DAUGHTER'S DAUGHTER (Huang Xi 2024)
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SYLVIA CHANG IN DAUGHTER'S DAUGHTER
HUANG XI: DAUGHTER'S DAUGHTER (2024)
A woman faces the consequences of her life
It would be hard for this film not to be a success. The director studied film at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts, and worked with Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-Hsien as crew member in producing his Goodbye, South, Goodbye and The Assassin/. The magnificent Sylvia Chang, who's at the center of this film, is not only a superb actress but a filmmaker who has directed three notable films. And the handling of the issues of loss and confronting the questionable choices of one's youth is fresh and original, chiefly thhrough the use of a sudden, dramatic shift from Taipei to New York, where most of the acttion transpires - a New York that seems at once down to earth and like another planet.
The filmmaker, whose second feature this is, makes wonderful use here of her familiarity with a wintry New York whose funkiness somehow seems comforting, with its comfortable, warm-coloroed Chinatown and functional mess contrasting with a gray, austerely modern and asceptic Taipei. Xi, Chang's character, is a fraught, complicated woman who comes to America to cope with tragedy, and the funk seems both a reflecton of the moral chaos and sorrow she confronts, and a kind of relief. Because this is a film about figuring out your life and how to reframe it.
The plot, with its multiple female generations (men figure only minorly), its abandoned daughter in New York and its cherished one in Taipei who didn't even know each other until they were grown, is a complicated one. But we should not get hung up on that or the issue of how to deal with inheriting a frozen in vitro embryo. Those are important details, but this is mainly the portrait of Sylvia Chang's character, the sixty-four-year-old Jin Alixa.
An opening sequence shows Jin with the main women around her. She's in Taipei, with a broken leg. Showing her own strong will, she refuses to have surgery for it, or even a cast. Present are her mother, Shen Yan-hua (Alannah Ong), who has the beginnings of dementia; her two daughters, Emma (Karena Kar-Yan Lam), who she left in New York at the age of sixteen, with a guy called Johnny (Winston Chao) who has started a dim sum restaurant; and the colorful and distinctive and not so ssuprprisingly gay younger daughter Fan Zuer (a very well cast Eugenie Liu). With Fan Zuer is Jaiyi (Tracy Chou), her "friend," or "colleague," who's obviously her girlfriend.
A thoroughly modern setup, but also a traditional one: caring for Shen is something the responsiblity-shirking Jin is nonetheless going to shoulder. She is going to reject things, but wind up taking them on or accepting the reality of them. Fan Zuer and Jaiyi, six years later, take on the responsiblilty of raising a child through in vitro fertilization. They go to New York for this, and work hard at it. But then to her shock Jin gets a call from Johnny telling her that the two young women have had a car accident, driving into a deer, and both are dead. Jin cannot believe it; but she almost immefiately packs her bags.
This is when the movie essentially begins, when Jin goes to New York to retrieve the remains of her favorite daughter and decide what to do with the contents of the flat she has shared with Jaiyi, then confront the hardest issue of all, inherited custody of a very healthy frozen embriyo. Watch Sylvia Chang's face to see how Jin deals with all the complex challenges she now encounters, how she tries to deny and reject and then wryly and wisely confronts the consequences of her actions going back many decades. The performance and the film itslef are elegant, unexpected, smart, and thought-provoking. A terrific Taiwanese study of a modern woman and a multigenerational family divided between East and West. Some have thought the run-time is a bit long; but others, with whom I agree, think they could watch Sylvia Chang all day.
Daughter's Daughter (Chinese: 女兒的女兒; pinyin: Nǚ'ér de nǚ'ér) 126 mins., in Mandarin and English, premiered at Toronto Sept. 5, 2024, showing also at Tokyo, Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, Udine, Sydney and Taipei. Screened as part of the New York Asian Film Festival Jul. 11-27, 2025.
SCHEDULE:
Friday July 18, 5:30pm
LOOK Cinemas W57
THE EMBERS (Chung Mong-hong 2024)
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CHUNG MONG-HONG: THE EMBERS (2024)
A police investigation digs up Taiwan's murderous and politically complex past
The film begins energetically, from the genre viewpoint, with a murder in a busy market place full of people. The killer comes up and stabs the victim in the stomach with a big knife. He dies later in the hospital. The whole homocide squad of the cops is on the case thereafter. A big wall in their collective office is covered with maps and photographs pertaining to putatively connected cases. It's all very promising. But eventually this vastly ambitious movie gets mired in endless interviews and multiple investigatory threads whose tie-ins with Taiwan's painful history only confuse, and judging by revidews, for some locals, may offend. There is much need for reconciliation in Taiwanese history, and while approaching it through a crime drama is new and original, it may not be the best way to learn about one's national history.
It's 2006. A diligent police detective, Chang (Chang Chen) winds up investigating with his squad two murder cases ultimately seen as connected, which lead back to a communist spy case from 1956, where the victims' fathers are all linked to a reading club. (He doesn't identify the second Caotun case as connected to the market case till nearly an hour into the film.). Along the way, the detective crosses paths with a food factory owner (Mo Tsu-yi) who is also probing his own father's mysterious death, and there is a young woman (Hsu Wei-Ning) whose father disappeared, who has taught English in Thailand. Since Chang works with a squad and under a stern captain (Chen Yi-wen), this is an ensemble piece as well. And since it must meander in an understandable and engaging way, credit is due to editor Lai Hsiu-Hsiung for maintaining flow, though this is a very complicated story. One needs an elaborate plot summary going in, like with the Metropolitan Opera.
In that past era, so many tragedies," says an older cop being questoned about an old case. And this is a theme of the film, which is moody and meandering, in a sort of Zodiac style, except that the killings are not all from one source. There are a number of men identified who disappeared and were never found, including cops. The period of 1949 until 1987, the long White Terror Kuomintang (KMT) era in Taiwanese history, was one of poverty and brutality that recent-generation Taiwanese audience members are reminded of here. One person says at that time they'd as soon kill 100 people to get one guilty one. The spy case leads to a scene where the accused are executed. Chang eventually discovers that Mo Tsu-yi has set up a program of vendettas against the people who victimized his father in the past, and this leads to a climactic, violent confrontation.
The cinematography credit seems to go to director Chung Mong-hong; anyway there are varied middle-distance outdoor walk-and-talk sequences for the numerous police interviews. Nice to have pauses for breath, but one violent police raid on an unexpectedly well-armed drug dealer may make you wish there had been more such moments to liven up such a long run-time (nearly two and three-quarters hours). But the main theme, as the title says, is always the still-smouldering remains of a violent past - though the word is specifically traced back to a missing father's English crossword puzzle, where it was the answer to the clue: "what burns without a flame."
The Wikipedia article for The Embers summarizes three local paper reviews, all unfavorable, both for being too talky and for misusing or misrepresenting the White Terror era that it connects with through its police investigation story, allegedly triviliizing the sufferings of victims of the time and even portraying them as evildoers. I can't assess these claims, but it seems clear that for Taiwanese the era is a touchy topic to deal with in a genre context.
More importantly there is too much material here and a mini-series might have been the better format. Or a novel.
The Embers 余烬 (Yu Jin), 162 mins., premiered at Taipei Nov.15, 2024, receiving five Golden Horse awards; also Rome Apr. 9, 2025, Singapore May 4, 2025. Screened for this review as part of the Jul. 11-12, 2025 New York Asian Film Festival.
Tuesday July 22, 8:45pm
SVA Theatre
FAMILY MATTERS (Pan Ke-yin 2025)
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WEI-HUA LAN, JING-HUA TSENG IN FAMILY MATTERS
PAN KE-YIN: FAMILY MATTERS (2025)
Coping
Taiwanese filmmaker Pan Ke-yin's feature debut grows out of his 2021 short My Sister, was made by his own company Ke-Yin Film, and utilizes the same cast. The feature is divided into four segments set in four time periods, each one focusing on a member of the Hsiao family, sister, mother, brother, father in turn, who have names corresponding to the season in which their focused story takes place. It must be observed that I did not really believe any of this for a minute, and there is no consistency of tone whatsoever. But the very harshness and simplicity gives the film a surreal quality that is not without possibilities. One thinks of Yourgos Lanthimos. The effect is of a series of interlocking short stories, recounting memorable moments in connected lives.
The first two segments, for the daughter and the mother, are both rather tense and grim: they are facing difficult problems. The third focused on a handsome young man about to do military service or go to university but with no problems yet and the world ahead of him, seems like a lark, except that he has no father. The last goes back to the first ones but, focused on the gambling father's downfall, is even grimmer.
In the first segment, Spring, the elder sister, discovers she is adopted, sending her world into turmoil and intensifying her already strained relationship with her mother, Autumn. This leads into Autumn’s arc, set in the past, where her and her husband’s efforts to conceive a son result in him asking his more stable (and fertile) friend Yuan to be a donor. When Yuan refuses to help a second time when Autumn has a miscarriage, she threatens him with her knowledge that he is gay.
The third story then shifts to the good looking younger brother, Summer, who, after graduating high school and during a regional water shortage, ends up working as a manager at Yuan’s motel. Yuan doesn't seem to know Summer has only just finished high school, though his claim to the staff that the youth has long management experience in Taipei must be a conscious lie. Summer films a longtime employee stealing from the till, but when he tries to show it to Yuan his phone won't work. During this segment Winter, the father, is gone, Summer telling Yuan the lie that his dad is managing a factory in Vietnam.
For the last segment we go back to a few years earlier when Winter, the father, is still on the scene. We knew that there was not much money. Now we realize that he has been gambling it away, perhaps to escape from the bad news that he has a low sperm count - the reason for the difficulty Autumn had getting pregnant. Addiction has at this point broken this family. Winter has not been working at his job for three months but has been pretending he is. There is not much love lost in this family. It's the rainy season, and at one point Summer is sick with a fever of 101º. He disowns his father when the latter, upset over gambling losses, stages a hostile and embarassing scene. The mother also turns on him. The film attempts a mix of pathos and warmth with a final year's end Lunar New Yeart ceremony of just the three of them, when the father has checked out, and there was no grieving.
Dramatic scenes, all these, but rather on the schematic side. Think the flash-forwards on Dickens' "A Christmas Carol." The effect is partly realistic, partly experimental.
Family Matters 我家的事 (Wǒjiā de shì, My Family's Affairs), 99 mins., in Mandarin, premiered at Osaka Mar. 15, 2025. Screened for this review as part of the July 11-17, 2025 New York Asian Film Festival. It will be in compettion for the Uncaged Award at its 24th edition.
SCHEDULE:
Saturday July 26, 1:30pm
SVA Theatre
2025 NYAFF Uncaged Award Nominee. Intro and Q&A with director Pan Ke-Yin
UNEXPECTED COURAGE (Shawn Yu 2025)
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HSUEH SHIH-LING, RENE LIU IN UNEXPECTED COURAGE
SHAWN YU: UNEXPECTED COURAGE (2025)
A difficult chldbirth (a true account)
It's difficult to watch this true story of chldbirth from Taiwan without being touched. It's full of very specific and hearthbreeaking details. That does not keep some from objecting to it, for being what they think is a selfish male point of view. Be that as it may, as presented this is a tale full of love.
Le-Fu (René Liu, in her first film in 13 years) is a well known senior talent manager about to get another big promotion. She and Po-En (Hsueh Shih-ling), who directs commercials, have been together for five years and their bond is strong, but they have not married. She does not believe in marriage, at least not going into this experience: it changes that, because it is an ordeal that would either destroy the bond or deeply strengthen it, and it has the latter effect. But she is 45 and he is 32, and that's the other impediment in forming a perfect union, or so it has seemed. She isn't sure he wants to make the commitment; he doesn't think he's quite up to her standard.
