Tag: Raindance

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

June 26, 2026by Hayley Scanlon

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

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

Working a soulless job as a delivery driver where his clients are often similarly withdrawn or hostile, Amenashi blames himself for Anna’s death and wonders if there was something more he could have done to prevent it while drawn into the same kind of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

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

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

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

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

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Unluckiest Girl in the World (Ryosuke Hayazaka, 2026)

June 25, 2026by Hayley Scanlon

Sachiko Yamanoura feels herself to be the unluckiest person in the world. Her unluckiness may tens towards the superficial in that she has terrible luck with men and is the sort of person who always manages to step in gum and pick the tako-less takoyaki, but her perception of it seems to be impacting her quality of life This is partly because she has an odd conception of the world in which she believes that fate is decided by gacha capsule toys and therefore exercises very little agency over her life to the extent that she is continually unable to break up with her financially exploitative boyfriend who not only forgets her birthday, but chooses that particular day to bring another woman back to their flat.

It’s this romantic dimension that occupies most of Ryosuke Hayazaka 50-minute drama as Sachiko is abruptly hit by car and wakes up in an afterlife where a smartly suited version of herself invites her to choose a new lover for her next life from the Gacha Life machine. It apparently contains only men she is compatible with and therefore allows her to experience what it would actually be like to date them as a sort of advanced mental fantasy. What quickly becomes clear, however, is that none of these men are very good options for her and even the ones who looked good on the surface had hidden issues. She briefly considers dating her 45-year-old boss who did actually remember her birthday and otherwise appears to be kind and considerate, but it turns out that he is already married and fleeing domestic responsibility after his wife has given birth to their first child.

The real issue is that she’s still dealing with the fallout from the abrupt disappearance of her fiancé three years previously who left alone to travel the world the morning after proposing to her. When he suddenly reappears, she considers picking up where they left off but is continually insecure that he will suddenly disappear again. A popular influencer host, meanwhile, offers the opposite sort of comfort in making it his business to tell her what she wants to hear in soft and non-threatening tones while all the while planning to exploit her by recruiting her as a member of his cult-like pyramid scheme selling lucky water. A student she interviews at her company similarly claims that luck is his special skill, but when she considers dating him, she finds out that he’s overtly close with his mother and she’d need to pass an interview with her first if she wanted to be his girlfriend.

A series of speed dates provide a little more real life detail as Sachiko is subjected to the obviously married guy, the bully who insists no one else is going to want to date her, the guy who wants an open relationship, and the evangelistic polygamist who wants her join him in a new era. She certainly does seem to be unlucky in drawing all these men none of whom seem to be very viable prospects for a long-term relationship or even genuine romantic connection. But at the same time, it’s entrusting her life to luck that put Sachiko in this position. If she accepted that luck was something she could make for herself rather than continually accepting an unsatisfying status quo and basically allowing all these men to treat her badly, she might be able to find a degree of satisfaction in her life that may or may not include romance.

Each of the rounds included the option to “pass”, but really Sachiko had that all along without really realising. Eventually she realises she doesn’t really need to pick any of these men and is free to stop drawing gacha rather than constantly waiting for the machine to spit out the winning ball. Shot in a 1:1 frame to mimic an Instagram reel, the film has a youthful, contemporary vibe informed by current dating mores and though it may present a rather bleak view of the prospect of romantic fulfilment in a chauvinistic society does at least allow the heroine to recover herself esteem and finally break up with her no-good boyfriend, refusing to let luck rule her life and finally taking control of her own destiny.

The Unluckiest Girl in the World screened as part of this year’s Raindance Film Festival.

Nameless (名無し, Hideo Jojo, 2026)

June 20, 2026by Hayley Scanlon

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trailer (no subtitles)

The Invisible Half (インビジブルハーフ, Masaki Nishiyama, 2025)

June 21, 2025by Hayley Scanlon

Most people don’t mean to, but in thinking they’re being nice all they do is make someone feel bad. Like they don’t belong, or there’s something wrong with them. Since returning to Japan from the UK after her parents’ divorce, Elena (Lisa Siera) can’t help thinking everyone’s staring at her. They call her the “gaijin” girl, a derogatory term for someone who is not considered to be Japanese, but Elena isn’t a “foreigner”, not that it matters. On her first day at her new school after leaving the last one due to relentless bullying, the teacher asks her what kind of mixed-ethnicity she is and then asks her to tell her all about England, though she’s been living in Japan for over 10 years and can’t really remember it. Nor can she remember much English, or perhaps simply doesn’t want to talk about it, though there’s no reason why she should anyway.

