BIFF seems to be in a transition phase, as it re-navigates its position amidst challenges from domestic and regional festivals and the financial pressure brought on by the government’s decision to halve its sponsorship this year. In this context, BIFF’s decision to expand its film offerings, from last year’s 209 titles to this year’s 224, was indeed courageous.

A celebratory atmosphere engulfed the festival throughout its ten-day run, and the official announcement of a high 84 percent average attendance at screenings seemed like proof that local audiences were pleased with the direction BIFF had undertaken.

Barely had staff swung open the doors of the Busan Film Center on October 2, the first day of the festival, than a group of pro-Palestine protesters appeared with banners and placards, demanding that organisers cancel the screenings of Of Dogs and Men, Israeli filmmaker Dani Rosenberg’s semi-documentary about the aftermath of Hamas’ attack on his country a year ago. With the Busan Film Center largely deserted at that time of the day – it was a Tuesday, and the first screenings wouldn’t started for another couple of hours – the demonstration ended without incident.

Far more eventful was the festival’s official press conference for the opening film, happening across the street. Rather than aiming their questions at the cast and crew of the Netflix-backed historical drama Uprising, Korean journalists besieged BIFF organisers about their decision to open Busan with a big-budget production, one moreover which will skip theatrical release and head straight for the U.S. streaming platform on October 11. Some viewed this as ironic, as one of the festival’s slogans this year is “Theater [sic] Is Not Dead”.

Park Do-sin, one of BIFF’s two deputy directors, admitted the festival has long dedicated its opening-night slot to independent films, but “maybe it is time for a change” to have “a more obviously popular film” as a curtain-raiser. Uprising is one of two Netflix productions bowing at the festival this year, the other being a selection of episodes from the second season of hit TV series Hellbound, the brainchild of Train to Busan director Yeon Sang-ho.

Similar to many of its counterparts in the region, BIFF takes a two-pronged approach in its programming: the Netflix titles formed part of its crowd-pleasing branch. In this category, we could also include the gala screening of Right People Wrong Place, which is a documentary about the production of BTS leader RM’s second solo album; Actors’ House, a series of four public talks featuring young Korean A-list stars; and the explosively colorful spin-off installations and events taking place in the open-air piazza of the Busan Film Centre.

The other face of Busan was shaped by and for film buffs. The programme dedicated to Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes’s films, for example, was perhaps BIFF’s piece de resistance in terms of honouring its cinephile tradition. Though it left out his legendary short films, the showcase was one of the most popular sections of the festival. The director’s two-hour masterclass was a sold-out affair, and he seemed to be enjoying his time at Busan – to the point of actually drinking soju, the favourite beverage of his favourite Korean director Hong Sang-soo, from a plastic bottle during the talk.

Gomes went to great lengths to explain how The Wizard of Oz was the main inspiration behind the bifurcated structure of his films. The audience was delighted: for the young people attending the masterclass, this is a film they knew and could readily identify with, an entry point into his seemingly daunting and elusive body of work. This was what the programmers had wanted too, a sign of the emergence of a new generation of cinephiles.

This is perhaps the raison d’être behind this year’s showcase of Asian coming-of-age films. Made up of nine films from across the continent – among them award-winning titles such as City of Wind, Tiger Stripes, Girls Will Be Girls and Happyend – “Teen Spirit, Teen Movies” offered young audiences an excellent introduction into how programmers tease out additional layers of meaning by placing similarly themed yet markedly different films side by side in a series.

To be fair, the programme did offer a wealth of domestic independent productions. With Works and Days, the winner of the festival’s best documentary award, the directorial duo of Park Min-soo and Ahn Kearn-hyung delivered a poetic and empathetic ode to artisans struggling against the automatization of their trades. Kang Mija’s Spring Night, which bowed in the Korean Cinema Today – Vision section, is an austere and movingly acted two-hander about the tragic love affair between a wheelchair-ridden man (Kim Seol-jin) and an alcoholic (Han Ye-ri from Minari).

And then there was Park Ri-woong’s The Land of the Morning Calm, which won one of the two top awards in the flagship New Currents competition. Revolving around the disappearance of a seaman in a small coastal town, Park reveals the racism and structural inequality bubbling beneath the glittering veneer of 21^st century Korea. Featuring a whirlwind performance from Yoon Joo-sang as the vanished man’s captain – and a Vietnam War veteran who was readily mocked by his neighbours for his military service – Park has consolidated his standing as a torch-bearer for Korean social realist cinema today.

