” falls head over heels for the American stranger and decides to follow him all the way to the states… 
A remake of Korean hit 
A small boy recruits the mysterious samurai “No Name” as a bodyguard after his dog is injured in an ambush in the landmark animation from 2007.
A no good lowlife makes his way by stealing from elderly women but experiences a change of heart when he’s taken in by a kindly old lady deep in the mountains.
Poland’s 
A giant of Hong Kong cinema, Hui began her time in the director’s chair in the late ’70s following a two year stint at the London Film School. Throughout her long and varied career which has featured both commercial and more personal cinema, Hui’s work is noted for its probing social commentary and political fearlessness.
Shining a light on a new, under appreciated film culture, Five Flavours presents a series of new films from Bhutan.
As cinema receipts dwindled in the early 1970s, Japanese studios considered the best way to stay afloat. Nikkatsu, whose output had largely skewed towards youth drama, decided to reboot itself wholesale and embark on production of levelled up “pink film” only with better production values. 40 years later, Nikkatsu’s “Roman Porno” line has been resurrected with four films directed by four of today’s most interesting directors. Five Flavours presents two of the four reboot movies paired with an original from the 1970s.
Wales’s premier horror festival, 
Another addition to the Meatball Machine universe, Kodoku follows a debt collector recently diagnosed with terminal cancer who realises his condition makes him immune to the mind control of invading alien Necroborgs. More splatter action from Yoshihiro Nishimura.
A group of horrible kids capture a strange creature and then mercilessly torture it in Giddens Ko’s surprising foray into the world of teen horror.
Set in 1953, 
Hee-yeon moves to a small village near Mt. Jang with her husband after their son goes missing. Bonding with a little girl who seems to be lost herself, Hee-yeon soon becomes embroiled in the strange events occurring around the mountain.
’90s neurologist Lam Sik-ka (Anthony Wong) can’t sleep. Contacted by a fellow insomniac former girlfriend, he begins investigating and finds the answer lies all the way back in the Japanese occupation…
An adaptation of the manga by Sui Ishida, Tokyo Ghoul is the story of Ken Kaneki who wakes up in hospital to discover he’s been given transplants from a “Ghoul” and is now part Ghoul himself which means he needs to eat human flesh to survive…
Students at a remote art school start mysteriously disappearing, could the creepy clay statues possibly be to blame?
Following the last series of 
Released in 2009, the second feature from Satoko Yokohama stars Kenichi Matsuyama as Yojin – an Aomori farm boy who lives on a slightly different plane of existence to everyone else. When a pretty school teacher (played by Kumiko Aso) arrives from Tokyo, Yojin becomes determined to win her heart, whatever the eventual costs may be!
Also known as Ending Note, Mami Sunada’s documentary follows the last days of her father, a lifelong salaryman who retired aged 67 only to be diagnosed with terminal cancer soon after. Realising that he had only a short time left to live, Sunada began preparing for his death, creating his own bucket list and thinking about the “ending note” (a kind of personal testament) that he would leave behind for his family.
Miwa Nishikawa whose 
Directly after the screening of Wild Berries, there will be a panel discussion examining the rise of female filmmakers over the last 15 years. Chaired by Kate Taylor – East Asian programmer for the BFI London Film Festival, the panel will also feature film scholar Jasper Sharp (co-founder of Midnight Eye, author of Behind the Pink Curtain), film researcher Alejandra Armendáriz Hernández, and the season’s curator, Irene Silvera.
The latest in a series of events marking the 20th anniversary of the Hong Kong handover, 
The latest instalment in Wilson Yip’s SPL series stars Louis Koo as a Hong Kong cop on a mission to rescue his daughter from Thai kidnappers. Co-star Gordon Lam will be in attendance to present the film’s UK premiere.
Ann Hui’s 1999 drama documents the struggle of a group of idealists fighting for the rights of boat people and their mainland wives.
Simon Yam and Lam Suet star in Johnnie To’s missing gun thriller.
A tribute to the kung-fu classics of the ’60s and ’70s, 2010’s Gallants follows two martial artists patiently waiting for their master to wake up from the coma he’s been in for the last 30 years. Co-star Gordon Lam will be in attendance.
Fruit Chan’s 1997 story of tragic youth in its 2017 restoration which premiered at the Udine Far East Film Festival.
Director Alex Law paints an autobiographical tale of growing up in a working class family in late ’60s Hong Kong.
Three infamous criminals smuggle themselves into Hong Kong for the biggest heist ever in a crime thriller produced by Johnnie To and directed by three proteges from his Fresh Wave short film programme.
A grizzled cop chases a gold smuggling fisherman through storms literal and metaphorical in Jonathan Li’s feature debut. UK premiere – Co-star Gordon Lam will be in attendance.
