Asian Cinema

Chie Hayakawa’s dystopian debut, which won a Special Mention for best first film at Cannes, follows a hotel maid in Japan who is three years past the age the government has set. It’s a melancholy film that leaves you asking what a human being is worth in a world run by economics. — In a near-future Japan, the state offers everyone over seventy-five a free and dignified death. Michi is almost eighty and still cleaning hotel rooms when polite young people start turning up at her door to persuade her to sign up for the procedure. — Golden Camera - Special Mention | Cannes Film Festival | 2022 Nominated for Golden Camera | Cannes Film Festival | 2022 Nominated for Un Certain Regard Prize | Cannes Film Festival | 2022

Nagisa Ôshima made only one ghost story in his career, and it won him Best Director at Cannes. In a Japanese village at the end of the nineteenth century, eroticism, guilt and fear seep into one another in this haunted, suffocating follow-up to “In the Realm of the Senses”. — In a Japanese village in 1895, Toyoji comes home from the army and lusts after Seki, the rickshaw driver’s wife. He is much younger than she is and not a patient man. Together they kill her husband, throw the body down a dry well and cover it with leaves. Three years pass, and the neighbours still wonder what became of Gisaburo. That is when Seki starts to see him. — Best Director | Cannes Film Festival | 1978

Hirokazu Koreeda (“Shoplifters”) doesn’t speak Korean, but that didn’t stop him making a film in it, and Song Kang-ho (“Parasite”) became the first Korean man ever to leave Cannes with an acting prize. Two con men steal an abandoned baby to sell to parents who’ll pay, and we end up rooting for them. — On a rainy night a woman leaves her baby in a church baby box and walks away, and the two men who work there take the boy before anyone can register him. When she comes back the next morning, she climbs into their van instead of going to the police. The three of them set off across the country looking for a couple who’ll pay for the child, with two policewomen watching their every move. — Best Actor Award (Song Kang-Ho) | Cannes Film Festival | 2022 Prize of the Ecumenical Jury | Cannes Film Festival | 2022

Save this Palme d’Or winner for a day when you can’t see the point of going on. Kiarostami puts a man who has decided to die behind the wheel, and out of his long drive he builds one of the most moving films about what keeps us alive. Afterwards, even cherries taste different. — Mr Badii has decided to kill himself, and all he needs is someone to come at dawn and bury him. So he drives the hills outside Tehran, offering the job to strangers he picks up. A young soldier bolts and a seminarian refuses, but a man who works at the Natural History Museum says yes, for reasons of his own, and then he starts to talk. — Palme d'Or | Cannes Film Festival | 1997

Desire stirs in a Japanese camp on Java in 1942, where Nagisa Ōshima (“In the Realm of the Senses”) cast two famous musicians: David Bowie as a prisoner and first-time actor Ryuichi Sakamoto as the obsessive commandant, who also wrote the score. Both sides search for their humanity in dark times. — British major Jack Celliers arrives in a Japanese prison camp and refuses to be broken, and the commandant, Yonoi, can’t take his eyes off him. Lieutenant Colonel John Lawrence, a British officer who speaks Japanese, tries to bridge the two sides, though what he passes on isn’t always a translation. Sometimes it’s what he thinks they ought to hear. — Best Original Music | BAFTA | 1984 Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 1983

Fresh off the triumph of Anora, Sean Baker returns to the streets of Taipei as producer, screenwriter, and editor, reunited with his longtime collaborator Shih-Ching Tsou. A vibrant and intimate take on family bonds, powered by one of the finest child performances in recent cinema. — When a mother and her two daughters move in together in Taipei, they struggle to adjust to the rhythms of urban life while trying to preserve their fragile family unity. At the same time, the younger daughter discovers that her left hand is considered “evil.” — Official Selection - Critics' Week | Cannes Film Festival | 2025

It opens with a man paying for sex in a moving car who, in the middle of it all, glimpses his daughter holding hands with a boy and crashes. This animation dares more than many live-action films, and no one in Tehran would ever have filmed it. — Pari works the streets of Tehran with her small son in the back seat, and she can’t get a divorce because her husband is in prison and won’t sign. Sara wants to go out to work, which her own husband forbids. Meanwhile a young woman needs a surgeon before her wedding, and the musician she spent the night with has to find her one, all in a city where so much is off-limits.