This starts out seeming like a TV movie of a young man and his busy, ambitious female partner. It takes time to care anything about either person. All of a sudden when Le-Fu is under intense stress, and is celebrating her forty-fifth birthday, she collapses, bleeding. She wakes up in hospital in a windowless room where she will spend four months. In the room there is the magnified sound of a rapid heartbeat. She is four months pregnant, and didn't know it. This is the sound of the fetus she carries.
She has had premature rupture of membranes. She may miscarry. So the hosital proposes she have tocalysis, a procedure to delay or stop uterine contractions during preterm labor, using medications to prolong pregnancy so the fetus can develop normally. She must not get out of bed. She is located near an operating room, is under the care of a female obstetrician, and nurses are at the ready for any emergency. She balks at this, but Po-En is fully on board with it, enthusiastic about this new prospect of their having a child together which he did not dream of, and her natural lifelong grit takes over with this new abosrbing focus. Once the moment comes when she bonds with and starts to talk to the fetus, it's clear that she too is fully on board, and this becomes a life-and-death struggle.
Po-En attends her closely, sleeping there, while trying to maintain his own life, carryng out commercial shoots, particularly, pointedly, of a young teacher of little kids who with her young husband has been trying desperately to get pregnant through IVF, and now suddenly is so, with twins, a heartbreaking subplot. There is also a memorable visit from Le-Fu's parents, her somewhat estranged, largely silent father, whose intense private request to Po-En is a riveting moment. And Po-En attends a wedding, well into the ordeal, coverng it remotely on his phone for Le-Fu, which precipitates the final ordeal. Po-En normally has difficulty sleeping. He finds now that he can only sleep when literallly tied to Le-Fu at night, with the sound of the magnified fetus heartbeat.
The tragic outcome of another couple is heartbreaking in this inetnse context and puts us, the audience, on alert as to what may happen to Po-En and Le-Fu to the final tense moments. And they know from early in the tocalysis process that it is very possible in these cases that the child may be born prematurely and may be handicapped. There is lots of time to think about all this and for us to process it.
The film is saved from being a conventional medical tear-jerker by its specificity and authenticity. Events are heightened, stylized, perhaps glamorized as is common in such cases, but it all works. This is a beautfiful, touching film, with new things to say about the choice to have children, the complexities of life in a committed couple, and yes, the unexpecterd courage that people can discover in themselves during a prolongued medical emergency or "this long disease," our lives. The two principal actors deliver throughout and are ably supported by all the cast.
Unexpected Courage. 我們意外的勇氣 (Wǒmen yìwài de yǒngqì, "Our Unexpected Courage"), in Mandarin, 111 mins., was screened for this review as part of the July 11-17, 2025 New York Asian Film Festival. SHOWTIMES:
Thursday July 17, 6:00pm
Film at Lincoln Center
Intro and Q&A with director Shawn Yu
Friday July 18, 8:30pm
LOOK Cinemas W57
BEHIND THE SHADOWS (Jonathan Li, Chou Man-Yu 2024)
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JONATHAN LI, CHOU MAN-YU: BEHIND THE SHADOWS (2024)
A jaded private dick in Kuala Lampur winds up investigating himself, then being a police suspect
From the Hong Kong school of filmmaking comes this jaded, ironic and also tecnically up to date tale of not very successful private detective Au-Yeung (Louis Koo) who makes his living off other peoples' secrets, adulteries, or lost pets. He used to be a high level detective consulted by important people, so he says, in Hong Kong, but here in KL where he came for his wife's work, he is a nobody just scraping by.
Au's usual routine changes as the film begins when the tables are turned and he realizes he has not been observing his own life. Wives in classic noir tales like Chinatown used to come to detectives suspecting their husbands. Now the men have cause to investigate the dames. Au’s main cases for the week are: a man looking for his missing fiancée; his gangster buddy Clowy (Raymond Wong) checking up on his boss’s wayward girl, Betty (Renci Yeung). Then comes the kicker: another guy appears to have his girl checked up on, and she turns out to be Au's own wife, Kuan Weng Sam (Chrissie Chau). She's been cheating on him, and the other guy hasn't even found out she's married. The writer is having fun on this one.
Then women are dying, and Au seems connected to them. He gets questioned by police detective Chen (Liu Kuan-ting ). The strange, sad-eyed Chen has a wife in a coma, and strange as it seems all these streams converge by the end of the story. We will find Chen has a story of adulutery in his wife too, and is a murderer, though he is suffering grievously over the coma and wants his wife to come back, but she does not.
After his police questioning, Chen knows who he is, so Au decides to lay low at his gangster buddy Clowy's place. As Clowy, Raymond Wong with his bleach-blond streaks and revealing casual wear is a colorful character. When they alk together one can appreciate the Cantonese drawl in which Au is more comfortable than the Mandarin the cop chief Chen used on him.
In shock, Au abandoned his missing-persons case. Hours later, she was murdered. Then the police find more bodies, all killed the same way. As the dead-eyed detective Chen every victim seems to connect back to Au-Yeung.
Central fall guy Au-Yeung is played by the ultra cool Louis Koo, who was seen in last year's NYAFF in Soi Cheung's widely reviewed Wu Xia replay, Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, where he plays a chain-smoking gang boss who poses as barbershop owner.
In this kind of noirish private dick tale a mood of existential dread is appropriate. One may wonder what this two-man directed tale written by a third man (Chou Man-Yu) is getting at with all these slutty dames, but Chrissie Chau is not that, she is subtle and beautiiful. Perhaps the film is commenting on the decline of relationships. The film weaves a tale of suspicion and danger punnctuated by complicated urban chase scenes. Au also has a little arsenal of tracking devices and other gadgetry to keep things up to date.
A festival blurb describes this Malasia-set film as stripping detective fiction "to its bones." It does feel stripped-down mainly through the early succession of similar-feeling short one-on-one scenes. But the plot is rather intricate; I didn't totally follow it. As usual with clasic noir as well as this distinctively updated variation, a moody atmosphere and a cool but downbeat protagonist are the main thing.
For more details, see Hong Kong writer Elizabeth Kerr's review in Kai Fong which identifies all the main characters. As Kerr says in her intro, this film is a "relationship drama-as-genre film," a double function that, again, is also not exactly stripped down.
Kerr points out this film, made by (Louis Koo;s production company One Cool, is part of his effort to strengthen Hong Kong cinema by internationalizing it, here with the Kuala Lampur setting and Malasian participatiion, and perhaps a structure designed, witout "reinventing the wheel, for wider audiences. Though this film falls short of greeatness, it contains hints and updated uses of GPS tracers and mobiles and urban murk that will appeal to the loyal film noir fan.
Behind the Shadows 私家偵探 (Cantonese si1 gaa zing taam, "Private Investigator"), 102 min., was released in China on May 31, 2025; in Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Macau on June 12; and in Taiwan on June 18. Screened for this revew as part of the July 11-17, 2025 New York Asian Film Festival. Showtime:
Tuesday July 15, 9:15pm
Film at Lincoln Center
POSSESSION STREET 邪Mall (Jack Lai 2024)
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PHILIP KEUNG HO-MAN AND CANDY WANG IN POSSESSION STREET
JACK LAI: POSSESSION STREET 邪Mall (2024)
An exorcism for wartime wrongs?
This film is very polished for something shot in 21 days at night in an old Hong Kong mall, and contains an appealing grouop of characters, but as zombie vampire tales go it may lack the shocks devotees long for. As one writer says, in the early stages of the zombification, the film "leans more towards revulsion than terror" and, as a Letterboxed sage comments, the full-on fighting quickly seems repetitions. However, it's all framed in a way that is specially meaningful. It comes out of Hong Kong, once a realm of rich culural possibilities and a hotbed of exciting movie production, but now shrinking to only a hollow shell of what it once was. Thus Possession Street, whose symbolic value is multiple. According to one local source, it's one in a "noticeable roster" of films that center on "a once-familiar place of communal activities that has descended into horror and anarchy," including the films Back Home and Yum Investigation.
This "possession street" is an old mall, now in decline. Opening black and white segments, narrated in part with a voice speaking in American English and skillfully mimicking World War II newreels, show us this place was bombed by GI's out to kill "Japs." Underlying the whole story, then, perhaps, is the idea that angry, resentful spirits live in this place, lingering from a wartime massacre, because several civilians who were accidentally trapped inside a bomb shelter during an air raid turned to murder and cannibalism. The run-down recent shopping center sits on the site of this gruesome tragedy. Warm little stories follow about current inhabitants of the mall, central among them video store owner Sam (Philip Keung Ho-man) a frustrated former movie stunt man, and his ptomising and attrctive daughter Yan (Candy Wong).
We see the pair when the daughter was just a girl and was excited by lessons in doing flips and manipulating a warrior sword in midair. Now, relations sour when Sam, who has sold the sword for the money, discovers that Yan has dropped out of architeture school. She is going around with a handsome young man with a camera and now pledges to make movies, with the goal "to keep Hong Kong cinema alive." Her love of cinema of course was inspired by her father's involvement in the wuxia films people aren't buying or renting from him much anymore.
Suddenly, due to the accidental breach in a supernatural barrier in the basement, seven vengeful spirits emerge in a cloud of orange dust that begins turning the local mall dwellers into man-eating zombies, who can be identified when turned by little blobs looking rather like candies hanging randomly from their heads or faces, an unusual creation due to makeup artist Mark Garbarino. One writer sees this as the beginning of "a battle for Hong Kong’s survival," though dire city-wide consequences are only hintedf at in the dialogue.
Mai Yun Tang (Yang Weilun), a would be Taoist priest and local authority on folk ritual, teams up with Sam and Yan to set up a Taoist procedure of exorcism involving ancient passwords, diagrams, entertwined red ropes in a circle, and imprecations, carried out along with all-out bashing and stabbing of the possessed ones. This is very nicely done - though, again, I'm not sure how much hardcore fans of vampire movies would care. At film's end, which arrives at a nimple ninety-six minutes, the Taoist red rope circle has come to surrounnd a heap of scattered corpses, and, in black and white again, the intact forms of the turned locals, of all who have just died, return to say goodbye to Yan. Edward Lee, writing about this film for the English-language South China Post, thinks "the key takeaway" of this film is "nostalgia for a vanished recent past" and this may be right. It is as if filmmakers in Hong Kong are frantically gesturing to us about their sense of loss. Furthermore, I now learn that Possession Street is the former site of Possession Point, where the British took possession of Hong Kong in 1841. Perhaps that is what relly haunts them, and us. For more on the larger implications of this film see Hayley Scanlon's review in Windows on Worlds.. A promising feature debut for Jack Lai.
Candy Wong, aka Wang Jiaqing, a member of the girl band Collar, is appearing in a movie here for the first time.
Possession Street 邪Mall (or "Evil Mall"; the character refers to "unhealthy influences that cause disease" in Chinese medecine), 96 mins., debuted in the west at Rotterdam. Screened for this review as part of the New York Asian Film Festival July 11-27, 2025.
SCHEDULE:
Saturday July 19, 3:15pm
Film at Lincoln Center
THE WAY WE TALK (Adam Wong 2024)
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MARCO NG, NEO YAO IN THE WAY WE TALK
ADAM WONG: THE WAY WE TALK (2024)
A very compelling film from Hong Kong about the importance of sign language to deaf people
In the 2024 Hong Kong film about deaf people The Way We Talk Adam Wong, cowriting and directng his sixth feature, is dramatizing an issue that hopefully is going out of existence. The invention of cochliar implants (CI) led to a banning of sign language at deaf schools, which has been compared to the wiping out of native language at North American and Australian that sought to erase their culture. It was believed (falsely) that with sign language the deaf world would invade the hearing world that deaf people were trying to enter by CI, which enabled them to learn to talk and understand speech. (According to a PBS short featuring gay deaf Gallaudet University President Roberta Cordano, we'd all be smarter if we learned sign language as well as oral language because it stimulates other parts of the brain.)
