As a member of the NETPAC-Jury this year in Rotterdam, I had the privilege to watch 15 films from Asia, as far as I understood mostly first or second features from different festival sections. NETPAC (Network doe promotion of Asian Cinema) is like the legendary Indian filmmagazine Cinemaya a love child of late Aruna Vasudev (1936-2024). And it was Cinemaya where I read the first festival reports on Rotterdam, the only big festival in Europe with a traditional strong likingb of Asian cinema.
For my side, I liked the selection of these 15 films, mostly because they presented a variation of different cinematic approaches and their range from minimalism to genre cinema. The festival director Vanja Kaludjercic wrote in the introduction of the festival catalogue: “Sometimes the most important point is that these films simply exist side by side.”
The following short reviews are reflecting only my personal views on these 8 films.
Gau bit kung fung (Last Song for You), by Jill Leung, Hong Kong: 2024 (Harbour)
There is this strange feeling after waking up from a nearly epic dream which one tries hard to keep alive in one´s memory. It was a bit alike with this film because these notes will be for a long time the only proof that I have seen a film which is not a dream. It begins like a charming but quite conventional melodrama, anywhere between the Hong Kong cinema of the 90s and close to the many Korean romance dramas as films or TV-series. A broken, once famous songwriter So Sing Wah is in a bad health and torn by his alcoholism meets in a hospital a woman of his age, Ha Man Huen, a former classmate eventually his high school love. What he does not know yet (but the audience is already informed) is, that this woman is seriously ill and is going to die. Later after she has passed away, a teenage girl (which looks exactly like like Man Huen in her teenage years in the flashbacks) knocks at his door and tells him that she is the daughter of Man Huen and her last wish that she and Sing Wah shall scatter her ashes into the Japanese sea. He accepts reluctantly and begins with the girl the journey to Japan. Interwoven with flashbacks, we see a romantic teenage love story which contrasts with the bitter So Sing Wah of the present. And before I am really aware of it , the film begins to go through several metamorphoses, from romance to ghost story and time travel drama. The past is invading the present and this seemingly conventional film gets something of the heavy melancholy of films like Hitchcock´s Vertigo. While the film permanently and often with heart breaking intensity jumps between past and present, many things are not what they seemed to be. It has in some moments even the deep sadness of Terrence Malick´s very requiem-like masterpiece The Tree of Life. And from a seemingly conventional drama, the film moves more and more into a crazy dance between time and space. Beside so much other things, it is a film about the making of a song and strangely subliminal about the making of this film itself. In my memory, images and sounds appear like evoked by Van Morrison´s songs from his iconic album Astral Weeks. Before the memories of this film (I already lost myself in it) are fading away I need to remind myself from time to time that I have seen it and not dreamed.
Cheongseol (Hear me: Our Summer), by Cho Sun-ho, Korea: 2024 (Harbour)
Cheongseol can be called a Feel Good Movie but one of the nicest ones and not with the false sweetness which causes a hangover. This Coming of Age-film is actually a remake from a Taiwanese film from 2009. As I am totally addicted to Korean TV-series, especially the romantic ones my access to this film is easy. But it also looks the a Korean pendant to the more popular current of the Japanese shomingeki films and its masterpieces by Yoji Yamada, which means films about every day life of ordinary people but as well films which leave us after a screening happier than we were before. Interestingly and according to many Korean contemporary films Korea establishes itself more and more as the true heir of the most important film genre in Japanese cinema than contemporary Japanese cinema itself and that includes commercial cinema and art house as well.
The story is simple, A boy has a part time job as a delivery boy for his parents lunch box shop. And by accidence he meet two sisters, seemingly both are deaf. The youngest one is a promising swimmer training for the Olympics, the elder one is devoted to her sister. The delivery boy Yong-jun, who is able to communicate in sign language fells very soon for the elder sister Yeo-reum. As the film uses a lot of the sign language, it is partly a silent movie and the score confirms this impression. Cheongseol is a piece of wonderful genre cinema, charming and refreshing and leaving us after the screening with a smile on the face. That can´t be wrong at all. One of the highlights is the young actress Roh Yoon Seo Yeo-reum). Mostly communicating in sign language, with minimal fatal expressions and gestures, she appears nevertheless as a whole orchestra of all possible human feelings and moods. Young in years she nevertheless evokes the wisdom of the great silent actors which are long gone. And another idea comes to my mind. During the democratization of South Korea in the 1990s, this film country represents beside dealing often with its huge historical traumas as well one of the healthiest visual culture in Asia, in the arthouse scene as well as in the mainstream.