Maybe not bringing it up would be worse, but the teacher’s ham-fisted attempts at inclusion only leave Elena feeling othered. These are just a few of the microaggressions she experiences in her daily life and even another girl who tries to make friends with her, Akari (Miyu Okuno), makes a few insensitive remarks like how she’d like to have “a gaijin’s face,” and that it’s not fair because she is Japanese. She also goes straight to using Elena’s first name, which could just be friendliness or possibility circumventing the usual rules of Japanese politeness because they don’t really apply to non-Japanese people implying Akari may not think of her as one. Elena says she just wants “a normal Japanese name”, so her new friend starts calling her “Rena” which Elena seems to like because it feels like acceptance, but is it, really?

In many ways, it’s the Elena/Rena dichotomy that’s at the heart of Masaki Nishiyama’s incredibly accomplished debut as she struggles to accept the “invisible” half of herself that is nevertheless what she thinks everyone is always staring at to the extent that they don’t even really see her. There’s another girl in her class, Ito (Runa Hirasawa), who appears to be a figure of fun who everyone, including Elena, avoids and considers “weird”. It’s after the class bullies take Ito’s phone and put it in Elena’s bag to kill two birds with one stone that Elena begins to feel especially haunted. A monster with a bandaged face she can only see when she’s holding her phone begins stalking her, leaving her in a permanent state of agitation.

The phone is otherwise a source of anxiety as it’s many through group chats, text messages, and social media that bullying takes place. Elena firmly believes that the monster is real, though in other ways it reflects her own sense of internal discomfort in being unable to accept what she perceives as two sides of herself as an integrated whole. Her not altogether sympathetic mother can’t begin to imagine what she’s going through, and there’s another part of her that wonders if she should have stayed with her father, though the situation may not have been much different in the UK. Her well-meaning teacher tells her she should learn to trust adults more, and asks why Elena is keeping things from her in a way that makes it sound like a personal slight or in someway a malicious act on Elena’s part. Elena replies it’s because she also Japanese, which is to say not someone Elena currently feels she can trust while also implying that Elena also does not quite consider herself to be “Japanese”.

The lumbering, bandaged monster reflects the way in which she is pursued by her own uncertain identity while craving acceptance from others but at the same time afraid to accept it. She doubts Akari’s sincerity and worries that her overtures of friendship are a prelude to a long-form pattern of bullying, but it’s finally Akari who is prepared to help her face her monster in accepting that it actually exists. Faced with another bandaged face, Elena comes to accept it as a friend along with embracing her whole self including her full name. Filled with a genuine sense of unease, Nishiyama’s eerie debut is both an exploration of societal prejudice and a coming-of-age ghost story in which a young woman learns to make her own place to belong regardless of the gaze of others.

The Invisible Half screened as part of this year’s Raindance Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

A Dobugawa Dream (ドブ川番外地, Asato Watanabe, 2018)

September 24, 2019September 24, 2019by Hayley Scanlon

Can you outrun sorrow or should you just accept defeat and remain within a bubble of despair? Forced out of his self-isolation, the hero of Asato Watanabe’s debut feature A Dobugawa Dream (ドブ川番外地, Dobugawa Bangaichi) tries to find out, looking for a home among those who’ve fallen through the cracks. This down and out ditch town maybe where you end up when you don’t know where else to go, but there’s comfort in knowing others got there before you, if not so much in realising that they have all failed to leave, either accepting the imperfect present in rejection of a possible future, or wilfully residing in the past.

Highschooler Tatsumi (Yuwa Kitagaki) is a lost young man filled with pent-up rage and frustration. He hasn’t filled in his career survey because he has no idea what to put in it and no amount of irritated cajoling from a less than well-meaning teacher is likely to change that. His only outlet is the dream of sailing away with his best friend on the makeshift raft they’ve crafted from refuse at a disused boatyard, but that dream dies when he discovers him hanging, barefoot his body swaying in the breeze. Unable to process his loss and the guilt that accompanies it, Tatsumi imprisons himself in his room watching VHS tapes of old TV shows until a series of angry voices from the other side of the door eventually forces him out of his place of safety and into a strange new world.