In is generally favorable Guardian review, (three out of five stars), Phuong Le comments, "Like many films dealing with social issues, The Way We Talk is not without its moments of didacticism." That's a big understatement, because this entire film is governed by its didactic purpose. But Phuong is still right that this is compensated for by the fact that an "easy chemistry" between the three lends an "infectious warmth," though though the latter phrase sounds a bit self-conscious. The point is these actors are deaf people. We're glimpsing their world, and that's more potent than the didactic purpose, no matter how overriding that is.
There's nothing like the little scenes at the opening between the two small boys who wind up getting severely dressed down by the teacher for having a little chat in sign language. Needless to say, sign language lends itself particularly well to talking during class, also to fun little chats, bursts of enthusiasm. I said something like this in a review of Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy's (2014 The Tribe , whose scenes acted by young Ukrainian deaf people seemed over-emphatic and mimed, adding that "sign language seems itself to involve much over-emphatic gesturing."
But who am I, after all, to say what sign language is like? Clearly it's different from spoken language, and closer to mime. We the hearing may never know what it's like to be deaf and fluent in sign language, talking with good friends - though we could certainly get to know more. What we do know is that sign language exists exclusively for the deaf, and doesn't involve sound. A different world. A deaf world. That's why it's so important to deaf people. It's reveling in being different, in being who one is. Sign language may be the key reason why deaf people have a passionate sense of solidarity.
The Way We Talk uses sound effects for the hearing audience to convey different degrees of deafness, as Darois Marder's 2019 Sound of Metal does to show the musician rapidly losing his hearing. The Way We Talk deftly switches degrees of distortion and sound levels to convey what different deaf people in a single scene are hearing or not hearing. This is particularly telling for CI sound, which varies in quality, with newer devices working better. and some surgeries more successful than others. After a spate of creaky CI sound, when a character removes her implant device and sets it on a table to think, we're overwhelmed by how beautiful and peaceful the silence, her silence, is. We see how entering "our" hearing world with Cochleal implant sound can be entering an ugly world.
The film's trio of protagonists are Alan, Wolf, and Sophie. Alan and Wolf are the two little boys in the opening scene (then played by Wong Wai Hang and Cheng Chun Hei). Wolf is the little boy who rejects CI and learning to talk. He revels in sign language, defiantly refuses the teadher's order not to use it in class. Grown us Wolf (Neo Yau, a hearing actor who learned sign language for the role) is still friends with Alan (played by first-time deaf actor Marco Ng), but they've gone different ways. Wolf is notable for his physicality and wouldn't want an office job even if his reliance on sign language didn't bar him from that. He is working for a car washing business and loves the water. He lives in a van. His passion is to go to diving school, but unfortunatrely is barred from that by the school's lack of a signing interpreter. Sign language really works particularly well under water. Sophie (as a child Law Hei Yi, adult Chung Suet Yang, also a hearing actor) is a poster child for CI, making a video for it that angers some for conrasting deaf with "normal" and saying some day with Ci "there will be no deaf people."
Alan, as planned early on, is a CI user and along with Sophie (Chung Suet Ying) and both are ambassadors for the implants and their use to aid in functioning in the hearing world and using speech. But Alan and Wolf as young adults still talk in sign language and have great fun with other young deaf people doing so. After going to uni and entering the corporate world as an apprenticde actuary,Sophie, whose mother barred her from learning sign language in the belief that it impedes learning hearing communication, now sees what she's been missing and wants to join the party. While Alan is closer to her and Wolf adversarial, Wolf begins giving her lessons in Alan's presence. One gets to feel a bit what it's like to be Sophie - and with the rest of her life too.
The film begins to be about entering a career, Wolf with diving school issues, Sophie stumbling at work because her CI malfunctions. She needs new surgery but is reluctant to get it, and starts to see herself as only a "mascot" at the insurance company. She begins to identify with Wolf. We follow the two of them as they both face conflicts with the hearing world and triumph in their own way. Alan is neglected a bit, his trajectory not made as interesting as Sophie and Wolf's.
This is an engaging film. We won't forget that opening with the two little boys delighting in sign language then getting punished for it. Things meander a bit toward the end. Mightn't some deaf people object that two of the three main actors aren't deaf? But a valuable contribution to the subject nonetheless.
The Way We Talk 看我今天怎麼說 ("Let's see what I have to say today"), 132 mins., in Hong Kong Sign Language andCantonese with English subtitles. Produced by Louis Koo's One Cool, it premiered at BFI London Oct. 12, 2024, releasing theatricfally in Hong Kong Feb. 20, 2025, with seven Golden Horse nominations and Best Leading Acress won by Chung Suet Ying. Screened for this review as part of the July 11-17, 2025 New York Asian Film Festival. Showtime:
Sat, July 19
6:00 PM
Q&A Walter Reade Theater
Ticket holders are invited to the Furman Gallery for Matsuri to Midnight after the screening and Q&A end.
MISSING CHILD VIDEOTAPE (Ryota Kondo 2024)
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RAIRU SUGITA IN MISSING CHILD VIDEOTAPE
RYOTA KONDO: MISSING CHILD VIDEOTAPE (2024)
A. tasty and promising understated Japan horror debut
A Letterboxd writer, not the only one writing with enthusiasm but most succinctly, says of this film simply "Our guy has studied Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and studied him well."
With its boxy format, intensified color, and long final nighttime passage, missing Child Videotape is an elegant, exquisitely simple new iteraton of the classic Japanese horror genre (backed by J-horror legend Takashi Shimizu). Another Letterboxd contributor, more voluble, calls this film "aggressively restrained" and finds it to be "just adamantly refusing to lean into scares" for "90% of the run," "just letting you sit in silence and static cameras" as "people are broken with loss and the impossibiity of closure" oppressed by how media "becomes some kind of prison of memory." If this is a feature debut, they enthuse, there's "no doubt" he's going to be "a big name in horror."
I don't know about that, but I didn't want it to end. Chill and disquiet mingled pleasurably with a considerable amount of aesthetic satisfaction. The film is a delight to the eye. Initially drab-seeming, it comes to downright painterly iimages later on, making a strking use of bright crimson, and the two young men are given a porcelain doll quality in some carefully composed scenes, set off within the film's "perfect rectangle" format. Along with that it pursues mood and character and eschews jump scares, and moves along a clearly discernible storyline to a satisfyigly unnerving conclusion. Naturally, some won't think it gives them enough of a jolt. Not all genre fans appreciate subtlety.
The use of scratchy video and mysterious recording shows Kondo's faithfulness to traditional means. One thinks of The Blair Witch Project - and it emerges from the director's interview with Katie Rife on RogerEbrert.com, he was thinking of it too. According to James Hadfield, writing about this new film in The Japan Times, Kiyoshi Kurosawa recently commented that " the problem with today’s digital imaging technology is that it’s too darn clean." There is immense evocativeness and scariness in scratchy, creaky, blinking and beeping that you get from film or worn out amateur videotape. That is one of the initial inspirations of this fine new Japanese horror fllm referred to in the very title Missing Child Videotape and its opening incident. And there is really no greater fear, no worse horror, for families than a missing child who is never found. It is a lingering pain, a festering wound like no other. And the tape does that to the protagonist.
The tape is sent to Keita (Rairu Sugita), who as first seen in the woods has a hauntingly mask-like, almost doll-like face, described in Genkinaito, a Japanese movie website, as "a 20-something who splits his time between a supermarket job and mountain rescue." It has been sent by Keita's estranged (and ultimately very scary) mother. It's one Keita himself shot as a boy climbing a death trap mountain 13 years ago, in a building that later can't be located, at the very moment when, playing hide and seek, his little brother Hirata disappeared, never to be found. At the opening scene Keita is in a woods and finds a boy who has been missing in the present day. This false foreshadowing of the central trauma will be no comfort to Keita.
Mikoto Kuzumi (So Morita), young woman reporter for a newspaper located in rural Gunma Prefecture where the tragic event occurred on Mount Hinata, is preparing a piece about the disappearance of Hirata. (This mountain forest turns out tobe also a dumping ground for funeral urns and (as Hadfield puts it) "other unwanted spiritual baggage"). She will be third in a trio of main characters whose other member is Keita's roommate (and Hadfield says "probable boyfriend") Tsukasa (Amon Hirai), a thin young man with stylish hair. Tsukasa is a cram-school teacher, but also possesses psychic powers, and sees dead people. Eventually Keita, Tsukasa, and Mikoto will wind up at Mount Hinata but not before Keita has revisited home and seen, spectrally, his mother. (That is when we get to the 10% of the film the Letterboxd writer calls "more explicitly allowing scares" and says "had my heart in my throat.")
The general idea of the very central "missing child videotape" is the resurfacing of long-buried trauma, trauma for Keita escaped in the 13 years since in the woodland rescues and the crowded anonymity of a lowly supermarket job, that slowly crescendo and are accompanied by new horrific events. The style of this kind of movie is chilly, and out of the ground of that chilliness to give us chills, a process ironically referrred to sometimes as a "slow burn." There's sometnhing essentially Japanese in this relating to the culture's understatement and restraint, which makes people sometimes seem, to an external observer, like automatons, or, as suggested here, porcelain dolls; and we know how traditinally scary dolls are in American horror films. The reliable creep of analog media - with the disturbing videotape shown a full ten minutes early in this film to set its special creepy mood - is agugmented later on by the arrival of an audio cassette left behind by a group of hikers who vanished in the same area where Hindada disappeared.
While Kondo has been widely acknowledged to be on his way to greatness in the genre, not all viewers have been utterly delighted, but these kinds of films don't score every time for every fan. In my own experience nothing has come up to the theatrical thrill of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure, seen in far-off 1997, before I was writing reviews. I never got much out of Hideo Nakata’s The Ring (1998), and its successors, though they provide a legacy to which this new film obviusly nods. But for me, coming in he rich variety of the 2025 NYAFF, Missing Child Videotape stands satisfyingly alone and by itself. Granted, though a brilliant calling card for the filmmaker, the film can be awfully quiet and slow at times. But open your eyes its beauty will offset that.
Ryota Kondo's short film "Missing Child Videotape," which served as the basis for his feature film, won the Grand Prize at Kadokawa's 2022 Japanese Horror Film Competition. The screenplay was penned based on Ryota Kondo story idea by Kaneko Suzuyuki, and the dp was Matsuda Kota. Stay for the closing credits and a chilling use of child voices in the score by Temma Teje.
Missing Child Videotape ミッシング・チャイルド・ビデオテープ ("Misshingu Chairudo Bideote-p")」, 104 mins., premiered at Tokyo Oct. 30, 2024. Also seen at TIFF. Screened for this review as part of the July. 11-17 2025 New York Asian Film Festival.
SCHEDULE:
Sunday July 13, 9:00pm
LOOK Cinemas W57
HOW DARE YOU? (Mipo Oh 2024)
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HURI, YOUTA MIMOTO, TEITA SHIMADA IN HOW DARE YOU?
MIPO OH: HOW DARE YOU? (2024)
Love and environmental radicalism at a Japanese elementary school
TRAILER
Could children this pure be found in this country? I don't know, but surely parents this neutral could not. Director Mipo O weaves her special spell to tell a tale of fourth graders becoming on small-scale eco-terrorists, and makes us love it. And when the strategies get out of hand and the culprets are identified, it's the fact that it was all for love of a girl that mollifies the school authorities. A very cute story.