Running at BFI Southbank through October and November, 
Starring Mizoguchi’s frequent leading lady Isuzu Yamada, Osaka Elegy centres on a switchboard operator who finds herself trapped in a ruinous relationship with her boss in an effort to save her father who has ruined himself through gambling debts. 
Women of the Night, completed in 1948, will screen along side Osaka Elegy (1936) and stars Kinuyo Tanaka in a tale of two sisters trying to survive in the ruined Osaka one of whom is a war widow and the other dangerously involved with a drugs smuggler. 35mm.
Kinuyo Tanaka also stars in Keisuke Kinoshita’s 1950 melodrama Wedding Ring. Starring opposite Toshiro Mifune, Tanaka plays a housewife who travels back and fore from the seaside, where her sickly husband convalesces, to Tokyo where she runs her family’s jewellery store. A chance encounter with a strapping doctor (Mifune) on a train has unforeseen consequences as the pair grow closer and the husband begins to realise that he cannot provide the happiness his wife is seeking. 35mm.
Clothes of Deception is directed by Kozaburo Yoshimura who was the subject (along with Kaneto Shindo) of the BFI’s previous 
Shiro Toyoda’s melodrama stars Hideko Takamine as a divorced woman who becomes the mistress of an elderly money lender to support her father but dares to dream of a happier future after falling for a young student. 35mm.
Tadashi Imai’s adaptation of a number of stories by 19th century writer Ichiyo Higuchi came top in Kinema Junpo’s best of list for 1953 and features three stories of women suffering at the hands of men. 35mm.
Kinuyo Tanaka, one of Japan’s great actresses, was not the nation’s first female director as she is sometimes described, but she was the first to have a career as a film director. The Eternal Breasts is Tanaka’s third directorial effort (following 
Hideko Takamine and Masayuki Mori play two former lovers cast adrift in the new post-war world world where their love is both impossible and impossible to escape. Naruse’s melancholy melodrama is the story of a woman who strives for self-determination while chasing a man who craves only respectability, as trapped and confused as her still divided nation. 35mm.
Masayuki Mori stars again in another romantic melodrama this time for Heinosuke Gosho (
Among the darkest of Ozu’s post-war movies, Tokyo Twilight is a less forgiving family drama in which Setsuko Hara plays the older of two sisters who has returned home from a failing marriage with her little girl in tow only to find out that her unmarried student younger sister is facing an unwanted pregnancy.
Soon after An Affair at Akitsu, also known as 
Recently restored, Noburu Nakamura’s The Shape of Night stars Miyuki Kuwano as a young woman forced into prostitution by a no good boyfriend. 35mm.
Following a long series of teaser screenings which culminated with Cannes hit 
The 
Closing the festival will be the second film from Kim Dae-hwan who picked up the best new director award at Locarno for this awkward tale of familial disconnection. 
The special focus for this year’s festival is Korean Noir and Korean cinema has certainly had a long and proud history of gritty, existential crime thrillers. Running right through from the ’60s to recent Cannes hit The Merciless, the Korean Noir strand aims to illuminate the dark side of society through its compromised heroes and conflicted villains.
The best in recent cinema across the previous year ranging from period drama to financial thriller, gangland action, social drama, and horror.
Programmed by Tony Rayns, this year’s indie strand has a special focus on documentary filmmaker Jung Yoon-suk who will be attending the festival in person to present his films.
Focussing on female viewpoints this year’s Women’s Voices strand includes one narrative feature and four short films.
Three films from legendary director Bae Chang-ho each starring Ahn Sung-ki.
Workers’ rights and examinations of the Yongsan tragedy in which five civilians and one police officer lost their lives during a protest against redevelopment dominate the feature documentary strand.
Two charming yet very different animated adventures aimed at a younger/family audience.
A selection of shorts from the 
Cho Sun-ho’s time-loop drama A Day (하루, 
Jun-young, a successful surgeon but less than successful father, witnesses a car accident involving his daughter only to wake up as if it were just a dream. Realising that the events of his dream are proceeding as he saw them, Jun-young tries to save his daughter only to fail and have the exact same events repeat themselves over and over again until he meets another man in the same position who has been trying to save the life of the other victim. Together, the two men unite to save the lives of their loved ones and escape the nightmarish temporal loop in which they are both trapped.
Tag screens on 14th October at 12pm. Check out our review of the film 
Of course there’s plenty of blockbuster fare on offer too from the latest in the Death Note franchise to cat-centric dramas, tales of Shogi playing geniuses, splatter horror, and one family’s strange journey to familial harmony when all the lights go off.
Alongside latest releases, 
Documentary fans also have a lot to look forward to with three very different explorations of modern Japanese life.
There’s no shortage of animation either with four new releases including the award winning In this Corner of the World, and Studio Ghibli classic Princess Mononoke.
Trippy psychedelic road movie, 
Windows on Worlds 