A row over a gutter between neighbours, a Lebanese Christian and a Palestinian refugee, lands them in court and becomes a matter for the whole of Lebanon. Kamel El Basha won Best Actor at Venice for the role, and the film earned an Oscar nomination. Beirut is at boiling point, about to spill over. — A Lebanese Christian and a Palestinian refugee in Beirut start arguing over a minor repair to a gutter, until one of them goes a sentence too far and the words can’t be unsaid. One wants an apology and the other won’t back down. By the time they reach court, the lawyers aren’t even talking about the gutter any more, and outside, the whole country is deciding who’s right. — Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film | Oscars | 2018 Official Selection | Venice Film Festival | 2017 Best Actor (Kamel El Basha) | Venice Film Festival | 2017

Iran wouldn’t let Mohammad Rasoulof leave the country to collect the Golden Bear he won in Berlin for this film. It tells four stories of men who are ordered to carry out a death sentence, and of what it takes to stay human in a country where humanity is in short supply. — Heshmat leaves the house before dawn and never tells his wife where he’s going. In today’s Iran, death sentences are carried out by young men doing their military service, and three others are handed the same order. One of them, a conscript, can’t bring himself to carry it out. — Golden Bear | Berlin Film Festival | 2020 Prize of the Ecumenical Jury | Berlin Film Festival | 2020

Jafar Panahi is banned by a court from directing, and soon after finishing this film in secret he was jailed in Tehran. Yet he keeps shooting, playing himself and sparing his own character nothing, while two love stories unfold in the shadow of fear. Venice gave it the Special Jury Prize. — In a village on the Iranian side of the Turkish border, a director who isn’t allowed to leave the country rents a room and directs a film remotely. His crew is shooting across the border in Turkey, telling the story of a couple buying fake passports, while he follows every take on a screen. Between shoots he photographs the village, until a rumour spreads that one of his pictures shows two young people side by side who should never have been seen together. — Special Jury Prize | Venice Film Festival | 2022

When Iran’s authorities banned Jafar Panahi (“It Was Just an Accident”) from making films for twenty years, he took the wheel of a taxi, kept shooting as he drove around Tehran and won the Golden Bear for it. With every fare, more of Iran and its people come into view, and no censor gets a say. — Tehran rolls past the front seat of a taxi, and everyone climbs in: men and women, young and old, rich and poor, people who live by the old rules and people who have lost patience with them, bootleg video sellers and human rights defenders. The man at the wheel is a very inexperienced driver but a very experienced director, and his name is Jafar Panahi. — Golden Bear | Berlin International Film Festival | 2015 FIPRESCI Prize | Berlin International Film Festival | 2015

Jafar Panahi spent nine months fighting just for permission to shoot this single day in Tehran, where women find even the simplest things out of reach. Venice gave it the Golden Lion, while Iran issued an official ban on showing it. — Over one day in Tehran, a baby girl is born in a maternity ward and nobody is glad of it. Three women who have just been released from prison are trying to get out of the city that same day, but Nargess doesn’t have the money for a bus back to her village. Another goes home to a family that won’t let her through the door. — Golden Lion | Venice Film Festival | 2000 Best Actress (Nargess Mamizadeh) | Venice Film Festival | 2000 FIPRESCI Prize | Venice Film Festival | 2000 OCIC Award - Special Mention | Venice Film Festival | 2000

Hirokazu Koreeda (“Shoplifters”) wrote this film after his mother died, and he admits that much of her behaviour found its way into it. It’s so spare and yet so warm that it recalls the Japanese master Yasujirō Ozu, and when it ends, you’ll want to pick up the phone and call your parents. — On a summer day, the Yokoyamas gather at the family home by the sea, as they do every year on the anniversary of their eldest son’s death. Junpei drowned saving a boy he didn’t know. The second son, Ryota, restores paintings without much success, and his parents have never warmed to his wife, a widow with a young son. And every year the mother invites the boy Junpei saved, now a grown man.