One is won over at the outset by the protagonist, the slightly reedy-wonky boy Yuishi Ueda (Teita Shimada), who is funny in a very compelling way. He belongs to the living creaturesafterschool club, and joins some other boys gathering woodlice to feed small animals. But Yuishi is really fascinated by a girl in the class with long hair, Kokoa Miyake (Huri). And when Kokoa gives a class essay that is a passionaate impersonation of Greta Turnberg, reeling off emission data at high speed, Yuishi is in awe. He works his darndest to show knowledge and interest. He takes book recommendations from Kokoa. He digs out his library card and finds her there.
There is a bad boy in the class called Haruto (Youta Mimoto) who's rather goodlooking, and after a clash with Yuishi he in and they become a trio, each contributing to ideas for a pro-environment campaign in the town. They wear masks and costumes and stick individual posters using cut-out characters and drawings so their handwriting can't be traced. But the campaign is noticed and very much has its own style. Next they get aggressive, shooting small rockets into public areas with messages on them. Finally they manage to open the gate of a local farm with cattle, to publicize the danger to the planet of methane gas from farming. Actually it's Yuishi who stays behind to let out a cow. And the cow turns up near the school, then causes several accidents, including the injury of an older man.
The school is called to a assebly and the principal asks the ones involved to confess. Surprisingly, Haruto turns out to be a crybaby and a snitch.
The final scene with the three kids, the parents, and the principal and the class teacher (Shunsuke Kazama), with a speech by Kokoa's aggressive mom (Kumi Takeuchi) about how her daughter used to be such a nice girl, thinking about clothes and makeup, and she kept telling her to give up these stupid books about the planet, makes a very nice finale. But the charm and watchablity of HowDare You? comes from the minute-by minute way director Mipo O gently guides the kids from one amusing moment to another. One of those bright and happy films about young people that make Japan look idyllic.
The film was written by Mipo O in collaboration with Ryo Takada. It features a distinctive light staccato piano score.
How Dare You? ふつうの子ども (Futsuu no Kodomo "Ordinary Child")), 96 mins., premiered at the Zin Festival of yough, Czech Republic, June 1, 2014. It releases theatrically throughtout Japan Sept 5. 2025. Screened for this review as part of the Jul. 11-17, 2025 New York Asian Film Festival.
SHOWTIME:
Sunday July 20, 6:15pm
Film at Lincoln Center
Intro and Q&A with director Mipo O
TRANSCENDING DIMENSIONS (Toshioki Toyoda 2025)
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ROSUKE KUBOZUKA IN TRANSCENDING DIMENSIONS
TOSHIOKI TOYODA: TRANSCENDING DIMENSIONS (2025)
A laughing monk, a mountain mystic, a hit man, and a dead lady
Despite the claims of uniqueness for Toyoda's return to feature-filmmaking after a seven-year hiatus, and the warning that one shouldn't begin sampling him with it (which I have done), there was something stylistically familiar about Transcending Dimensions from Kill Bill. In fact the ceremonial quality and mix of spiritual, martial arts, and gangster elements seems to inspire a lot of QT's oeuvre. There is much emphasis on slow, or stately, motion in this new movie and a sectioning or separating of scenes and accompaniment by different designated music, the solemnity broken by a sense of humor or implied existential absurdity. This film finds a way to make spiritual awakening into a flashy show and combine that with parts of an action movie.
Nearly forty minutes transpire before the opening credits. Early on, a woman throws herself under a train. There are several violent clashes, and a shooting. There's an additional element of sci-fi, possibly an influence of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: a Space Odyssey, and kaleidoscopic imagery. Several of the main characters at moments are encased in what looks like a glorious, giant quartz crystal; at one point, a key character is multiplied in a sparkling kaleidoscope. At these times I was reminded of Tarsem Singh's visually exquisite 2006 The Fall.
Main characters - also a QT staple - are distinct types, almost like chess pieces. Instead of the pawn, the rook, and the knight, there's the tall blond grinning monk (Chihara Junia), the hit man (Ryuhei Matsuda), and there's the enlightened one, Rosuke (Yôsuke Kubozuka). Theodoor Steen reports from an interview with Toyoda in his Screen Anarchy review that there are six "Mt. Resurrection Wolf" short films, under way since 2019, which are the "returning puzzle piece" for the new feature. (Another source calls this feaure the culminationof the Wolf seies.) The short films, Steen reports, allude to matters of government and the media during the covid epidemic, and came at the time of the filmmaker's "infamous" arrest for after his "infamous arrest" (infamous for the arrestors, I assume, not the arrrestee) "for having an antique non-functional gun in his home, an heirloom from his grandparents."
Not much of that makes its way explicitly into the new feature, though one character refers to spirit guidance from the wolf. But there are themes from earlier Toyoda films, Steen explains, especially "the cult leaders vs. criminals theme of I'm Flash and the theme of isolation to seek transcendence of Monsters Club." And three is a brief chat about reincarnaton, and whether one believes in it. The ghost lady does (as perhaps she might); the enlightened sage says he "is not there yet."
I wish Steen had said something about Master Hanzo (Chihara Junia), a Shugendō ascetic with otherworldly psychic powers, a tall, grinning long-haired blond monk, since a visit to his glamorously wooded temple garden by a group of men is a major set piece of the film. Here is where Yasu (Masahiro Hihashide), Teppei (Kiyohiko Shibukawa),a man who has lost his way, is instructed to cut off his little finger to guarantee his spiritual dedication and transcend dimensions - a gesture, one thought, usually assigned to yakuza underlings as punishment or proof of loyalty. And there's the bathroom break the frightened Teppei takes, the naked lady "seat warmer" who startles him in th loo, and Shinno's laughing commpletion of the pinky-chopping. There is the other man (an un-robed monk?), Teppei (Kiyohiko Shibukawa) who curses Hanzo as a dangerous quack and refers to him with vulgar expletives, vowing to get him. And there is the assassin, Shinno (Ryuhei Matsuda), who takes direct action against Hanzo, masters one of his tricks, and is given a magical conch shell by him and later returns again to kill him.
A key figure, as it turns out, is Nonoka (Haruka Imou), girlfriend of the missing monk Rosuke (Yosuke Kubozuka). She may or may not be alive, but approaches the assassin Shinno and also denouces Hanzo and strongly suggests that Shinno kill him. They discuss reincarnation. Hanzo appears later to acknowlege Rosuke as the more spiritually spiritual guide. Things are said about Buddhism and about the way seeking Nirana may functioin for a seeker. I won't divulge the complicated finale, which as a Toyoda neophyte, I probaby don't understand anyway.
For some of my details of the characters and cast I'm indebted to the most thorough description of the film I've found in English, a review in psychocinematography.com, which explains further how the film may relate importantly to the filmaker's several encounters with the law, including an earlier one for drugs in 2005, which influenced his sense of society, of the spiritual and the "Other," his sense of individual "narratives," and the inspirations behind his films. There's a lot there. As a fan of Japanese cinema, one obviously ought to know more about this director. Even if this is starting backwards, it's an interesting beginning.
Transcending Dimensions 次元を超える, 97 mins., has been presented at Nippon Connections and Rotterdam. It was screened for this review as part of the July 11-17, 2005 New York Asian Film Festival.
SCHEDULE:
Saturday July 19, 9:15pm
Film at Lincoln Center
Intro and Q&A with director Toshiaki Toyoda
TIME TO BE STRONG (Namkoong Sun 2024)
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CHOI SUNG-EUN, HA SEO-YOON, KANG CHAE-YUN IN TIME TO BE STRONG
NAMKOONG SUN: TIME TO BE STRONG (2024)
TRAILER
Time to Be Strong subtly describes the cruel and exploitative nature of the Korean youth pop music industry by focusing, without colorful flashbacks or graphic descriptions, on a brief healing moment in the devastated post-career lives of three former K-pop "idols" - though the word "idol" itself, it's clear, is an exaggeration. The sophomore effort of director Namkoong Sun was a government-supported project. Some awards came at the Korean premiere - best local film, best actress - but audience reaction may be mixed. For me it was a bit of a slog, but that's always very subjective and it seems very heartfelt and personal too.
We follow Soomin (Choi Sung-eun), Sarang (Ha Seo-yoon), and Tae Hee (Kang Chae-yun) on a short vacation to Jeju island. They're sort of washed up at 27 or so, forcibly "retired" from their torturous jobs, Tae Hee in perhaps a boy band, the two young women who knew but aren't dating him, Soomin and Sarang, from the same girl band, one of whose members exited tragically, and event that haunts them. She would have perhaps been on this trip and someone else. This is a trip film, a coming of age film, perhaps a film about healing. Jeju, Korea's largest island, is a colorful holiday spot, and we glimpse beauty but also ordinariness like cars, side roads, a motel, an old van. Of this holiday spot they get to see only a little.
This is because very early it turns out Sarang has psych issues and her suitcase gets lost in the flight so she has no meds. At an outdoor cafe she becomes angry and paranoid and physically attacks other customers. After the fracas a representative of the attacked party demands a large direct settlement which Soomin negotiates. They give up much less than is demanded but most of the cash they have. So they have no money and apparently no credit cards, and besides are all three traumatized. Tae Hee, who looks like a very big angelic baby, already has troublingly large credit card debt - something about an older woman who tried to exploit him. He keeps uselessly calling his former CEO because he says he has nobody else to talk to. Soomin can take charge, perhaps, but she struggles with bulimia, which she hints is a common result in girl bands of years of maintaining youthful looks.
They look for work, and they find it picking tangerines. The man in charge (Hong Sang-pyo) is unusually nice and they bond with the humble co-pickers, whom Tae Hee entertains with singing. Obviously he can't sing: he exlpains nowadays they can fix that in the recording studio. Soomin negotiates a cheap place to stay, a camper van. Tae Hee normally has trouble sleeping and here, his tall frame is cramped. On the second day of tangerine picking Soomin faints, and the boss won't let her go back to work. In their chat, he tells Tae Hee he can't understand a thing he says. It may be that they're city slickers from Seoul; but also that the world in which kids were "idols" and are "retired" at 27 is alien to him, as to most of us.
The boss pays them double but very kindly asks them to leave after day two. He says they have been picking twice as much as the regulars are; evidently that would ber too disruptive. They receive notifcation that Sarang's red suitcase has been found and they go to the lost and found where Sarang finds it's red but not hers. The lost and found lady insists she take it anyway, saying it's been around for. years. It turns out to have nice stuff, in fact, which Sarang wears. Later she goes to a medical facility and renews her meds, getting a two-week supply. But she's probably bipolar, and her mood drops soon.
On an up note however the lost and found lady (Kang Chae-yoon) turns out to be what Moon Ki-hoon calls in a review in The Korean Herald a "dorky but endearingly sincere fangirl," whose warmth stands apart from "the industry's manufactured, hyper-organized fan culture," and whose "simple gestures of goodwill -- playing and singing along to their old songs, showing them how to enjoy life while acting as an impromptu tour guide -- become literal beacons of hope for the protagonists." I fear it is spelled out so obviously. This film isn't notable for its subtlety. She gladly joins up with the trio to drive them to their van, which would be a long bus ride, and that night she parties with them, drinking by a chopped-wood fire at the beach, singing and letting go with them and next day playing that impromptu tour guide role.
There is a final double crisis, which feels a bit manufactured but in the circumstances is understandable: Soomin is the only stable one of the three travelers, and we've seen how flawed she can be, at times.
Though the message about K-pop exploitation of its young performers and the followup life lessons are pretty explicit, this is a sweet little film, which students of this kind of entertainment ought to look at. Maybe this is how members of an English boy band in the UK between 2010 and 2016 that was not One Direction might feel. Even not all of them could ber Harry Styles.