Guo Ran (Fruit), by Li Dongmei, China: 2025 (Tiger Competition)
Guo Ran, (the title refers to the name of an unborn child) was the minimalistic example among the films and formal one of the most interesting. It is about a young couple, the woman is pregnant since a few weeks.The film is almost entirely shot in long and static sequences. The passiveness of the protagonists and the camera positions are accordant in a strange almost uncanny way. The protagonists are for a big part of the film sitting or lying and sometimes for moments they seem totally motionless like the camera. Sometimes when the couple is in a park or in the nature, they almost disappear in long shots between trees and bushes. The fiction seems to disappear or in other words – the real world reconquers the frame and lets the fiction almost disappear. It is of course an illusion because the framing itself is the most artistic intended element of cinema. At the first sight, the camera seems indifferent according to its ability to record with clinical precision what its lens is able to capture. Ironically the film deals very often with other optical and sonic devices of a gynecological hospital, other devices which work with clinical precision. For now , we are literally dammed to witnesses. Anywhere in the film a little boy appears, they call him “biscuit”.Where he comes from, what is his tory or why he has to appear in this film remains a mystery.
I had to think of Alain Bergalas´essay on Ozu, “A Man stands up” and his interesting formal comparison between Hitchcock and Ozu where he came to the conclusion that the montage of a film by Ozu is as much emphasized like the montage of a film by Hitchcock. In the case of Guo Ran the lack of dramatization, the almost clinical avoidance of melodrama can be as striking that Hitchcock´s suspense or Sirk´s melodramas. This seemingly indifference of the camera and the seemingly nondramatic presentation of the plot and the characters is very tricky. Especially the last long shot is burnt in my memory. And at least in my memory of this film it seems loaded with emotion like static electricity. And even though we have at the beginning the feeling that not much happens in front of the camera, the film turns slowly to an intense demonstration of what Ozu once calls to “present life like it is”. Almost against or despite Li Dongwei´s rigorous strictness, in my memory the film appears as one of the most intense work I saw this year in Rotterdam.
1 Girl Infinite, by Lilly Hu, USA: 2025 (Bright Future)
Based on the director´s own experiences in her home town Changshu. The film was the “Caméra Stylo”-example. As an autobiographical inspired film it is almost something like a confession or a very sad memory. First of all, it is about a relationship between two teenage girls. Tong Tong lives in Yin Jia´s small and shabby apartment, because she has no place else to go. Yin Jia, who is in love with her is always anxious to leave Tong Tong out of her sight. In the apartment Tong Tong accepts some caresses from Yin Jia but if she is among her other friends, she almost ignores her. Tong Tong does everything to get her drugs and for her dream to go to America, she even uses a boyfriend. Both girls are outcasts, not wanted and not loved by their parents. The “Outside”, this part of Changsha we see appears to me as one of the most godforsaken locations I have seen in a film for quite a while. The indifference of the environment is as painful to watch as the more intimate interior scenes. They do not only emphasize lust but even more the vulnerability of these two existences. I do not completely agree with Xuanlin Tham who defines in the catalogue 1 Infinite Girl “as an assured and visually stylish debut” The strength of this film works for me in a rather different way. And whenever the film pops up in my memory (sometimes spontaneous), I think of this often rough directness of emotions evoked or displayed, less styled than probably authentic displayed as once really felt. As we witness this uneven relationship between Yin Jia and Tong Tong, the evoked emotions sometimes flies like sparks around my ear. Actually I really did not feel too much when I saw this film. But the film literally came back to my memory and now I think of it as one of the three nost emotional experiences I had with a film in Rotterdam. Like I mentioned, 1 Infinite Girl is radical and very personal “Caméra Stylo.
An Errand, by Dominic Bekaert, Philippines: 2024 (Bright Future)
Labelled as a Neo Noir film it is another genre film. It is not so much the genre itself which fascinates me but when I saw examples from my own country like Thomas Arslan´s Scorced Earth (Verbrannte Erde) or Christoph Hochhäussler´s Till the End of Night (Bis ans Ende der Nacht) I became aware that it is possible that seemingly featureless buildings, places or locations of our time can be turned into magical mysterious film locations. An Errand, filmed in the classic Academy aspect ratio reveals as well this phenomenon. It is also a Road Movie. Most of the events happen in flashbacks durin a driver´s (who is working for a monster boss) car ride. The use of colors and lights seem to live a life on its own. And the more the film proceeds, the more the film looks like a strange feverish dream which has to be reedited in the spectator´s mind. The fascination for this contemporary reinvention of a classic film genre is not so much the reference to a very old genre but the fascination to see it with a fresh eye. The genre conventions, the darkness, corruption, toxic masculinity or the blurred line between corrupt politicians and mobsters or police and criminals are balanced for the specific Philippine society as much as Hochhäusslers and Arslans films refer to specific German society. But An Errand does not only reflects on the very civilization it is originated from but as well on past and present of this quite old specific genre. That most of the films have to do with the protagonist´s reflection about his work which have a strange chemistry with the mobster story makes An Errand to an inspiring cinematic journey.
No Magic For Socialists, by Htoo Lwin Myo, Myanmar: 2025 (Cinema Regard)
First of all, the film is an essay about a part of film history hardly known outside of Myanmar. It is about Myanmar´s fantasy and genre film industry. After the military coup in 1962 and the rise of the socialist party these films were banned because of protecting the socialist ideas from superstitiousness. Strangely that there is hardly any ideology who can really deal with the fun of cinema.