Chaired by the now-exiled Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, the five-strong New Currents jury named Myanmar director The Maw Naing’s MA – Cry of Silence as the other winner of the competition. Set nearly entirely within a garments factory and a rickety corrugated-iron shack that serves as a dormitory for young women, the film delivers a chilling account of what life is like in Myanmar today through the ill-fated political awakening of a young, exploited worker.  Filmed clandestinely with actors working under made-up names, The Maw Naing’s triumph could be seen as proof of Busan’s ability to pack a political punch.

MA – Cry Of Silence
dir. The Maw Naing (Myanmar-South Korea-Singapore-France-Norway)

KIM Jiseok Award

Village Rockstars
dir. Rima Das (India-Singapore)

Yen and Ai-Lee
dir. Tom Lin Shu-Yu (Thailand)

BIFF Mecenat Award

Works And Days
dir. Park Minsoo, Ahn Kearnhyung (South Korea)

Another Home
dir. Frankie Sin (Thailan-Hong Kong-France)

Sonje Award

Yurim
dir. Song Jiseo (South Korea)

A Garden In Winter
dir. Eléonore Mahmoudian, Matsui Hiroshi (Japan-France)

Actor of the Year Male:
Yoo Lee ha
in The Final Semester (South Korea)

Actor of the Year Female:
Park Seoyun
in Humming (South Korea)

KB New Currents Audience Award
The Land Of Morning Calm
dir. Park Ri-woong (South Korea)

Flash Forward Audience Award
Memories Of A Burning Body
dir. Antonella Sudasassi Furniss (Costa Rica-Spain)

Documentary Audience Award
K-Number
dir. Jo Seyoung (South Korea)

Fipresci Award
Tale of the Land
dir. Loeloe Hendra (Indonesia-Philippines-Taiwan-Qatar)

Between these events, Su-yeon, our heroine, has her story told through a series of engagements that are not quite linear and not quite chronological.

The pivotal experience for her comes when a former classmate and lover, Jeong-ahn, invites her to take part in lodging a complaint against one of their teachers, Professor Shin, from back in the day. “You know how he committed sexual violence on his students,” she is told.

Apparently, the professor also took his actions outside of school into the literary world and karma, it seems, is about to catch up with him. Will Su-yeon (Seok-hee) be willing to join the group in bringing this bad man to book?

“I just slept with him once,” she says, as though it excuses her from getting involved. As you can imagine, it’s not quite what her companion expects as a response. The next morning, news of what transpired between the professor and his students is on television. It’s big news. Su-yeon turns off the TV.

Does she feel guilty for not considering her experience with the professor harmful? Or is she lying to herself about the harm she suffered? An answer isn’t provided. Not directly, at least.

What answer there is comes when Su-yeon receives feedback from a publisher concerning her work. She seems to be anti-romance, which is not quite compatible with being a romance novelist. Her protagonist, she is told, treats other characters in a way that’s “devoid of love” and her “characters seem to lack charming qualities”. Her work has obscenity but no romance.

It is a clever way to answer the central question about Su-yeon’s past, as the event is itself never really shown, although we do get a flashback in which the young Su-yeon looks to be a minor. In other words, too young to consent.

This indirect treatment of the aftermath of sexual assault is carried through the film’s lean 62 minutes’ runtime, as we see Su-yeon and a staffer at her publishing house feel their way through a weirdly undefined relationship. Is the weirdness linked to that affair with Professor Shin? Again, there is no direct answer. But the nature of the film’s storytelling — its focus on the women afflicted by the professor’s actions, rather than the man himself — encourages one to make that connection.

Korean cinema has long had filmmakers in thrall of the understated — a group sometimes separate from and sometimes the same as those who are big-time purveyors of graphic violence. There will, for example, probably always be some forum online for those who debate just what exactly happened in Lee Chang Dong’s Burning, a film that famously sealed its story with one very violent episode as a kind of catharsis.  Journey To Face Them has no such thing; the closest it comes to violence is the ejection of a horny, humiliated lover-boy from a vehicle. To close her picture, Hwang goes instead for the sort of catharsis that is almost a cliché in arthouse pictures, the type that involves the closeup or medium shot of a character framed as though on the cusp of an epiphany, or in its wake. This familiarity doesn’t detract from the film’s positives — its performances, the confident camerawork, its poetic, meditative quality — but it does feel a bit too easy to end this story on an ambiguous note.