Time to Be Strong 힘을 낼 시간 (Himeul nael sigan), 102 mins., Jeonju May 2, 2024, three awards (grand prize film, Watcha's pick, and best actress to Choi Sung-eun), also featured at Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore fests, with theatrical relese in Korea Dec. 18, 2024. Screened for this review as part of the July 11-27, 2025 New York Asian Film Festival. SCHEDULE:
Friday July 25, 6:00pm
SVA Theatre
2025 NYAFF Uncaged Award Nominee. Intro and Q&A with director Namkoong Sun
SKIN OF YOUTH (Ash Mayfair 2025)
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ASH MAYFAIR: SKIN OF YOUTH (2025)
TRAILER
A Vietnamese trans love story that's like gorgeous and sexy music video
NYU-trained Vietnamese filmmaker Ash Mayfair got a rave review for her debut The Third Wrfe from Variety's Jessica Kiang. It was a depiction of 19th-century arranged marriage in Vietnam that was both chilling and lush. With her sophomore film Mayfair has turned to the hazards of trans, focused on a young couple in Saigon and their fraught love. She is San, who works an escort for rich men she hopes will finance her sex change surgery. He is Nam, a frisky underground cage fighter with a tendence to violent anger.
Set in Saigon in 1998, this is a gloriously sensuous and impressionistic explosion of image and sound that comes off sometimes as more a surreal fable than naturalistic storytelling. And then at times, especially at the end, it descends into humble but still sensual realism.
Nam is very sexy. San is girlish and pretty. When Nan tell her she is already a woman to hhim, we understand. In fact it is hard to believe that that body isn't a woman's, of if originally not, came about without extensive surgery (questions about casting?). When she comes back after being told to take a couple years and prove her stability before surgery, she dropes more than ever into a depression. nam is loyal and loving, but he has energy to burn, and so when his resorting to a prostitute named Mimi leades to her pregnancy, they become more and more a threesome. Gradually San comes to accept and even be a soulmate for Mimi.
Another party is granny, who accepts San but wants "babbies to play with" and so accepts both San and Mimi too. Granny sells banh cuon (Steamed Rice Rolls) in a street food stall and doesn't want to stop despite Nam's desire to set her up in a better house.
This idylic picture has a big, big bump when Nam, who also firts with the same cigar-chomping rich man as San, in his case to be sposored as a fighter, accidentally fights someone who tries to rob them and causes a young man's death. He goes to jail for this and then on trial, but Mayfair loves here characters and will not harm them.
I was turned on and sensually gratified by this film without being completely convinced by it.
A graduate page of Tisch tells us that Ash Mayfair was born in Vietnam and educated in the UK and the US beore her studies at at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, of which recent quadruple Oscar-winner Sean Baker is the most notable graduate today. Her critically acclaimed first feature The Third Wife (a 2015 Purple List selection) garnered nineteen awards, screened at over seventy international film festivals, and wqs distributed in thirty countries. Mayfair’s followup drama Skin of Youth has a raft of awards, won a Special Mention at Talents Tokyo, the Open SEA Fund Award at SE Asia Fiction Film Lab, and the Sorfond Award at the Busan Asian Film Market. The project was presented at the Berlinale European Co-Production Market in 2020 and is shortlisted for the Cannes women directors initiative ‘Breaking Through The Lens.’
The Tich pagre quotes Ash Mayfield: "In the nineties, Communist Vietnam opened up when the U.S. lifted the trade embargo on the country. Overnight Saigon changed into an exciting new world where films, fashion, money, and music poured in from the West bringing with them the promises of sexual and personal liberation. Vietnamese youths like myself were able to see examples of freedom everywhere, and yet we were not allowed to embrace and live it in our own reality.' says Mayfair.
Mayfair is a young filmmaker of obvious gifts, who paints on the screen with flowing colors. Recently I belatedly watched at a friend's urging Thien An Pham/s 2024 Cannes Directors' Fortnight Caméra d'Or winner Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell and was deeply impressed as its deep dive into Vietnamese life, city and country, and its hypnotic, spiritual use of slow cinema style and Bi Gan-style long takes. That I feel is on another livel and it will be hard for any other young Vietnamese director to equal it; but Ash MAyfair is obviously an artist to watch and I need to see The Third Wife.
Skin of Youth was screened for this review as part of the Jul. 11-17 New York Asian Film Festival. Showtimes:
Thursday July 24, 8:45pm
Film at Lincoln Center
2025 NYAFF Uncaged Award Nominee. Intro and Q&A with director Ash Mayfair. Feature preceded by short film: Colors Of The Sky's End
DEEP IN THE MOUNTAIN (Le Yongyi 2025)
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LE YONYI; DEEP IN THE MOUNTAIN (2025)
TRAILER
Bumbling local officials let an evil man roam free in the Chinese provinces
Le Yongyi was an editor for Zhang Yimou, so this story, his debut feature as a director is put together with a certain ingenuity. It's a tangled tale of foolery, but it revolves around a thoroughly evil man, associated with evil doing at rural Maniao River Village's Ruyi Restaurant. "Ge Wenyong," a closing info card of this film tells us, "was convincted of multiple robbery, rape, intentional homicide, and desecration of corpses." He was sentenced to death,' we're further told, "with lifetime deprivation of politcal rights and confiscation of all personal properties." (Before he dies, I guess.) "After his death penalty reviewed in September 1996 he was executed by shooting." After watching this film, which shows some samples of his evildoing, you wish you'd gotten to see this sucker bite the dust.
"Yan Xue," the second card tells us at the close of trhe film, "who was coerced into participating in Ge Wenyong's crimes, actively cooperated with [the] investigation and interrogaton." She is, in thf film, a young woman who barely speaks. She has been witness to horrors and is traumatized into near-muteness. But she was punished, we're now told, in accordance with the laws of the People's Republic of China. She gets a smaling, quiet, hopeful scene at the end when Yao tells her he has gone to her village, found that her family is fine, and that when she gets out "there is still hope," and she quietly smiles.
Now there are various village officials the film weaves in and out in this day and a night of confusion ushered in by a frame tale of big rigs on the mouintain highway. So the next card tells us that "Village chief Zhang Changchun, seurity director Chen Yonggin, old accoutant Chen Hamin, and little accontant Chen Guanghkan" were all "punished by judicial authorities for the crimes [of] of obstructing official duties, picking quarrels, and provoking troubles." (I like that list.) In the film these folks are seen as bumbling idiots whose stupid behavior and for a while cooperatong in Ge's imprisonment of Yao, the highway cop, is partly due to their currying favor in the local petty polital heirarchy. This is clearly being made fun of -- and the way they all fall into line when the district official comes. They for one thing for a while helped Ge in his "arresting" of Yao, the highway cop, somewhat a bumbler too, but innocently searching for the lost truck Ge has confiscated.
Things had started with Yao relieving a fog light violation of Yang Zhaowe . i's truck We later learn in the most touching speech of the film that Yang Zhaowei has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and has been spending time with his high-school age daughter Yang Ge by taking her with him in the truck. We learn that he has had massive debuts, has sold off eerything, "even" his motorcycle, to pay them, and rented this truck, making money through hauling, at this point, TVs. His only dream is to pay off his debts before he dies and not leave them for his wife and daughter.
Yao is seen at the end, not Ge's prisoner - and they were engaged in a to-the-death hand-to-hand battle earlier - but back to his lowly but decent job of highway inspection of trucks. Besides reassuring Ge's young woman victim the film jerks some tears with his returning of some confisdcated property to Yang Zhaowei's young daughter. It's the pair of white high heeled shoes he had bought for his wife, but gave to her after she tried them on and broke one of the heels. It's a pretty sweet sceen.
Then comes the last info card to tell us "Yao Sichen was awarded a Class II Personal Merit and sent back to the criminal police team." He had been "demoted," he has told us, to the highway detail as a result of goofy excessive zeal: taking off running in his underwear when he saw what he thought was a missing woman, and thereby embarassing the force. And one more card: Yang Ge, Yang Zhaowei the dying accountant's daughter, gained admission to university thre say year of Yao Sichen's restoration to crime prevention.
The film's self-description of being "absurd comedy wearing crime clothing" does tell us what it's trying to do,but Ge Wenyong is just too desicable a man for comedy, and finding out at the end that he was a real person only underlines that fact. Howeever, the way Le Yonli wind up his feature directorial debut, the complex interweafving of characters and plot details, and the way he directs the actors all show mastery. We will watch for what he does in the future.
Deep in the Mountains 如意饭店 (Ru Yi Fan Dian, "Ruyi Hotel"), 108 mins., in Mandarin, premiered Apr. 2025 at Beijing, showing also at Udine. Screened for this review as part of the Jul. 11-17, 2025 New York Asian Film Festival. Showtime:
Saturday July 26, 6:15pm
SVA Theatre
2025 NYAFF Uncaged Award Nominee.
I,THE SONG (Dechen Roder 2024)
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DECHEN RODER: I, THE SONG (2024)
TRAILER
Tracking down one's more risqué double in Bhutan
This film from Bhutan about a staid schoolteacher who goes on a search of her lookalike from a viral sex video that has ruined her reputation is a beautiful, hypnotic, exotic little film full of the clothes, music, tea drinking and Himalayan scenery of its setting. A French writer has called it "a leap forward for the cinema of Bhutan." The authentic and ethnic are muted into beauty in the filmmaking even if details are fudged toward the end. But maybe we aren't meant to take it literally anyway. A wise lady the protagonist meets says "whether dreams or reality, it's all illusion" and perhaps this Buddhist view underlies everything here. What does this pursuit of a double mean? Here, maybe it's new possibilities, but also the search for a mysterious siren, because the risky lady seems to have disappeared, only to reappear, perhaps as the protagnoist in makeup, or in flashbacks.
Key to the effects are the rather sphynx-like actress, Tandin Bidha, who plays both Nima, the wrongly dishonored teacher, and Meto, the mysterious woman she tries to track down; and the actor Jimmie Wangyal, who plays Tandin, the singer and songwriter in a bar in Gelephu, near the Indian border, where a bit of detective work scrutinizing the infamous video leads Nima. Wangyal has a slinky brooding quality; Bidha is a bit of a Greta Garbo herself.
A school opens the film with colorfully costumed children on an auditorium stage who are singing a sweet English song. Te protagonist Nima (Tandin Bidha), a teacher, is called to the office of the principal (Kezang Dorjee aka Kazee) and told she's fired because she can't be around, it's too disturbing. She was in a viral sex video. Except, she insists, she wasn't; it's not her. But even her boyfriend Penjor (Dorji Wangdi), caught hosting traditional Bhutanese folk plays, is sure it is.
And so begins Nima's search for her double, starting with the video itself, which she hasn't seen, though everyone in Bhutan otherwise seems to have done. (As is pointed out later, the country has a population of seven hundred thousand and it's almost as if everybody knows you.) She visits a somewhat seedly local video dealer (Karma Tenzin), and though the video is too shoert to be on a disc, he gets her a copy of it.
Studying it at home, she finds the woman in it has a mole on her face, but Penjor says she might have drawn it on for the video. The mole is our only clue that these are two women, except that Nima's road trip/investigation locates numerous facts about the woman, Meto. Indeed we learn more about Meto in the film than about Nima.
In Gelephu, where her double lived, everyone calls Nima Meto, or at least thinks she is Meto's sister. Asking around for Meto, Nima is soon directed to Moon Bar and the entertainer there, Tandin, Meto's boyfriend, but she has left him and he is angry and wounded and will not speak of her. She turns to others. A sprightly girlfriend tells how she and Meto wanted to enter a song and dance competition. Actually, she tried out with Tandin. One of the film's most memorable scenes is the flashback to Tandin improvising wild and crazy tunes on his guitar to unnerve Meto, while she shows her strength and determination, singing and dancing to it anyway. It's quite an unexpected kind of meet cute,and an indication of the important seedy grace and glamor Jimmie Wangyal lends to this film and the skill in altering him for flashbacks and Tandin Bidha to become Nima's double.