Running blindly, Tatsumi wanders through a dream until he is eventually engulfed by a cheerful street funeral which turns out to be in honour of a man still alive – Tsuchiro, a middle-aged former shogi champ now a drunken rogue and what passes around here for a guardian spirit. Questioned by the local bobby, Tsuchiro passes Tatsumi off as his own son, a ruse no one believes but one with a grain of truth. In Tsuchiro, an infinitely cool presence all sunshades, yukata, and shit-eating grin, Tatsumi finds both a father figure and a double. Just as he is chasing the ghost of a friend he couldn’t save, Tsuchiro is in flight from himself, uncertain of his own identity now he no longer sees it reflected in the eyes of an opponent.

Trapped in this strange netherland, Tsuchiro has chosen oblivion. He drowns his sorrows but secretly plays shogi alone by nights while Tatsumi listens in silent consternation from the next room as his tiles click down on the bloodied board. Originally reluctant, Tatsumi finds himself becoming the older man, dressing in the cast-off clothes of the street and drinking himself out his sorrow but quickly becomes disillusioned with what he sees as Tsuchiro’s hypocrisy. The older man offers him a home among those who have nowhere else to go, but the wily bar hostess, though trapped herself, cautions him that he might not want to stay here, among the perpetually lost, for evermore.

A climactic argument sees Tsuchiro offer some tough love, telling Tatsumi that if he wants to stay he needs to leave his darkness at the door, but Tatsumi doesn’t want the superficial solution the older man has found. He’s angry, and he’s powerless, and not yet ready to face his pain but there are other people he will fail to save precisely because of his solipsistic rage – a lesson age tried to teach him but he was too impatient to see. Further loss and an altruistic act of sacrifice push him towards a reckoning in a deeper dream which allows him to interrogate the ghosts of the traumatic past and, perhaps, make his peace with them.

Alternating between bleak despair and absurd humour, A Dobugawa Dream takes its broken hero on an oneiric odyssey through grief, despair, and eventual rebirth as he learns to reconnect with the world around him and prepares to sail away from the traumatic past into the dreamed of future. Escaping the Dobugawa dreamscape, he takes its wisdom with him, no longer running but moving forward all the same. A beautifully composed and remarkably assured debut from Asato Watanabe, A Dobugawa Dream is both a tale of marginalised lives and the corrosive effects of unresolved trauma, and a gentle hymn to the sadness of letting go.

A Dobugawa Dream made its international premiere at Raindance 2019 courtesy of Third Window Films.

Teaser trailer

Raindance Returns for 2019 with Selection of East Asian Festival Favs

August 20, 2019by Hayley Scanlon1 Comment

London’s Raindance Film Festival returns from 18th to 29th September with a handpicked selection of independent filmmaking from across the globe. This year’s programme features a handful of East Asian indie features with a particular concentration on documentaries.

Ai Weiwei: Yours Truly

Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei holds an exhibition of postcards sent to political prisoners across the world in a documentary filmed by Cheryl Haines.

Demolition Girl (Japan)

A teenage girl starts earning extra money performing in niche videos in which she wears her school uniform and stomps on things in order to escape from her feckless family members in Genta Matsugami’s exploration of life in small-town, working class Japan. Review.

My Dearest Sister (Japan)

A filmmaker who has lived abroad for many years finds herself at odds with her mother and sister in her relationship to her overbearing father in Kyoka Tsukamoto’s autobiographical documentary.

Night Cruising (Japan)

Documentarian Makoto Sasaki follows blind musician Hideyuki Kato as he tries to achieve his dream of directing a science fiction movie.

A Dobugawa Dream (Japan)

A young man shuts himself away following the suicide of a friend then escapes to find a substitute family with an eccentric older man, a barmaid, a dancer, and a police officer.

Bombie (Laos)

Documentary by Tanner Matthews and Shelby Baldock following bomb disposal officers in Laos.

On the President’s Orders (Philippines)

Documentary by James Jones and Olivier Sarbil exploring the effects of Duterte’s war on drugs on those who carry it out.