Hwang hasn’t made a classic. Her film is nonetheless very good. It will find grateful audiences wherever women and men engage in the complex game of love, sex, and all of their attendant mess. They’ll just have to come to their own conclusions about Su-yeon’s actions and inactions.

Director, screenplay, editing: Hwang In-won
Cast: Seok-hee, Seung-yeon Lee, See-eun Kim, Sol-hae Kim Woo-young Bahk
Cinematography: Min-ju Kim
Sound: Enoch Park
Producer: Eun-joung Park
Production companies: DGC, Tiger Cinema
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (Korean Cinema Today, Vision)
In Korean
62 minutes

“You don’t remember me?” the figure asks the now-cowering novelist. Out comes a gun.

While the camera excuses itself and waits outside in the rather lovingly lensed dark, three shots ring out, the last coming a few seconds after the first two. The police arrive almost immediately. Clearly, the blood-splattered killer wants to be caught and has had her wish fulfilled.

Which, of course, leads to one question: Why does this killer of a bestselling novelist want to be caught? Who knows. But even a somnolent viewer can tell that the crime and the wishing to be caught are connected to novelist Jeong Sang-woo’s latest, a supposed biography based on the actual kidnaping of a young girl, titled A Girl with Closed Eyes. This detail proves important when the killer says she is the kidnapped girl whose story has been told by the dead novelist.

It sets off the mystery of Chun Sunyoung’s debut feature, which has premiered at the Busan International Film Festival. The film is a moody delight that, at least initially, wallows happily in well-known tropes of the crime picture, as though trying to pre-empt a viewer who wants to wag her finger at those tropes.

Like in The Silence of the Lambs and many other films, the killer (Minha Kim) has her eyes on a particular police officer (Moon Choi). As with all of Korean master Park Chan-wook’s work, certain scenes are striking and dark-lit. As with any number of cop movies, the assigned officer has a sidekick who has a somewhat goofy and slightly less competent handle on things. And as with more than a handful of murder mysteries, the cop used to live in the same town as the case under investigation. There’s also some Jung Byung-gil and Bong Joon-Ho influence here and there.

As said, the film is keenly aware of what it owes to other projects. A novelist is the victim of a crime, so the screenplay puts Rob Reiner’s 1990 film Misery in the mouth of a character, who says that the case is an easy one, because putting the stalker and a famous novelist together is “like Misery”. Naturally, the case is anything but easy. It is also very different from Reiner’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel.

As the story goes along, detail after detail accrete. And little by little, the story moves from a why-do-it to a mix of whodunit and howdunit, sometimes going back to why-do-it or hovering somewhere over all three. This could be pleasurable and it is, to a point. After that point, the twists begin to take the place of story. It starts to seem like the idea is to cram the screenplay full of twists rather than pursue a more natural outcome for the characters introduced in the first act.

Some of these twists work. With the rest, it’s hard to drum up the attention required when one is quickly displaced by another. And yet, there is a lot that manages to be very engaging here, principally the visuals and the performances from Choi and Kim. The screenwriting, also by Chun Sunyoung, is pretty solid, at least before the scarcely believable exposition as to what happened the night of the novelist’s murder.

Notwithstanding, the writer-director-producer clearly has a talent for story and an eye (aided by cinematographer Hyungbin Lee) for great images. Hopefully, she will return for a second feature. And, hopefully, then, she’ll relax a bit and tell a story—sans elaborately twisty gimmicks.

Cast: Minha Kim, Moon Choi, Kiwoo Lee
Director, screenplay, producer Chun Sunyoung
Executive Producers: Soyoung Lee, Myunghoon Kang
Cinematography: Hyungbin Lee
Production Design: Yijin Jung
Editor: Younglim Lee
Music: Younggyu Jang
Sound: Jiyoung Jeong
Production Company: MIND2MIND PICTURES
World Sales: Finecut
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (Korea Cinema Today: Special Premiere)
In Korean
105 minutes

Loeloe’s previous short film, Nail House, revolves around a man trying to protect his house against encroaching property developers. In a way, Tale of the Land could be considered a rural extension. That’s probably why the director chooses to have Tula (Arswendy Bening Swara) tell his granddaughter (Shenine Cinnamon) that “abandoned houses tend to fall apart, but ours is strong”. But the old man seems deluded: a floating structure in the middle of the sea, their rickety hut is vulnerable to the elements and obviously on its last legs. But his remark reflects something deeper: in this case, “house” refers to more than just the physical edifice and includes their cultural and historical heritage, and persistence is the key to the survival.