Anzu is a talking temple cat in rural Japan who enjoys sake in his spare time, and though he starts out lazy and grumpy, he and eleven-year-old Karin soon make a great team. This manga adaptation mixes humour and fast action with melancholy and real emotion. Just try not to love cats after this. — Eleven-year-old Karin’s father brings her to a country temple on the Izu Peninsula and leaves her with a grandfather she barely knows. He runs the temple, where a giant cat called Anzu has lived for decades, doing odd jobs for the whole town, and it’s Anzu who ends up looking after the girl. Neither Karin nor the cat is thrilled about it. — Official Selection | Annecy Film Festival | 2024 Official Selection - Directors' Fortnight | Cannes Film Festival | 2024

Park Chan-wook’s wild revenge thriller won the Grand Prix at Cannes from a jury led by Quentin Tarantino, and it’s been a cult film ever since: brutal, gripping and striking to look at. Its hero is armed with nothing but a hammer, and still he’s impossible to forget. — In Seoul in 1988, a drunk Oh Dae-su is raising hell in a police cell when a friend comes to collect him, but somewhere on the way home he vanishes. He wakes in a locked room with nothing but a bed and a television, which tells him that his wife is dead and the police are after him. Fifteen years later the door opens, and he has five days to find out why he was locked up. — Grand Prize of the Jury | Cannes Film Festival | 2004 Nominated for Screen International Award | European Film Awards | 2004 Audience Award | Stockholm Film Festival | 2004 Best Asian Film | Hong Kong Film Awards | 2005

Set to the Pet Shop Boys’ “Go West”, Jia Zhangke’s film follows globalisation as it reshapes China decade by decade. He shot the 1999 chapter on a camera from that year, and as the frame widens, so does the distance between the characters, until by 2025 a father and son have no language in common. — Tao is dancing in the town square at Chinese New Year in 1999, and two men want to marry her: Liangzi, who works down the mine, and Zhang, who has just bought it. She picks one of them, and the film catches up with all three in 2014 and again in 2025, when her son is growing up in Australia. — Palme de Whiskers Award | Cannes Film Festival | 2015 Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 2015 Audience Award | San Sebastián International Film Festival | 2015

Kiarostami (“Taste of Cherry”) gives an eight-year-old one job, returning a friend’s notebook, and you root for him on a road to the heart of humanity as twisty as a Safdie brothers film. Gentle and sometimes funny, it won the Bronze Leopard at Locarno, and that boy stays with you for a long time. — Their teacher warns Mohammad Reza that if he does his homework anywhere but in his notebook one more time, he’ll be expelled. That same afternoon, at home, Ahmad realises he’s taken his friend’s notebook by mistake. Mohammad Reza lives in the village over the hill, and Ahmad doesn’t even know his address, but he sets off to find him. — FIPRESCI Award - Special Mention | Locarno International Film Festival | 1989 Prize of the Ecumenical Jury - Special Mention | Locarno International Film Festival | 1989 Bronze Leopard | Locarno International Film Festival | 1989

Satrapi, the author of “Persepolis”, adapts another of her own graphic novels for the screen, this time with live actors, and goes back to an Iran that no longer exists. There’s magical realism and real feeling in this melancholy story of a love that never had the chance to bloom. — In Tehran in 1958, the most famous violinist of his day loses the will to live after his wife smashes his beloved violin, because no other instrument sounds the same. He goes to bed and doesn’t get up again, lost in memories of the past and in thoughts of his children’s future. Somewhere among those memories waits the love of his life. — Official Selection | Venice Film Festival | 2011 Audience Award | São Paulo International Film Festival | 2011