Song Lang (Vietnam)

Beautifully filmed, highly atmospheric tragic romance set in 1980s Saigon in which an embittered thug falls for a Cải lương opera star. Review.

Raindance Film Festival takes place at Vue Piccadilly, 18th to 29th September. Tickets are already on sale via Eventbrite. You can also keep up with all the latest details via the festival’s official Facebook page, Twitter account, Instagram, and YouTube channels.

Matsuchiyo – Life of a Geisha (松千代一代記, Ken Nishikawa, 2018)

October 6, 2018July 21, 2019by Hayley Scanlon2 Comments

The figure of the “geisha” looms large in Japanese cinema, but all too often international perceptions of what a geisha is or should be are rooted in old fashioned orientalist ideas of exotic Eastern women somehow both refined and alluring. Most assume geisha is synonymous with high class prostitute and that the life of a geisha is not much different from any other sex worker save for the trappings of elegance which are in fact its USP. These assumptions are, however, not entirely accurate.

In order to tell the story of the modern day geisha, Ken Nishikawa steps in front of the camera to tell that of his own mother which is also in many ways, the story of 20th century Japan. Later known as Matsuchiyo, Nishikawa’s mother spent the pre-war years in Manchuria returning to a land in ruins shortly after the wartime defeat. In order to support her ailing mother, she became a geisha which is, as we will discover, an extraordinarily skilled and arcane profession entailing the mastery of a number of traditional arts from dance to shamisen.

As Matsuchiyo later puts it, it’s difficult for a foolish girl to become a geisha, but for an intelligent one it may be impossible. A flippant remark to be sure, but it hints at the true purpose of a geisha’s training which amounts to a gentle erasure of individual personality in order to play the role of the perfect woman from the point of view of each particular client. Somewhere between bartender and therapist, a geisha must listen patiently to the complaints of each of her companions as they pour out their souls over sake, laying bare the fears and worries with which they could never burden a wife (assuming they might want to). Nodding sympathetically, she must remain cheerful and supportive, never voicing her true feelings but only those the client has paid to hear. The business of a geisha isn’t selling sex but fantasy, an image of unconditional love which is entirely conditional on payment of the bill.

As far as bills go, being a geisha is an expensive business and so each must be careful to hook a patron who will support her ongoing career – paying for training, equipment, elaborate outfits and hairdressing, in return for preferential treatment and loyalty. Matsuchiyo, as young woman, fell in love with a handsome young man but he was poor and her family still had debts. Though they urged her to do what she thought best, Matsuchiyo made a sacrifice and gave up on love to continue her geisha training and provide for her family. She became the mistress of a wealthy elderly man and later the “shadow wife” of a younger one from a wealthy family who fathered her three children but had two more with a legal wife. On his death she received nothing and the children were not even allowed to go to their father’s funeral, such was the taboo nature of their existence from the point of view of their father’s family.

The children were also instructed not to tell people that their mother was a geisha, leaving them with a lingering feeling of shame regarding her profession even if Matsuchiyo herself has absolutely none. Becoming a geisha is hard, it takes skill and application not to mention an investment in time. These days there are few women who want to be one, possibly because of its associations with the sex trade, but also simply because times have changed. Before the war when poverty was at its height, it was “normal” to sell a daughter to a geisha house so she might feed her family. Thankfully, this was no longer (officially at least) possible in the post-war world, but when Matsuchiyo became a geisha there were many young women like her who did so to escape the kind of extreme poverty which is happily absent in the modern Japan. The geisha houses enjoyed a post-war boom in the Showa era but have been in rapid decline ever since, becoming perhaps a rarefied cultural icon while the regular foot traffic trots off to the decidedly more casual world of hostess bars.

Nishikawa narrates much of his mother’s story in English with occasional on screen graphics to aid in explanation before allowing her to tell some of it herself in subtitled Japanese. Though others might have lamented Matsuchiyo’s “hard life” filled with loss and heartbreak, she herself regrets nothing and continues to dedicate herself to the geisha craft as the president of Atami’s geisha guild, fostering the latest generation of younger women keen to carry on the geisha legacy in an ever modernising world. A fascinating insight into the tightly controlled dichotomies of a geisha’s life, Nishikawa’s personal documentary is also voyage through the changing society of post-war Japan through the eyes of those trained to observe and most particularly an old woman who survived it all with a smile.