And persist they do, and only by themselves. Tula rebuffs May’s suggestions about relocating somewhere else, as he says it would waste too much fuel and time moving the house to another spot in the ocean. He doesn’t even entertain the idea of returning ashore: he’s living in self-exile from the rampant corruption and destruction posed by the mining mega-projects on land. Loeloe illustrates this in one of the film’s most powerful shots, in which the old man’s boat is dwarfed by a passing ore-carrying cargo ship. For her part, May suffers from a condition that would make her lose consciousness the minute she sets foot on terra firma.

With Loeloe’s poetic screenplay and Philippine editor Carlo Francisco Manatad’s splicing, the elusive relationship between the duo and the reason behind May’s affliction is slowly but surely revealed. A member of the indigenous Dayak community, May was the sole survivor of mayhem caused by unchecked mining expansions on land. Having saved the girl from her doom, Tula believes her survival – and his own – can only be ensured by cutting themselves adrift.

Now a young woman, May tires of being seen as cursed, and yearns to break out of her confinement and visit her parents’ graves. Another part of it is simply her wish to see the world out there. Her main connection with that visible but untouchable realm is via bumbling cattle herder Yus (Yusuf Mahardika), whose affection doesn’t interest her. Instead, in true romantic tradition, she is drawn to Lawa (Angga Yunanda), a handsome security guard working for a mining corporation like the one that decimated her own community years ago.

Stripped down to its narrative, Tale of the Land is admittedly predictable as May confronts the many dilemmas she is facing. But Loeloe enhances his story with a wealth of visual symbolism reflecting Tula’s long-suppressed trauma and May’s fluttering post-adolescent desire. With the help of Fahrul Tri Hikamwan’s lush camerawork, Loeloe succeeds in bringing these elements to the surface. His evocation of Borneo’s natural beauty and Dayak cultural rituals provides food for thought about the price being paid in the pursuit of a politically-charged modernity. 

Director, screenplay: Loeloe Hendra
Cast: Shenine Cinnamon, Arswendy Bening Swara, Angga Yunanda, Yusuf Mahardika
Producers: Yulia Evina Bhara, Amerta Kusuma
Cinematography: Fahrul Tri Hikmawan
Editing: Carlo Francisco Manatad
Production design: Sigit D. Pratama
Music: Teresa Barrozo
Sound designer: LH Aim Adi Negara, Vincent Villa
Production company: KawanKawan Media
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (New Currents)
In Indonesian, Kutai
99 minutes

For Rana begins with motorcycle stuntman Aref (Hamed Behdad) entering a darkened circus tent to perform the notorious “globe of death” act. He whirls round and round in a spherical metal cage with only his blue headlights on, producing a sensorial spectacle that is at once scintillating and ominous. As opening sequences go, this is certainly a shock to the senses.

This opening salvo is proof that first-time feature film director Iman Yazdi has technical savvy, after nearly two decades of experience as an assistant director, production manager and directing shorts. But that’s as original the film is going to get, and it quickly spirals into sentimental territory. What’s lacking in For Rana is the edge that could propel this conventional melodrama to loftier artistic heights. In a story smacking of déjà vu twists and turns, an array of archetypal characters and a finale that offers all-too-convenient closure, the film lacks that spark of originality that could make it stand from many similar films on the market after its premiere at Busan.

While the first motorcycle sequence seems to suggest Aref is hard-boiled to the core, we soon get to see the man’s softer side. No soon has he finished his daredevil act that we see him having fun on a racetrack with his toddler daughter Rana. They drive to a hospital to pick up Aref’s wife Soodabeh (Pantea Panahiha) and head for a hearty al fresco dinner to celebrate the girl’s birthday.

When Rana puts a sticker on Aref’s motorcycle, however, even the uninitiated know tragedy is bound to follow. Cue Rana falling ill, the doctor informing the parents of her need for a new heart, and their discovery of a potentially compatible organ in the body of a terminally ill old man who has been kept in a vegetative state for some time. But the elderly man’s young fiancée (Hediyeh Bazvand) refuses to pull the plug. The parents’ discussions with her and the dying man’s middle-aged son (Payam Ahmadinia) turn the narrative towards inheritance-related intrigue between the son and his stepmother.

So it is that For Rana runs on these two parallel tracks, as the working-class couple goes to extremes to cobble together enough cash in exchange for the old man’s heart, while the well-off family fights each other to make themselves even richer. For the former, Yazdi employs every artistic trick in the book – a confused Aref hearing voices in his head, a crying Soodabeh running in slow motion, the tension-filled denouement – to illustrate the pair’s desperation; the latter, meanwhile, slowly descends into soap-opera territory, as the two heirs-to-be wage war on each other with minders by their side and murder on their minds.