Meto isn't at her former workplace either, a small printshop (beautiful and beautifully lit in a yellow light like a lot of this handsome film whose dp was the Indian born and trained Rangoli Agarwal, a woman like the director). But there the boss Phuntsu (Tshering Dorji), who again at first takes her for her double, suggests Nima go to Meto's home village, and she drives there and meets the familiy of Meto. Yes, they too generally mistake her for her double, notably Meto's grandmother Aum Tshomo (Choney Zangmo), who doesnt see very well anymore.
Another strain is introdced at this point of the lost sacred song which the gradnmother says has been "stolen" (apparently for a popular recording) and begs to have returned to the village so she can die in peace. Nima can't grasp how a song can be "stolen" or "returned." Dechen Roder's idea (as she explains in an interview) is to paraellel the idea of a "stolen song" with a stolen experience - because it turns out the intimate video of Meto was shot without her knowledge. Grandma wants to song back; Meto (as well as the collaterally damaged Nima) wants her intimate experience back. It's interesting that on the surface the film refers to things like invasiion of privacy, perhaps social media and the internet, and the damaging exploitation of tradtional culture, but makes something beautiful, haunting and poetic about it - sometning one online writer for a website called Dirty Movies sees in detail as riffs off Hitchcockk's Vertigo. Director Dechen Roder ceertainly combines the ethnic, the poetic, the musical and the realistic in interesting ways, though in the latter half some of the editing shows a loss of continuity.
I, the Song, in Dzongkha, 113 mins., premiered at Tallinn Black Night Nov. 19, 2024 winning the Critics Picks Best Director award. It wasalso shown at Goa Nov. 28 and at Vesoul Asian Film Festival. Screened for this review as part of the Jul. 11-27, 2025 New York Asian Film Festival.
SCHEDULE:
Monday July 14, 3:00pm
Film at Lincoln Center
GOWOK: JAVANESE KAMASUTRA (Hanung Bramantyo 2024)
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HANBUNG BRAMANTYO: GOWOK: JAVANESE KAMASUTRA (2024)
Indonesian epic of sex training strays too far from its opening sweetness
In his detailed and admiring reviw in The Film Verdict Clarence Tsui opens by declaring Hanung Bramantyo "one of the most commercially successful Indonesian directors of his generation," and this film, arrived at Rotterdam, "something that’s epic in every sense." Actually it's "epic" somewhat in the sense of Ryan Coogler's genre-busting astonishment Sinners. But it probably has narrower appeal. It's a generation-crossing tale of a gone local custom, sex training for well-born young men. This leads to a great, tragic romance, with ends after two hours in spell-weaving and horrific violence. The memory of the romance is sweet; of the final violence, perhaps not so great, though that ending, "packaged with a layered twist" as a Letterboxd contributor puts it, is indeed ingenious. As Tsui says, this film is "lushly mounted period drama of the old-school, big-screen variety." It feels at times as if it could have been made in the time it covers, 1955-65, except such sexually related subject matter would not have been broached and such a tale would probably not have ended in such genre-busting violence. The early love story is enchanting; what follows at times a bit of a slog.
The thing we learn about is the Gowok, which went out after a massacre in 1965. A Gowok was a woman pledged to remain single all her life, whose sole function was to train young males of high status in the ways of sex and of giving pleasure to their female partners. But this is indeed a grand and at moments beautiful production.
The Gowok is Nyai Santi (Lola Amaria). She has a hunble young assistant and planned successor, Ratri Sujita (Alika Jantinia). The youth brought to them, who is destined for marriage soon and for a higher role in the region than expected, is young Kamanjaya (Indonesian pop star Devano Danendra). The setting is a virtual palace, bordering on an impressive tiered waterfall where women go to do laundry, and Santi to pray and meditate.
What happens is that young Jaya immediately falls for equally young Ratri, and though she is of the lowliest origins, he is one rare priviledged young man who is thoroughly imbued with radical ideas about the education and and liberation of Indonesian women. While he is secretly taking Ratri aside and wooing her and kissing her and assuring her this is okay, he is also coaching her in the liberation of women and referring her to a program in town (which she's able to get to thereafter) that will provide her a pathway to a better life than being the successor to the Gowok Santi and never marrying. He promises to marry her and shows her an attractive journal he is keeping in which he describes his love for her.
Viewers in hopes of a sexy film will be disappointed, because while glimpses of the sexual training and of the book of Kamasutra-related instruction used by Santi and passed on to Ratri are provided, we don't see much of the actual Gowok-to-proviledged-youth amorous training, which probably would have made local viewers uncomfortable, and anyway is not what director Bramantyo is aiming for.
There are scenes between Jantinia and Denendra that are extremely sweet and touching - and hopeful, though we suspect that Jayi's promises for one reason or another are too good to be true. After his training with Santi he must leave, though he doesn't want to be away from Ratri. He then goes into military training. Af first he and Ratri exchange frequent letters. Then Jayi's letters stop. Ratri is devastated. She loses all her hope, and eventually accepts her fate of remaining in Santi's service and grooming as a Gowok. This accounts for nearly the first half of the two hours-plus film, a segment I can recommend to anyone.
Afterwards things get much more complicated and full of intrigue and decepton. Ratri's deception - Jayi's letters were, of course, derailed so Ratri did not see them - leads Ratri, much later, when Jayi has taken on very high status and has a son, Bagas, sent to the Gowok, to seek revenge, cruelly deceived, though finally enlightened into the machinations of Santi. There are light notes, among which trans person Aldi Bisl as Gowok servant Liyan
is notable, and young Ali Fikry is adept as the presumed son of the mature Jayi (Reza Rahadian). The cast is good throughout. But the sterling memory is of young Jaya wooing young Ratri, itself convincing proof that they know how to make sophisticated and entertaining movies in Indonesia.
Gowok: Javanese Kamasutra, 132 mins., premiered at Rotterdam. It was screened for this review as part of the Jul. 11-17, 2025 New York Asian Film Festival.
SCHEDULE:
Tuesday July 15, 6:00pm
LOOK Cinemas W57
HANGING GARDEN (Toshiaki Toyoda 2005)
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ANNE SUZUKI IN HANGING GARDEN
FROM NYAFF: A special 20th anniversary screening of NYAFF 2025 Filmmaker in Focus Toshiaki Toyoda’s unnerving 2005 portrait of one family’s secrets, the film that launched a Japanese genre. - Festival blurb.
TOSHIAKI TOYODA: HANGING GARDEN (2005)
Toyoda's provocative portrait of an urban family, everyone going their own way
Before Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata, Kore-eda’s Still Walking, and Sion Sono’s Noriko’s Dinner Table, it has been said, there was Toshiaki Toyoda’s Hanging Garden, the film that "started it all." (But compare also the crooked famly genre, represented by Bong Joon-ho's Parasite and Hirakasu Koreeda's Shoplifters.)
The Hangong Garden (the title refers to the mother's beautiful balcany garden attached to the Kobayashi family's small, but nice, housing project apartment) certainly is worth a watch. It was also a change of pace for director Toshiaki Toyoda, being celebrated in this year's New York Asian Film Festival. It's more satirical and comical than the other listed family films. And for earlier cinematic dives into the Japanese famly we must consider, and bow to, the classic work of Yasujirō Ozu, whose work is on another level, as significant artistically as it is culturally.
A refreshing change of pace into bluntness and satire came in 1983, with Yoshimitsu Morita's generationally defining The Familly Game, an acid depiction of gender power lines and the way small middle class Japanese families really worked.
All these post-Ozu movies are different in style, focus and quality; they just all involve modern day urban Japanese families. Some of them, like Ozu, try to deal with subtle fluctuations in famiily as Still Walking does- Hanging Garden certainly does not do that. They all tend to shrink in significance when we compare them with the Ozu classics. But if you want to say a family is not what it seems on the surface or what its members tell each other, this is a general theme linking numerous films. (This may flow naturally out of Japanese culture's enigmatic and concealing aspect, its emphasis on shame, respect,and image.)
The Japan Society description of Hanging Garden for its 2010 presentation was "Family as a nightmare and a fount of terror, discord and disquiet: that was his [Toyoda's] idea." This quality may be most hilighted not by any one subplot but by the ever-present swirling, rocking movements of the camera of dp Kenji Maki . The Japan Society blurb goes on to describe the family members one by one. First the mother, Eriko (Kyoko Koizumi), "cheerful and subservient on the surface but full of murderous rage and dying inside." Next the father, salaryman Takashi (Itsuji Itao), "a bland corporate drone driven by the dark forces below his belt." (We learn that Eriko chose him and seduced him.) Then the children, "the sulky and socially withdrawn son Ko (Masahiro Hirota), not much of an A-student in public but more studious with his private tutor when the door’s closed" (and often off to a love hotel). And teenage daughter Mana (Anne Suzuki), "an obsessive visitor and user of love hotels in a bizarre, frantic search for the origin of her own conception." Finally there is the "rather wicked chain-smoking grandmother…" the blurb concludes. She is Sacchan, Satoko Kinosaki (Michiyo Yasuda).
The film is somewhat a series of skits, linked by the fact the central character in each is a member of the Koyahashi family and may have to deceive other family members to do what he or she does independently. Even the grandma winds up in the love hotel at one point, though she (in an example of premature dementia?) cares nothing for the impression she makes.
Some of the provocative effects like that may titillate, at the cost of any feel of authenticity. Toyoda is a little too much in love with filming the love hotel. Hanging Garden may have been a ground-breaker, but it's not best in class. It's probably another example of Toyoda's variety, about which I can't say much yet, having only seen Transcending Dimensions, a more impressive film than this one. 9 Souls is pending.
Hanging Garden 空中庭園 ("Hanging Gardens"), 114 mins., opened in Tokyo Oct. 8, 2005; limited festival showings began with Sarajevo Aug. 23, 2006. Screened for this review as part of selected Fimmaker in Focus review of Toyoda's past and present work in the New York Asian Film Festival, Jul. 11-27, 2025. Showtimes
Fri, July 18
3:00 PM
PAPA 爸爸 (Philip Yung 2024)
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JO KOO AND KYLAN SO IN PAPA
PHILIP YUNG: PAPA 爸爸 (2024)
TEASER
The calm complexities of a life, even marked by a horrific event
"Inspired by true events," this haunting, complex, low-keyed Hong Kong portrait of a father with the patience of Job never asks whether the fifteen-year-old son Ming (Dylan So) who kills his young, beautiful wife Yin (Jo Koo) and their younger daughter Grace (Lainey Hung) with a meat cleaver, whether he is still worthy of his love. He only has to find a way. The film moves around in time, introducing the horrific event at the outset but not actually glimpsing it till much later, going back over earlier events like the man ruminating. As he seeks to understand we also try to. It's an approach that may lose some in the audience but that, with sympathy, may move closer to human thought and feeling than usual, away from drama and cheap effects toward everyday experience and the subtlety of a novel, or a suite of novels.
A unifying element is the 24/7 Hong Kong style cafe diner the couple start and jointly run. The wife was pretty and younger, Yuen (Sean Lau, in a remarkable performance) having decided to marry later than other members of his generation and his friends, but Yin is fully on board with it, and the affair has the feel of romance. None more so than when they wed, and their karaoke lark that same day, a moment he comes back to repeatedly.
Ming, the son, is judged to be mentally ill and after a trial is sent to a kind of psyciatric prison, though one that seemingly considers his release after only four years. We look in on the son much earlier when he is an ordinary and cheerful smaller boy. As a young teen he seems no different, quiet, bespectacled, curious, calm. What the family does not know is that he has been hearing voices telling him that overpopulation is causing the glaciers to melt and he kills the two people closest at hand to lower it. He goes out bloody and tries to add to the reduction by strangling someone on the street, but he isn't strong enough. He goes to a park and sitting there, calls 999 and reports that he has killed someone. We see him arrested there later.