Matsuchiyo – Life of a Geisha (松千代一代記, Matsuchiyo Ichidaiki) was screened as part of the 2018 Raindance Film Festival.

Teaser trailer (English)

Bad Poetry Tokyo (東京不穏詩, Anshul Chauhan, 2018)

October 5, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Running towards a dream can help you forget whatever it was you were running away from, but there may come a time when you have to accept that your dream has betrayed you and the sun is already setting. For the heroine of Anshul Chauhan’s debut feature Bad Poetry Tokyo (東京不穏詩, Tokyo Fuon Uta) that moment has arrived all too soon and though she perhaps expected it to come and had actively resisted it, it can no longer be outrun.

30 years old, Jun’s (Shuna Iijima) dream has been a long time coming. At a make or break audition for a Canadian film, she tells the panel that she studied English at a top university in Tokyo and plans to move to LA to work in movies. Meanwhile, she blew out of her country home five years ago and has become estranged from her family. She supports herself working as a hostess in a seedy bar which is more a front for sex work than it is a drinking establishment, but sex work is work and at least pays well allowing her to save money to move to LA.

Unfortunately she plans to move there with her current boyfriend, Taka (Orson Mochizuki), who is a bouncer at the club and was responsible for getting her the job in the first place even if he now can’t quite reconcile himself with the feelings of jealousy and resentment her work causes him. Taka also has issues of his own and when twin crises present themselves in the form of a possessive and intimidating client, and a home invasion that seems like an inside job and leaves her with visible facial scarring, Jun is finally robbed of all hope and left with no other option than to retreat to her hometown and the quiet horrors which have been patiently waiting for her return.

Jun’s life, it would seem, has been one long scream. Returning to a seemingly empty home, she is less than happy to find her slumbering father (Kohei Mashiba) slumped over in the living room. Noticing the wounds on her face he begins to ask her what happened but more out of irritation than concern – he warns her not to bring any trouble to his door. Jun mutters that it might have been a mistake to come back, to which her father cooly retorts that the biggest mistake was her birth, resenting his daughter for her very existence and the taboo desires she arouses in him while insisting that this is all her fault because she is essentially “bad”. Jun’s dad didn’t even bother to tell her that her mother had died, perhaps out of embarrassment or shame for this was not a natural death and though not at his hand he is very much to blame. The first of many men to have wronged her, only now in her somewhat weakened and desperate state is Jun finally ready for a reckoning. After all, there is nothing more to lose.

Men have indeed ruined her life, as has the oppressive patriarchy which continues to define it. The first time we see her, Jun is forced to perform an intense audition scene of a woman being brutally beaten and abused for a dispassionate director. Which is to say, she is forced to humiliate herself and relive very real traumas in the quest to fulfil her dream. This early scene of playacting will be recalled several times, most obviously in the flashforward which opens the film and eventually leads to a moment of both liberation and transgression which ultimately seals her fate.

Unable to gain a foothold in acting, Jun is forced into a life of sex work which she finds degrading and unpleasant, allowing herself to be “violated” in return for money as she later describes it. Again reliving past traumas, her anger only grows and intensifies as she passively permits herself to be misused. A final act of rebellion in refusing the intimidating and entitled attentions of a controlling client leads to a dangerous situation in which he reminds her that women like her belong to men like him and if it pleases him he will destroy her. Jun gives up on her dream and therefore has no more need of the club, but employment in a hostess bar is not always as casual as it seems and one cannot just simply leave. Once again Jun has become someone’s property, not merely as an idea but as flesh.

Jun’s physical wounds are a manifestation of her emotional trauma and the legacy of violence which traps her in an oppressive cycle of abuse and despair. Back in her hometown, filled as it is with unpleasant memories and the shadow of her father’s cruelty, Jun is haunted by the spectre of an innocent childhood. Reuniting with an old friend who, it seems, has always carried a torch for the girl she once was, Jun is forced to confront the gulf between the “innocent” self which escaped with hope, and the defeated self which has returned with none. Even this seemingly positive, innocent romance is eventually tainted by violence offered as an act of love which has its own sense of disquieting poetry. Yet violence is the force which perpetuates despair, creating only fear and rage and pain each time it breeds. Jun is running once again but neither forward nor back, only full pelt towards the setting sun.