It’s perhaps interesting to note how For Rana represents Iran in a drastically different light than, say, other Iranian films doing the rounds on the festival circuit. Here, religion is conspicuous by its total absence, and Soodabeh’s (female) colleague’s second marriage is greeted with nothing but words of congratulations from all around, a situation one would never expect to see in films by  Ashgar Farhadi or Maryam Moghadam and Behtash Sanaeeha. The nearest the film gets to broaching the patriarchal nature of Iranian society is when Aref learns of his father’s refusal to acknowledge Rana as his granddaughter because he deems her parents’ marriage “illegitimate”. (It’s never explicitly spelt out why this is the case – not even in the most intense of rows the couple has during the film.)

In For Rana, the main problematic seems to be corruption of both the moral and economical kind. Iranian society is shown as a network of transactions where everything can be bought and sold. The sight of cheques (and cash) changing hands remains a dominant visual motif throughout, the one nod towards symbolism Yazdi and his co-screenwriter Hossein Mahkam subtly include in a film notable for its histrionics.

Director: Iman Yazdi  
Screenplay: Hossein Mahkam, Iman Yazdi
Cast: Hamed Behdad, Pantea Panahiha, Nader Fallah, Payam Ahmadinia
Producer: Morteza Shaysteh
Executive producer: Amin Asadi
Cinematography: Roozbeh Rayga
Editing: Samaneh Sezavar
Music: Arman Mousapour
Sound designer: Amir Hossein Sadeghi
Production company: Hedayet Film
World sales: Madakto Pictures
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (New Currents)
In Persian
87 minutes

At the beginning of Gingerbread for her Dad, Alina Mustafina readily admits she is a walking cultural contradiction. Born and raised in Kazakhstan, she speaks Russian (and three other languages) but not Kazakh; once based in Qatar, she now lives in a new pyramid-shaped wooden house totally unlike that of her neighbours in Almaty. Her story can’t hold a torch to her grandmother’s, though: born in Tatarstan and relocated to Kazakhstan when she was young, Lyabiba was a Communist model-worker in the 1980s, a record-releasing singer in the 1990s, and now a pious Muslim who never leaves the house without her headscarf and her Quran.

Mustafina’s first feature-length documentary slowly unveils Lyabiba’s very eventful life, framed by the director fulfilling one of the old woman’s lifelong wishes: to find the burial ground of her own father, who died somewhere in a forest in Poland as a Red Army soldier during the final days of the Second World War. Starting off in the Kazakh capital of Almaty and ending in a clearing in the woods near the Polish-Belarussian border (after a stopover in Lyabiba’s native Tatarstan), Gingerbread for her Dad offers heartfelt, real-life family drama spiced with acerbic humour and numerous insights into Kazakh national identity as seen through three generations of a family.

Made with grants from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia and Korea, plus $15,000 Mustafina raised through her Instagram blog, Gingerbread for her Dad defies its modest budget with rich, flowing imagery. Alexey Elagin’s camerawork evokes both the ambitious nature of the trio’s “grand tour”, and the delicate nature of the mother-daughter relationships between the three women. The film well demonstrates former journalist Mustafina’s ability to pursue a story and capture the details of people’s interaction. More festival travel is indicated.

The seemingly corny title actually stems from a tragic episode in Sermukhmedova’s childhood. While just a small girl near the end of WW2, military cadres came to her home with news that little Lyabiba’s father had been killed in action, thousands of miles away in the west. To show their condolences, they brought the family some sweets – a luxury at wartime. “I ran around and shouted, ‘My dad is dead, we’ve got gingerbread cookies’,’” the old woman tells her daughter and granddaughter, as she looks back at her naive younger self with bemusement and guilt.

Grandmother’s contradictory emotions chime with Mustafina’s anxieties about her own cultural roots. The director laments her inability to speak Kazakh – she speaks Russian, which remains a lingua franca in her country – as well as her need to learn her prayers all over again as a full-grown adult.

Mustafina’s idea of bringing granny to Poland is initially rebuffed by her mother Alissa, who sees this journey as a salute to empty heroism, validating the questionable notion of people dying for their nation. As someone who attained adulthood at the same time as Kazakhstan attained its independence, Alissa casts doubt on “our ancestors dying in someone else’s war”. The chasm between their views on belonging is also reflected in their responses towards Mustafina’s question about where their “place of power” is. The roots-searching director Alina says Kazakhstan; her mom Alissa says, “in myself.” At which Lyabiba quips: “Are we done already?”