You can say that the scenes here are sliced and diced, but it's all in the editing, which uses fragmented chronology to recreate a sensibility and a tormented awareness. The essence of this film is in the editing.
There is detail later about Ming's treatment at the psychiatric facility, and his responding well to medication. We get a feeling of Yin. It's a family of four and it seems a good humored family, no yelling, no pouting, as when Ming asks for a new cell phone that takes photographs and his father objects that multi-function gadgets are no bood and offers to buy him a camera, and he just says, "Never mind." This scene evokes a "memory" we have from Yuen's earlier days, in a camera shop when he buys a new digital camera and is excited about what it can do. But there are a number of ticketed chapters here, and even a chapter of the family cat, Carnation, who is what Ming takes most snaps of whe he gets a phone with a camera.
Later Papa reminds the boy, who has forgotten, that a snap of the four of them was done with a timer, because it was a digital camera. All these memories, all these interconnectons, as in a sensiboility, as in a life. But foremost remains the event from the pages of the Hong Kong press, an event that stunned the city and marks this man -- because this film is first of all about him, "Papa," of a family that is no more, destroyed by the son in a few minutes one night when he, he is saved perhaps, because he is where he so often is, at the cafe, working, when it happens. For Yuen there is always the question of why, why did you do this? Even though the boy gives that explanation, it remains incomprehensible. Later he will learn to say the mental illness did it. And then at another time, Yuen is trying to reconcile with the boy (to restore that little part of the family that remains), and asks that they not talk about that event at all now.
At the same time we also experience the deaths. We see the choosing of the coffins (Yuen asks if wife and daughter can be buried in the same one: they cannot), the funeral, meeting with friends and relatives and what the undertaker tells him it is and is not proper to say to visiting mourners (not "thank you," not "see you later").
Meanwhile Yuen, who is a "typical" inarticulate Hong Kong man who has little to say at any time, and makes no dramatic declarations after the murders, nonetheless is full of self-recriminaton at times for himself. And yet also his inarticulateness sometimes may be the best approach, and the most touching. He must recognize that his invovement with the 24/7 cafe makes him not the most hands-on of fathers. He might consider, though this is not mentioned, that they, he and his wife, might have recognized signs of something strange in their son, and had it looked to. But if your son is smart, bookish, intellectual, and withdrawn, do you suspect he's schizophrenic? You do not. Nonetheless the wish that things had gone differently causes the man to ruminate wistfully, and this is a governing principle of the many flashbacks. Yet they are also a neutral picture of events, not a fantasy retelling of them to suit an idea.
Yuen's stoicism breaks in a memorable scene after the tragedy when he hires an escort and then is robbed by her employers before anything happens. It is here unexpectedly that he gives in and is destroyed with prolongued weeping as guilt, regret, shame, and all the feelings bottled up in him come out.
Much of the film is fascinating and compulsively watchable as it slips imperceptibly and pleasureably around among present and past events. It seems to be finding too easy solutions sometimes in the latter segment, which is also marred by switching to another actor to play the more grownup Ming. But one can see why this has gotten a lot of attetion, including a review in Hollywood Reporter by Jordan Mintzer and one in Variety by Richard Kuipers. I was also impressed by the citizen review by Ong Chenghan in Letterboxd that calls the film " a profound journey of inner healing" that tells "a story about responsibility, loss and forgiveness in an extremely restrained and gentle way, allowing people to slowly understand the true appearance of 'love' between silence and recollection": this gets at some of the complexity of this great film for director Philip Yung and for the cast, especially lead actor Sean Lau.
Wikipedia
Papa 131 mins., premiered at Tokyo Oct. 31, 2024, also shown at Hong Kong and Udine. Screened for this review as part of the NYAFF (July 11-27 2025). Showtimes:
Special Screening
Saturday July 12, 6:00pm (Auditorium 4, LOOK Cinemas W57)
Saturday July 26, 3:30pm (Auditorium 4, LOOK Cinemas W57)
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9 SOULS. (Toshiaki Toyada 2004)
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TOSHIAKI TOYODA: 9 SOULS (2004)
A raucous, comedic, violent adventue
9 Souls, an eccentric action comedy thrill prison break tale, is one of the films on which Japanese director Toyiaki Toyada's reputaton is staked. It is part of the 2025 NYAFF series "In Focus" on his work. It shows nine fugitives, all of them convicted of murder or some other high crime, on flight from themselves in modern Japan. Bursting out of prison all at oncer, they commandeer a van from a strip club, planning to make it to a stash of counterfeit money a crazy inmate has revealed to them, and then find a home place to hang out. This does not turn out as planned, but there are many adventures.
9 Souls is essentially in two parts, the group one and the individual one. In the first the escapees are traveling together, and it seems crucial for them to stay that way. Every time they rush off to a new location they seem to leave someone running madly behind desperate not to be abandoned, and this becomes a "thing" typical of this film, its rather combination of comedy and intense action. In the second part the men go off on their own, and individualized adventures result. The stage is set for this by introducing each "soul" with a title card at the outset with crime and sentence: murderer, escape artist, legendary violent biker, dwarf porn king, drug pusher on US naval base, mad bomber, "general loose canon," "born delinquent," father killer."
The essence of the thing is that this is a buddy picture where the escapees work as a team, and the absurdity of that with men such as this, whose only point in common is that they were jailbirds and whose feuds with their own gangs are well known. Yet they do help each other, starting with their escape. There is panbache in the way this opebing scene is handled: with camera at ground level, we just suddenly see a big hole in the ground and the men climb out of it one by one.
From the get-go (nine prisoners escaping at once) 9 Souls is not in any way a realistic treatment of the prison escape theme. So if that is what you are looking for, you must look elsewhere. This is first of all an entertainment, one as full of energy and invention as you could want, but requiring a willing suspension of disbelief at all times. In crafting a crime escape film involving nine criminals, the filmmakers are looking for something joyous and collective, somewhat on the order of the American Ocean's Eleven films but wilder and more criminal.
There are lots of laughs, but there are buckets of blood shed as well. It's not that there is no sense of danger, only that the rules are not the usual ones. Look for lots of onscreen action--not subtle character portrayal. A tour de force.
9 Souls (ナイン・ソウルズ, Nain Souruzu), 119 mins., opened in Japan Jul. 31, 2003 but premiered at Toronto Sept. 12; also Toronto, Pusan, Friberg, Philadelphia. Japan Cuts debut 2012. Screened for this review as part of the Jul. 11-17, 2025 Japan Cuts. SCHEDULE:
Sunday July 20, 3:15pm
LOOK Cinemas W57
TRAVESTY (Baatar Batsukh 2024)
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SUKHEE ARIUNBYAMBA IN TRAVESTY
BAATAR BATSUKH: TRAVESTY (2024)
Batsukh has crafted an atmospheric crime story out of the minimal material of the Mongolian outback, making great use, tactical but also visual, of the spaces and the stark structures that sparsely inhabit them. (The director was also the cinematographer, as for his previous films.) A hospital is on the square, which for all we can tell is empty, on a square, also, visibly empty provide the scene. A few people inhabit it. The film iself is an ingenious filling up of empty spaces as well. The filmmaker has a strong pollitical bent and aims for nothing so much as to scold the government for its indifference to the people and its general incompetence.
A disgruntled kid occupies the hospital. He announces he is holding the 19 patients hostage and demanding a ransom. of 1 billion Mongolian tugrik a person. The tension is at a fevrer pitch when he threatens to kill one prisoner an hour until the ransom money is paid. A police captain is summoned from the city, Davaa (Sukhee Ariunbyamba), who has authority and takes charge, except that he has no authority over anybody and none of the local police and officials care about the situation. Captain Davaa appeals to town, then city, then nation, then state, and the catch is that as he goes higher, the human being is more petty, cowardly, selfish, and irresponsible. No one has as much chutzpah or soul as Davaa, back where it all started. That is the point. Some writing about this film criticize it for its over-politicization of the plot. But that is the point. This film is a transsparent attack on the government. There is some beauty in the simiplicity of it. We get a picdture of how plain things may see to you if you live in Mongolia, or this remote a part of it.
Some of the scenes take place in the local police station, which in addition to being ostensible headquqrters for the hostage negotiations, winds up hosting a woman about the give birth, and a discheveled man who is her husband, and also the local math teacher. The only doctor in the beseiged hosital is allowed out to attend the pregnant woman, and gives some picture of what is going on.
It's also fun that what takes place in the plot parallels what the filmmaker himself is doing, which is faking us out. Spoiler alert: the big takeover of the hospital for ransom isn't. The victimes that get their heads blown apart don't. Spoiler alert: it's just a kid, with an automatic weapon nd a bold pln. LIkewise with Travesty. The filmkaker's aim is to use minimal means to keep us entertined and think we're seeing a bold rural crime played out. With minimal means. What stand out here are the visuals, which are striking, and make good use of the natural environment, half city, half desert. Some of the acting is not bad either. This was pointed out in the Screen Daily review by Nikki Baughan, who adds that for locals, the presence of Mongolian pop star Daviadasha, aka Ariunbold Ganbold, in the role of Bayraa also added flavor. But she correctly explains the central role of the city cop who comes in and dominatersthe scene. "The big city cop in the provincial town is a well-used trope, and Sukhee plays it effectively," she writes, "his gruff, world-weary demeanour and casual attitude suggesting that his superior authority can outwit these outback hicks." That changes a bit when he discovers that his adversary in the hospital has the same criticisms of the government as he does, and (spoiler alert again) they arrive at an amicable agreement.
An enjoyable and absorbing film with striking visuals.
Travesty, 78 mins., premiered at Busan Oct. 3, 2024. Screened for this review as part of the Jul. 11-27, 2025 New York Asian Film Festival. Showtime:
aturday July 26, 4:00pm
SVA Theatre
2025 NYAFF Uncaged Award Nominee. Intro and Q&A with director Baatar Batsukh and producers Alexa Khan and Trevor Doyle
SUNSHINE (Antoinette Jadaone 2024)
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MARIS RACAL IN SUNSHINE
ANTOINETTE JADAONE: SUNSHINE (2024)
TRAILER
An unwanted pregnancy in the Philippines
Maris Racal stars in the film, marking her third collaboration with Jadaone, a director popular on multiple levels in the Philippines. The story follows a young Filapina Olympic aspirant gymnast who discovers she is pregnant on the week of the national team tryouts. On her way to a seller of illegal abortion drugs, she meets a mysterious girl (Annika Co) who eerily talks and thinks like her. The device the director acknowledges is based on Taika Waititi's Jojo Rabbit, but not used as extensively. It provides a kind of wall against coming too close to a sitation that's harsh even though it's idealized.
This is an issue picture with an urgency because this is a conservative and Catholic country where abortion is illegal and there are thousands of unwanted teenage prenancies. Perhaps the film is only as good as the degree to which young women can identify with Maris Racal as Sunshine and the rest of the public can sympathize with her plight and her solution. Ordinary Filapina girls may aspire to being like Sunshine, especially after the gymnast Carlos Yulo became a multi-gold medalist. Not all will directly identify with an elite athlete. Maris Racal is convincing enough. She performs her streamer-swirling routines convincingly and has the fresh, perfect look of a world class gymnist.
Sunshine falls doing her routine and knows something is wrong. Quite soon she guesses, and buys two pregnancy tests of different brands to avoid a wrong result (a tip from someone). Things move fast after that. Her irresponsible teen boyfriend (Elijah Canlas) is a complete asshole. On the street she buys an abortion pill for vaginal insertion; we don't know what it is but when she takes it where she goes to a sleazy sex hotel for a prescribed 12-hour fast, excruciating pain leads her to the hospital. When she wakes up she has lucked out by getting "Dr. Helena," an OB-GYN doctor who clearly runs her own sub rosa abortion clinic on the side, and who treatsher for free. At the end of the film, Sunshine has returned to training and enters competition.