Hirokazu Kore-eda (“Shoplifters”) doesn’t speak French, but he directed Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche in it anyway, in a sharp, funny, unpretentious film about family. For a film star the plain truth is just too dull, and the trouble starts when she lies about her daughter’s life too. — After fifty years as a star of French cinema, Fabienne has just published her memoirs. When her daughter Lumir, a screenwriter, flies in from New York with her husband and their little girl, she reads the book and finds that her mother has lied about her childhood. It puts Fabienne at school gates where she never waited and at a school play she never came to. — Official Selection | Venice Film Festival | 2019

Sold as a date movie and released in Chinese cinemas on New Year’s Eve, the film Bi Gan made before “Resurrection” took $38 million on its first day and $1.5 million on its second. It ends with the director’s virtuoso signature, a final shot that runs for an hour. — Luo Hongwu comes back to Kaili, a rainy town in southern China, after many years away, and almost at once he sets out to find the woman he has never managed to forget. The trail leads him to people who knew her and to a name that may not have been her own. Then he goes into a cinema, and it’s no longer clear whether he’s still searching or already dreaming. — Official Selection - Un Certain Regard | Cannes Film Festival | 2018 Official Selection | San Sebastián International Film Festival | 2018

Michel Gondry (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”), Leos Carax (“Holy Motors”) and Bong Joon-ho (“Parasite”), three great directors, bring three very different stories to one city. In their hands Tokyo turns magical, surreal and melancholy, and extraordinary things start to happen. — Tokyo is split into three stories. In one, a couple come in from the provinces to make films and can’t find anywhere to live, and in another a dangerous creature climbs out of the sewers speaking a language that doesn’t exist. The third belongs to a man who hasn’t left his home in years, until an earthquake strikes and a pizza delivery girl faints on his floor. — Nominated for Un Certain Regard Prize | Cannes Film Festival | 2008

Jafar Panahi once worked as Kiarostami’s assistant, and here he borrows the style of his famous “Close-Up” for what starts as a sweet tale of a first-grader lost in Tehran. Halfway through the shoot, the young actress has had enough, pulls off her microphone and says she won’t go on. — Nobody comes to collect Mina from school in Tehran. The first-grader, with her arm in plaster and her satchel on her back, waits at the gate until she decides to walk home alone. She doesn’t know her address, so she asks strangers and climbs onto whichever bus comes along, in a city several sizes too big for her. Then the little actress snaps that she’s sick of playing the part. — Golden Leopard | Locarno International Film Festival | 1997

Wong Kar-Wai’s sensual, ambitious sci-fi is a loose sequel to “In the Mood for Love”, with Tony Leung back as the same man, only now his luck in love has run much lower. He moves from one woman to the next, but none of them can make him forget the one. — In a Hong Kong hotel room in the 1960s, Chow Mo-wan writes pulp fiction, and one by one the women who pass through the room next door find their way into his books. His latest story is about a train to 2046, a place people travel to in search of a lost memory, and from which no one has ever returned. — Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 2004 Best Actor (Tony Leung) | Hong Kong Film Awards | 2005 Best Actress (Ziyi Zhang) | Hong Kong Film Awards | 2005 Best Cinematography | Hong Kong Film Awards | 2005 Best Art Direction | Hong Kong Film Awards | 2005 Best Original Film Score | Hong Kong Film Awards | 2005

Wong Kar-Wai flew to Buenos Aires in September 1996 for what was meant to be a six-week shoot, and he was still filming in December. Two men from Hong Kong cross the world to save their relationship and break up along the way, and from then on they swing between love and hate. — Two men on holiday in Argentina break up partway through the trip, and neither has the money to get home. One takes a job as a doorman at a bar and rents a tiny room, while the other spends his nights with whoever’s around, until the day he turns up hurt on his ex’s doorstep. — Best Director | Cannes Film Festival | 1997 Audience Award | Arizona International Film Festival | 1998 Best Actor | Hong Kong Film Awards | 1998