And so these exchanges go, as they fly first to Tatarstan, where Lyabiba revisits her birthplace and her memories through the letters and photos at her relatives’ home, before moving on to Poland. The trip offers closure to the three women, while the journey itself gives them a chance to open up and reconcile suppressed angst and long-forgotten tristesse about the different ordeals in their lives.

While Gingerbread for her Dad is very personal, it is never self-indulgent. The director, who is seen and heard throughout, has somehow transformed her presence – and also her mother’s and grandmother’s – into a vessel through which she projects something more profound than her own self. This is a chronicle of three women from three different generations in a country that is still in the midst of accounting for its past, present and future place in the world.

Director, screenplay: Alina Mustafina
Cast: Alina Mustafina, Lyabiba Sermukhmedova, Alissa Mustafina
Producers: Yerkezhan Maksut, Akzhol-bi Sarsembayev
Cinematography: Alexey Elagin
Editing: Valentina Bek, Aidan Serik
Music: Akmaral Mergen
Sound design: Dmitry Vasilev
Production company: UVENT Production
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (Wide Angle Documentary Competition)
In Russian, Kazakh, Tatar, Polish
76 minutes

What Village Rockstars 2 lacks in dramatic twists, Das compensates with camerawork oozing poetic beauty or electric energy at every turn – imagery she spliced together to produce a tapestry of utmost poignancy and authenticity. No longer the starry-eyed, guitar-craving 10-year-old that she was in the first film, Bandita Das delivers a natural yet nuanced performance as an adolescent contending with the joys and humdrum realities of her provincial existence, a youngster at once content and confused about her observations of the passing of time.

The film begins with a group of kids gathering in the fields at dusk, making trinkets out of weeds. They sing and pluck at a guitar, an instrument Dhunu (Bandita Das) cherishes and handles with care in between the days when she performs with a local band. With these opening sequences, Rima Das seems to be picking up where she left off seven years ago, when she chronicled a free-spirited child’s attempt to acquire a real six-string and defy traditional tenets of girlhood in the process. Now that Dhunu’s got it, one might expect to see a film about her onward journey as a fledging musician – a rural and more subtle equivalent, perhaps, to films like We Are the Best! or Linda Linda Linda.

What Rima Das sets out to do, however, is outlined in a subsequent scene, when a teacher instructs Dhunu and her classmates to write an essay about the two topics deemed the most important to them: the floods in Assam and “your aim in life”, and in that order. Indeed, Village Rockstars 2 is less a film about human beings fighting against nature but more about them living in it, as Dhunu and her mother (Basanti Das) learn to embrace the good and the bad, as divined by the gods. Serving as the film’s sole cinematographer, Rima Das manages to capture the most vivid moments in which her characters’ display their rugged ways of accommodating the frequent monsoons and rising waters besieging their lands.

We do get to see Dhunu playing music and also touring small towns with her band. But we actually see more about these budding musicians’ encounters and experiences off stage: the rows with misogynist concert organisers who refuse to hand over their performance fee because of they lack a male singer, or their camaraderie as they work in the fields together to earn some extra money in between gigs.

Desire, deception and death do pop up in Dhunu’s life, but Rima Das doesn’t overplay these events as earth-shattering melodramatic milestones in her protagonist’s young life. Rather, they seem to be stations Dhunu is bound to travel in her journey through time, moments that are as significant as the ones in which the teenager removes bloodsucking leeches from her legs, or goes around town looking for a job to bring home some extra cash. The screenplay simply moves from one event to the next, without any of them being shaped as a moment of foreboding, pending closure or catastrophe. In parallel with Rima Das’ camerawork, Shreyank Nanjappa’s sound production and design is crucial in providing the film with its necessary natural ambience.

Director, screenplay, cinematography, production design, editing: Rima Das
Cast: Bhanita Das, Basanti Das, Junumoni Das, Bhaskar Das
Producers: Rima Das, Fran Borgia
Music composer: Pallab Talukdar
Sound designer: Shreyank Nanjappa
Production companies: Flying River Films, Akanga Film Asia
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (Jiseok Competition)
In Assamese
107 minutes

Once upon a time, The Maw Naing’s characters were beset mostly by subtle spiritual concerns –  the struggle for The Monk‘s protagonist was between a fulfilment of mortal desires and the attainment of enlightenment. It would be hard for the director to go down this slow-glowing path now, with the Myanmar people’s hopes for happiness all but dashed by the reinstatement of a full-on military dictatorship in February 2021. But something of that film from a decade ago has remained: just like The Monk, MA – Cry of Silence revolves around a young individual’s rite of passage, in this case a meek, long-suffering woman’s political awakening as she is forced to confront the brutal blows raining down on her peers from those higher up the food chain.