Perhaps this film compromises too much to make its unpalatable topic palatable, even as for many in the country nothing will really achieve that.
For some reason this made me think of the great Brazilian movies about the lives of street kids in the cities and favelas, Pixote, Ciudade de Deus and all the others, so full of life. Perhaps the Philippines isn't much like that in detail, but it seems to have some of the same vibracy and warmth. and we feel that a little bit in one sequence of Sunshine where the protagonist is running with her sister (who has a small baby always in tow), has been talking to her JoJo Rabbit-esque child doppelganger, and has discovered her young lesbian friend is pregnant by her uncle. But most of the time she has it pretty easy, despite the imminent threat to her Olympic career, and we are a little too much protected from the violence and disorder of a world with a lot of poverty, many pregnant unmarried girls, and illegal abortion.
But to be critical of an issue picture that may be something of a voice in the wilderness is, as I've noted before, how Mike D'Angelo described Eiiza Hittman's 2019 Never Rarely Sometimes Always: "A film that offers virtually nothing but compassion, which makes it all but impossible to criticize without seeming downright heartless."
RESURRECTION TRILOGY (Toshiaki Toyoda)
THREE SHORT FILMS ('RESURRECTION TRILOGY') BY TOSHIAKI TOYODA: WOLF'S CALLING, DAY OF DESTRUCTION, GO SEPPUKU YOURSELVES
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TOSHIAKI TOYODA
Toyoda's two arrests, in 2005 for drugs (just before Hanging Garden was released), and then in 2019 for possession of a firearm (an antique one), both strongly affected him in the rigid world of Japanese culture and led to blacklisting by the local cinema industry, and to his own intense anger. After the 2005 arrest he laid low and did not make another film for four years. The three short and mid-length films included in the 2025 NYAFF, Wolf's Calling (2019), Day of Destruction (2020) and Go Seppuku Yourselves (2021), known as his "Resurrection Trilogy," reveal his anger while having other symbolic meanings - and showing off his mastery as a filmmaker in a particularly pungent way. After I watched Day of Destruction, with good sound (and the sound is overwhelming and wonderful), I finally started to grok the guy, to see why he has a cult following of people here who collect his Blu-ray sets.
The festival calls these three "passionate metaphorical tomes on society, exile, death, and resurrection." They are also deeply Japanese yet in revolt against what is represented as the rigidity and the simplicity of the culture. They are critiques of it and remarks on his own treatment by Toyoda, But they're also works that revel in the medium.
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WOLF'S CALLING 狼煙が呼ぶ (2019)
It has been remarked that Toyoda is great with music, and sound and revels in them. The clanging metallic sounds of the ancient instruments that ring out through much of Wolf's Calling ( composed by the Edo punk band Seppuku Pistols) echo in the mind for a long time after watching it. The old-sounding Japanese music is deep-penetrating. It speaks to something deep within us that we did not even know was there. (I found and reveled in the sound of Japanese Noh drama when I was no more than around 7 or 8 years old.).
This film refers to the filmmaker's arrest for 'possession of firearms', no doubt. It is an intense, resonant, wonderful recreation of an imagined moment in a flashback, as it were. A contemporary woman, perhaps at a new house, new to her, a handsome, good sized one perhaps on the edge of a forest, goes to the wooden attic, finds a wooden box, unwraps from its cloth an old, worn and discolored pistol.
In the main sequence a man in traditional garb goes by signs of an ancient wolf up a long stairway in a wood to a magnificent old temple or fortress (Mt. Resurrection - Wolf Shrine). Men gather, all in samurai attire, wearing double swords, ready. Several draw their swords. The air is thick with aggression and machismo. Down the hill men in straw hats assemble - farmers, gathered to fight. The farmers, in motley, very motley attire, carry arms, rifles. At the sight of this, the leader of the group from the knightly class up above reaches into his kimono slowly. There is an ominous sound. He draws out the pistol, shiny and new, ready to be used. The ugly modern weapon must be used, though it pushes out the honorable weapoon of bravery and skill, the sword of the samurai. Toyoda is also hinting that Japan's fascistic modern policing system that harrassed him over an antique firearm is ignoble.
After the film comes back to the woman in the attic with the old pistol in her hand and the immense clanging music of antique Japanese percussive instruments of Seppuku Pistols, there are "faux" credits, like the "faux" credits at the end of Ryan Coogler's amazing new film Sinners with the surprise "envoi" by the Chicago blues great, Buddy Guy. But this time it is a young man in trditional Japanese garb, pacing the heights overlooking the skyline of a great city - Tokyo - looking down, as it were, on the present with a cold eye, nothing more. It may feel a little anticlimactic, but it reasserts the presence of the past over all this expanse of vagueness and light: what is this world?
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THE DAY OF DESTRUCTION 破壊の日(2020)
The Day of Destruction opens with a prelude in black and white. There is a man who comes with permission to enter a closed off tunnel where there is a "monster," the guard jokes, and it has put the all out of work. "Don't you have a mask?" the gatekeeper asks. "Your back will bend," he smiles. WE actually follow him as he walks the entire length of the mine. At the end is a demon. The sparse dialogue wavors between superstition and contemporary event. The punk band lyrics cry out with desperation and irony. Example: "Hey Siri, how much longer must I put up with this? OK Google, which part of this is OK? Would self-restraint for 10 more years be enough?Would self-restraint for 100 more years be enough? If you think you're alive, prove it now."" The walk through this dark looming echoing tunnel is that long look, a minute that seems like an hour, an hour that seems like a minute. It's a strange, extended moment as ominous and barrier-pushing in its way as Eraserhead.
It's understood that the film was initially conceived as a commentary on the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (and no doubt the planned repression to enable them), but was adapted to address the COVID-19 pandemic during its production. The background is that a demon is born in the depths of a mine in a remote, rural village. This is where we are. Villagers have prayed at a local shrine to placate the demon, but he nonetheless finds a vessel in a man whose sister is suffering from a mysterious new disease. He is practitioner of Shugendo, an esoteric branch of Buddhism whose practioners gain supernatural power and save themselves and the masses by conducting religious training while treading through steep mountain ranges. (Here, it's a tunnel.)
But with this background, this 56-minute film is best seen primarily as simply an immersive audiovisual experience. It can be taken as an objection to how COVID was handled by authorities, the use by power of ominous fear of all we don't understand. It can also be seen as an outcry about how corrupt the world is and how need it is in purification. Day of Destruction harks back to some of the very varied Toyoda's earlier, rawer material and is billed by some a a "horror" film. But it's more a philosophical cry of rage.
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GO SEPPUKU YOURSELVES 全員切腹 (2021)
This one 25 minutes long is set in a part of the samurai era when an epidemic, or plague, is happening. A geisha walks through the village in the opening scene and the camera follows her from behind. When it gets up to her face, there is only an oni demon mask there. And then she slices her finger off.
Wells are polluted, and scapegoats are sought, though wise men say it can only be an oni, a demon, that could cause such widespread harm. Local officials seek human scapegoats and an outsider, and a cynical and angry young wandering samurai called Raikan (Yosuke Kubozuka) is chosen as a scapegoat, accused of poisoning the wells, and ordered to commit seppuku. "Go seppuku yourselves" (all commit seppuku) is something he says, near the end of a bold, bitter speech lashing out at the corrupt governors, ending with his committing seppuku, ritually disemboweling himself, and then being beheaded by Toyoda regular Kiyohiko Shibukawa.
It's a stunning performance by Kubozuka, ot only the increasigly intense, theatrical speech, but watching the facial expressions as he moves the knife around in his intenstines, and altogether a memorably bitter, cynical, fearless character: even when he first appears, his first words are, "I am a samurai, I kill people for a for a living"; So he is not just condemning the corrupt officials, but also the samurai code itself under which he has lived for years. Though shorter than the middle film, it may be the most memorable, at least for the character of Raikon. It ends with full-on punk music by the groups utilized differently before, perhaps intentionally to undercut the "period" flavor.
The pent-up rage and creativity exhibited in these three shorter films by Toshiaki Royoda are a joy and, as I said, showed me what was going on when people became cult fans of his work. I have still not been able to watch all his films, but I'll be looking for them.
Wolf Calling, 17 mins., Day of Destruction 56 mins., Go Seppuku Yourselves 25 mins., released in 2019, 2020, and 2021, where screened for these reviews as part of the New York Asian Film Festival, Jul. 11-27, 2025.
VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH 不赦之罪 (Anthony Wong 2024)
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ANTHONY WONG
SEN LAM, ANTONIO TAM: VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH 不赦之罪 (2024)
Christian anguish and hypocrisy in Hong Kong
This anguished and austere drama about guilt and forgiveness seems at first to be veering almost into Carl Dreyer territory. But it's plot line is more lurid than that, and it indulges in more modern formal experimentation - time shifts and sudden flashbacks. It pushes toward the lurid when it gets to the moment when the repentant young rapist Chan Taz Lok (George Au) goes up to be baptized by Pastor Paul Leung (Anthony Perry Wong), father of. the girl,who subsequently committed suicide, and Pastor Leung tries to drown him.
The other factors are the Pastor's wife (Louisa So), who's lost her faith. (Pastor Leung merely switched to a more born-again sect, apparently). And of course the daughter, Ching (Sheena Chan). And we find out about her from flashbacks. Apparently the Pastor and his grim wife never learn how reprehensible their daughter was, that she provoked Lok, had him send shots of his genitals and then exposed him; or that Lok, a classmate, was a sensitive kid, an artist who is always drawing, who was bullied and beaten by other boys at the school. On the other hand we never get a good look at the rape. And we don't learn the steps that led to her suicide, but it seems not simply a reacrtion to being raped.
Hayley Scanlon in his Windows on Worlds review of this film describes the truths it unravels. He says it examines whether the pastor "is merely a hypocrite who expounds on 'the beauty of suffering,'" (he's written a pamphlet on that) while "wallowing in his grief" but unable to practice what he preaches. As Scanlon puts it, we learn that the pastor's "religiosity" and its "oppressive qualities and implacable rigidity also contributed to his daughter’s death," and for him shifting all the blame to Lok is just an escape - one his wife didn't have, hence her loss of faith.
This is a lot to unlock in a film of only moderate length, and the filmmakers' exposition is lacikng at some points. What exactly did Lok do prison time for and how did it come about? Does the pastor ever find out more of the truth? Apparently not, because he never accepts Lok's revelation that he is learning to forgive the girl.
This is a strong performance by Anhony Wong, but if anything George Lau as the boy has a better role. He seeks salvation in the church and really forgives. The actor cast for the role is actually unusually pure looking, and exudes a rawness that jumps off the screen, making him a counterweight for the powerful Wong. You almost come out of the film thinking the girl raped him. It's an intense role for Wong, but he's a bit stiff, harsh, and shrill. And it's not clear how sympathetic he's meant to be. If as little as it seems, he's not a very three-dimensioonal character. But then Carl Dreyer characters can seem like that too. This genre of religious torment drama isn't for everyone. This certainly takes us somewhere Hong Kong cinema doesn't usually go.
Valley of the Shadow of Death 不赦之罪 ("mortal sin"), 84 mins., premiered at Tokyo Oct. 31, 2024, showing also at HogKong April 2025 IT reportedly won the Keep Rolling, Keep Running program hosted by the Federation of Hong Kong Filmmakers, was nominated for the Firebird Award at the Hong Kong and was featured in the Asian Future competition at Tokyo. Screened for this review as part of the 2025 New York Asian Film Festival. Showtime:
Sunday July 13, 3:30pm
Film at Lincoln Center
Intro and Q&A with directors Jeffrey Lam Sen, Antonio Tam and actor George Au.
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GEORGE AU