Bad Poetry Tokyo was screened as part of the 2018 Raindance Film Festival.

Festival promo (English subtitles)

The End of Wind (风的另一面, Fog Forest, 2018)

October 4, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Does beauty still exist in the world or only in the minds of lonely people? Director Fog Forest wants to know if there is anything pushing back against the forces of indifference in his debut feature, The End of Wind (风的另一面, Fēng de Lìngyī Miàn) which follows the melancholy fates of three individuals each looking for connection in an increasingly apathetic society. A salaryman with an existential crisis, a man wrongly imprisoned for a violent crime, and a young woman whose escape from North Korea led her straight into the hands of human traffickers, ponder if life is still worth living when the bonds between people have become so weak and distorted.

Wang Ran, a frustrated company man and all round snappy dresser, has long been in a depressive slump. Lamenting the attitudes of those all around him, he resents their all encompassing greed and self-interest. He can’t understand why they are so keen to destroy the “beautiful things” of the world in order to continue their quests towards materialist success. Then again, Wang is no longer sure that the “beautiful things” really exist outside of his own mind and if they do he has no idea how to find them. Meanwhile, Yang Botao has just been released from a ten year prison sentence for a crime he did not commit only to find that his mother passed away while he was inside and his father has spent all their money trying to get him released. To make matters worse, Yang is also suffering from kidney disease thanks to constant beatings from sadistic prison guards. A series of events brings the two men together when they decide to rescue a young woman, Kim Meishan, who escaped from North Korea but fell into the hands of human traffickers when her father was killed during the journey.

Each of the three protagonists is looking for some kind of connection which will restore their will to continue living even when life is so obviously meaningless and depressing. In order to find his purpose, Wang gives up his job and goes wandering, living in bare apartments and trying to make connections with kind people he finds along the way. Yang too decides to set off on a journey when his attempts to restart his life are frustrated by an inability to find a job in his hometown where the spectre of his “crime” haunts him everywhere. Unlike Wang, Yang decides to try rekindling an old connection in looking for a woman he knew before he went away who has apparently moved on, possibly to the North West. A true journeyman, Yang becomes the conduit which delivers the path to destiny that Wang has been seeking when his delivery job brings him into contact with Meishan who is able to pass him an SOS in the form of a cassette tape. Intended for her long lost mother, the message is in Korean and Wang is therefore unable to understand it save for identifying Meishan’s distress and realising that he has received a literal cry for help.

Though helping Meishan, Wang’s sense of purpose beings to return, warmed by her desire for life as evidenced by her ravenous hunger. In her he perhaps comes to believes that the “beautiful things” he dreamed of really do exist, and can be found by building genuine connections with others even if they are not supported by common language. His final answer is, however, not quite so positive and all three of our protagonists realise different destinations in their mutual quests for fulfilment. Having been abandoned by all each exists separately, unable to reconcile themselves either to the compromises of the consumerist world or discover a new one through forging bonds with other similarly lonely people. Wang’s world is one of imperfect destruction, surrounded by ruins and filled with nihilistic emptiness from which there may be no escape. Or perhaps, the only possibility of escape ends in an “end” which is not an end but a release. Poetic, if at times obtuse, Fog Forest’s debut is a noirish exploration of the sadness of being alive but one which offers no sign of hope for a society in terminal decline.

The End of Wind was screened as part of the 2018 Raindance Film Festival.

Original trailer (english subtitles)

Love At Least (生きてるだけで、愛, Kosai Sekine, 2018)

October 3, 2018by Hayley Scanlon1 Comment

For some, it might be impossible grasp just how exhausting it can be merely being alive. For the heroine of Kosai Sekine’s debut feature Love At Least (生きてるだけで、愛, Ikiteru Dake de, Ai) , adapted from the novel by Yukiko Motoya (Funuke, Show Some Love You Losers!, Vengeance Can Wait), life is a draining cycle of waking and sleeping from which she fears she will never be able to free herself. An encounter with an equally atypical though perhaps more destructive young woman who orders her to leave her ordered existence so that she might step into the newly vacant space unwittingly helps her towards a moment of clarity though not the one it might at first seem.