Written by Oh Young-jeong, who also serves as producer here, MA – Cry of Silence doesn’t broach post-coup Myanmar politics as explicitly as, say, the anonymously directed omnibus Myanmar Diaries or the work of Na Gyi and Paing Phyo Thu. Instead, economic exploitation is the evil here, its effects embodied in the life of Mi-thet (Su Lay).

For the rural-born woman who had moved to the city for a better life for her family, her new concept of home is one-third of a cramped room in a corrugated-iron shack. Work means long and demanding shifts at a textile factory overseen by a perverse foreman who wields an iron ruler with his right hand and molests his charges with his left. Through Ei Lay (Nwe Nwe Soe), a roommate who works as a maid for a former general, Mi-thet learns of the mountains of cash being passed from Chinese businessmen to local bigshots; at night, she hears endless commotion outside her dormitory, as thugs harass and pursue anyone they don’t seem to like.

Zaw Moe’s production design conjures up Mi-thet’s claustrophobic existence, with Tin Win Naing’s camerawork and Mathieu Farnarier’s sound design matching the excellent art direction step by step. An example? The cacophony evoked by the audio-visual montage of whirling electric fans and buzzing banks of sewing machines.

The oppressive tedium is soon broken as outspoken Nyein Nyein (Kawyt Kay Khaing) rallies her colleagues to put down their tools until the boss agrees to pay them the salary they are owed. Initially reluctant to join the protest, Mi-thet is soon stirred into action as she discovers Ei Lay’s suffering at the hands of her employer. But her epiphany has much to do with the friendship she strikes up with her recalcitrant neighbour U Thun (Ko Nanda) – a man whose scars betray Myanmar’s painful past, and whose vault of clandestine books provides Mi-thet with a pointer to the future.

U Thun’s recollections, supplemented by some brief archive footage of the deadly clampdown on a street demonstration in Yangon during the anti-dictatorship uprising in 1988, are the furthest The Maw Naing goes in referring directly to his country’s political situation. Then again, when the foreman berates the protesting workers for not being grateful for their lot, he sounds every bit like the deluded tyrants demanding subservience for the crumbs they throw at their people.

For those who have been following the news about Myanmar’s rapid slide towards oblivion in the past three years, Mi-thet’s fate is more or less preordained. As she says in the film, however, tragedy should be confronted by solidarity and resilience. Boasting stellar performances from its young cast, MA – Cry of Silence conveys its fiery spirit loudly and clearly.

Director: The Maw Naing
Screenplay: Oh Young-jeong
Cast: Su Lay, Kwayt Kay Khaing, Nay Htoo Aung, Ko Nanda
Producers: The Maw Naing, Oh Young-jeong
Cinematography: Tin Win Naing
Editor: Nicolas Bancilohn
Production designer: Zaw Moe
Sound designer: Mathieu Farnarier
Production companies: One Point Zero (Myanmar), Plus Point One (South Korea), Massala, Protocol, DUOfilm (Norway), Alpha Violet Production (France)
World sales: Alpha Violet
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (New Currents)
In Burmese
74 minutes

Despite pivoting sharply from the lush, tropical and intensely romantic period drama he delivered five years ago with the 1950s-set The Garden of Evening Mists, Lin retains his trademark melancholy with the help of Kartik Vijay’s gorgeous black-and-white camerawork. Too gorgeous, in fact: one could argue that the monochrome palette is a red herring of sorts, as is Lin’s decision to interweave the story with scenes from a seemingly parallel universe where Hsia plays an urbane woman trying to attain some kind of catharsis through a community college acting course.

The film begins with a bloodied young woman staggering through the night and then into a police station. Cut straight to eight years later, and she’s introduced to the viewer (through an intertitle bearing her name) as Yen (Hsia), who arrives home after spending eight years in prison for a violent crime which Lin elects to reveal drip by drip. The most obvious hints are dropped through Yen’s often acerbic, sometimes explosive rows with her mother (Yang), an earthy shopkeeper with a terrible taste in men. This is something which irks Yen the most, as she despairs of the things she sees in her ruffian lover Ren (Sam Tseng, who also received a Golden Horse nomination for this role).