Only very few prints survived even though mostly in pitiable condition and some of them only in fragments. The lack of proper film archives and the lack of preservations almost wiped out a whole chapter of Myanmar´s film history. The excerpts of these films presented in this documentary display obvious signs of decay. I had to think in Davy Chou´s documentary Le Sommeil d´Or (Golden Slumber about the Golden Age of Cambodian genre cinema before the terror of the Red Khmer and the endless clutch of film cases with almost decayed prints in it. Like in Htoo Lwin Myo´s film, history exists more in the stories told by the surviving filmmakers than in the vanishing films itself. From the glory of the time the films were screened in cinemas, not much is left. The celebrated filmmaker from the past live in very modest apartments and their memories appears so much more lively than excerpts from their films which can not give more than an idea from a glory long gone. One of them tells about how they created special effects. One of these special effects is based on the manipulation of the exposed film material itself. That is a strange mixture between joyfulness but also something of a pioneering spirit of experimental filmmaking. Well, that preservation of film history, the task to make film history available for generations to come is a global known problem among film archivists. But the awareness that it could be already too late for some chapters of film history and their decay inevitable, is a tough thing to accept. I try to imagine the former audience of the Cambodian cinema before The Red Khmer or the audience of these genre films from Myanmar before 1962 who had fun with these films. Most of them are gone and the films and its surviving filmmaker are the last witnesses of vanishing chapters of film history. That can break my heart.
Bad Girl, by Varsha Bharath, India: 2025 (Tiger Competition)
Ramya, the young main protagonist is a naughty and vibrant girl. Raised in an ultra-conservative brahmin family where each movement and each of her actions is strictly observed, rated and judged, Bad Girl could have been a drama as well. But Bharath has chosen for her Coming of Age-story mostly the form of a comedy with a slight anarchistic breath. Partly and at least in the first half, Bad Girl looks like the reversal of the literature genre picaresque novel. The first part has a very fast pace and the form of a comedy seems itself a form of residence against strict and meaningless rules established by the upper cast of brahmins. To ridicule this strict order and to laugh about it has something refreshing and liberating. School administration and family appear here as agents of an old and long ago outdated social order. Here the form of a comedy seems even a bit more subversive than the form of a drama could have been. Varsha Bharath uses with a certain playfulness two different aspect ratios. As the first part is filmed in the classic Academy format, for the second part Cinemascope is used. In the second part the film adds elements of another genre what we call in German “Bildungsroman”. Ramya is still a non conformist but becomes more mature and more aware of her role as a woman in a total misogynistic society. But her struggle to find her own path in life is just in the beginning. But Ramya´s emotional turmoil, her desires and her rebellion become more sorted without loosing the complexity and energy of her character. How Anjali Sivaraman embodies this whirlwind Ramya is another joy in this film.
For the sake of completeness: Our Jury is given the NETPAC Award to Bad Girl with the jury statement: "The film that we have chosen unfolds a coming-of-age story in a provocative way, it is cinematic and playful, with unexpected narrative solutions."
Shi Ming (Blind Love), by Julian Chou, Taiwan: 1025 (Tiger Competition)
For now, Shu-ji acts as a housewife, struggling to keep her family together, her two sons and her despotic husband. The elder son is rebelling against his father who wishes that he becomes a successful surgeon like himself.
The historical background is the movement for the quality of same sex marriages in Taiwan and we sometimes we see demonstrations in the streets. Xue-Jin, another woman, an eye doctor and photographer was a high school mate of Shu-ji. They had once a relationship. While Xue-jin lives her life as free as possible, Shu-Jin while working in her kitchen appears almost like a prisoner amid of expensive modern kitchen devices. How the film is built, it suggests that the oppression of homosexuality is only one part of a very complex system of oppression. Her elder son has a short affair with the older Xue-Jin. ^The he young man is attracted to Xue Jin´s sense of freedom but as soon as he discovers the connection between her and his mother, he resigns his own intentions to accepts his mother´s own right for happiness. While Shu-ji is at the beginning very much involved in her world, Xue-Jin the non conformist often observes this world with a distanced glance and she is in a sense the agent between the film´s fiction and the audience. Shi Ming is with its 145 minutes a slow paced family drama. With its rich textured and precise arranged images it reminds me in these short period when Taiwan was one of the most exciting film countries in Asia. All the film is asking for is to watch closely and with patience. Not only through Xue-Jin,, the photographer, the observer, the film is defining cinema at first as an act of seeing. Ideas or discontent with the world, the longing and desire being happier than the social structure allows - are the results of this very precise observation. Its formal strictness avoiding dramatic twists which tends slightly as well towards minimalism, offers not only a certain amount of freedom. And finally in the last minutes one realizes that the film lead with all its energy to freedom for its protagonists.
Rüdiger Tomczak
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