Yasuko (Shuri) has vague memories of her mother dancing when the power went out but she herself is afraid of the dark. Looking back there’s a lot that makes sense to her about her mother’s behaviour and subsequently her own, but she hasn’t yet found a way to come to terms with her psychology. Yasuko has bipolar and is currently unemployed as she suffers with hypersomnia and hasn’t been able to hold down a job. She’s supported by her live-in boyfriend of three years, Tsunaki (Masaki Suda), who once dreamed of being a writer but now has a soul crushing job at a tabloid magazine writing salacious exposés about celebrities.

Yasuko is currently in the middle of a depressive spell and rarely leaves the house, spending most of the day asleep and exchanging texts with her somewhat unsupportive sister but her life is turned upside-down when she receives a surprise visit from a woman calling herself Ando (Riisa Naka) who drags her off to a nearby cafe and explains that she previously dated Tsunaki three years ago and now she wants him back. Viewing Yasuko as some kind of lesser human, Ando thinks she should see sense and leave Tsunaki to which Yasuko quite reasonably points out she has no income and so the request is quite unreasonable. Ando, however, is nothing if not thorough and it’s not long before she’s bamboozled both the cafe and Yasuko into taking her on as a part-time waitress.

Ando, an extremely unpleasant and manipulative woman, may be as Yasuko points out even “sicker” than she is but somehow she seems to make all around her do her bidding. Oddly enough, working at the cafe might actually be good for Yasuko – the cafe owner and his wife are kind and sympathetic people who seem to want to help and the other waitress was once a hikikomori so they might truly have some idea of what is involved in trying to help those in need. Ando, however, doesn’t quite seem to want her to succeed – she turns up at the cafe on a regular basis to feed Yasuko’s insecurities, pointedly asking her if she’s considered whether the problem might not just be that she’s “useless”, telling her that it’s pointless to try because she’ll inevitably fail, all of which seems quite counterproductive to her nefarious plan.

Then again, kindness and sympathy are not always quite as helpful as they seem. The cafe owner’s wife is nice, to be sure, but is fond of repeating the mantra that depression is caused by loneliness and that therefore making friends with the people at the cafe will make everything better. There might be something in her way of thinking, but it’s also a superficial approach to a more complicated problem and mild refusal to face some of the more serious aspects of Yasuko’s condition. When she’s started to feel as if the cafe is a safe space, told to think of herself as “family”, Yasuko lets down her guard and reveals one subject of her obsessive anxieties which just happens to be the washlet and the possibility of its sudden explosion should the water pressure go haywire. All of a sudden it’s as if the air changes, they look at her like she’s “mad” and the facade of their patronising desire to help is suddenly ripped away. Yasuko’s worst fear has been realised, they “see through” her and she feels as if there’s no hope any more.

Being seen through is perhaps something which Yasuko both fears and craves. Tsunaki, meanwhile, is suffering something similar only in a less extreme way. He also feared being seen through, but unlike Yasuko chose to isolate himself, rarely speaking and maintaining a healthy distance to the world. For this reason he’s been able to put up with his awful tabloid job, even excusing himself when an actress whose affair they’d exposed committed suicide because after all it was “nothing to do with” him despite the fact he was so obviously complicit. Increasingly conflicted, he begins to pull away from Yasuko, unwilling to overburden her with his own worries or perhaps more accurately equally afraid to expose them. Yasuko’s cruel barb that she wished Tsunaki’s “lack of character” would infect her hints at her mild frustration with his passivity, that his refusal to engage and habit of pussyfooting around her illness to avoid creating a scene are also contributing to her ongoing lethargy. The passive aggressive texts from her sister which seemed so unsupportive are perhaps less so as she is the only person willing to go toe to go with her and suddenly Yasuko’s meanness towards her outwardly patient and caring boyfriend reads more like provocation, as if she’s trying to make him respond rather than allow him to continue enabling her inertia.

Being driven apart by their parallel crises eventually brings the pair back together again, closer to an emotional centre and reaching a brief moment of understanding. As Yasuko says, the connection may have been only momentary, but within that infinitesimal space she can perhaps find a life. The dark is not so scary after all. Anchored by an extraordinary performance from Shuri, Love at Least is a beautifully composed examination of the costs of modern living in which fragmentary moments of absolute connection become the only source of salvation in a world of broken dreams and hopeless futures.

Love At Least made its World Premiere at the 2018 Raindance Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)