Barely has Lin brought this array of small town mortals into view than the film abruptly jumps to the city of Kaohsiung, where the mild-mannered Allie (also played by Hsia) joins a company of Uber drivers, housemakers and schoolteachers for weekly bouts of amateur dramatics in a modern rehearsal studio. Egged on by an instructor who earns part of her living as a proxy “wailing filial daughter” at local funerals, the meek and mysterious Allie learns to unleash her penned-up angst, whose source we can only speculate.

Yen and Allie take turns appearing in the film. Lin, who wrote the screenplay, has certainly inserted some intrigue into the proceedings with this doppelganger device. But all the guessing distracts the viewer from what should be key to Yen and Ai-lee: that is, the way Yen and her mother nearly repeat the fatal tragedy that broke up their family and drove them apart years ago, and how they rebuild their bonds with the help of a boy (Hsieh I-le) who is imposed on them by Yen’s father’s lover (Elsie Yeh).

Amidst the youth-oriented comedies and puppyish romances dominating Taiwanese cinema today, Yen and Ai-lee appears remarkably refined in both its values and its aesthetics. The latter is felt in Masaki Hayashi’s subtle score and Penny Tsai Pei-ling’s art direction – her designs for the two protagonists’ homely appearances, their rough-hewn home and its provincial environs, provide the two leads with a visual springboard to plunge headlong into their characters.

Director, screenplay: Tom Lin Shu-yu
Cast: Kimi Hsia, Yang Kuei-mei
Producers: Clifford Miu, Linhan Zhang
Director of photography: Kartik Vijay
Editor: Tom Lin Hsin-ming
Production designer: Penny Tsai Pei-ling
Music composer: Masaki Hayashi
Sound designer: Kuo Li-chi
Production companies: Bering Pictures
World sales: Lights On
Venue: Busan International Film Festival
In Mandarin, Taiwanese
108 minutes

If one is to look for an equivalent to Kaneko’s Commissary, the nearest example would probably be Departures, Yojiro Takita’s Academy Award winner from 2008: both films zero in on an angst-ridden man’s search for redemption through a job that’s largely regarded as socially transgressive. If Departures is a cello concerto, then Kaneko’s Commissary is a fugue.

Ryuhei Maruyama’s excellent central performance is augmented by his fellow actors. His pairing with Yoko Maki (Like Father, Like Son), who plays his wife, is particularly in sync, even in the smallest physical gesture. His character’s experience – as someone who did bad things, and then had to confront people doing bad things with or without sound motives – is counterpointed in parallel narratives. Bowing in the Busan International Film Festival’s New Currents competition, Kaneko’s Commissary offers conflicting sentiments, food for thought and emotional balm to viewers, just what the on-screen Kaneko couple present to their clients.

Set in a small, tightly-knit neighbourhood in a Japanese city, the film revolves around Shinji (Maruyama), a mild-mannered man running an “inmate package delivery service”. Perhaps unique to Japan, the service is born out of two traits of Japanese society audiences might have seen before: first, the country’s infamous adherence to rules and regulations that render packing supplies a pain, and make visiting hours out of bounds for working people. Second, the culture’s emphasis on subservience and order make relatives ashamed or hesitant to venture into prisons. And so Shinji makes his living bringing blankets, clothes or even divorce papers to the incarcerated.

While all seems well, discontent towards him and his family is never far from the surface. This is brought vividly out in the open when their neighbour’s daughter is murdered, and Shinji accepts a request by the murderer’s mother to pass a blanket and a message to her unrepentant son (Takumi Kitamura). The other mothers in the neighbourhood openly shun Shinji’s wife Miwako (Maki) while their son, Kazuma (Kira Miura), is relentlessly bullied in school. Once a hot-tempered convict himself – something the viewer is treated to in the film’s prologue – Shinji’s calm veneer slips, revealing his trauma and regret towards the past, and his rationale for doing what he does in the here and now.

As Shinji unravels, his salvation arrives in the shape of a high-school student (Mawa Kawaguchi) who he runs into all the time in the prison waiting room. As he learns more about the boy’s intention to meet the middle-aged former gangster (Goro Kishitani) who killed his mother, Shinji’s despair about the world takes an optimistic turn, as Furukawa gently guides his protagonist and his film in a mellow, hopeful, feel-good direction. Furukawa, who also wrote the screenplay, proves his humanist credentials by exposing the hidden schisms in a seemingly genteel society, in the most subtle of ways.

Editor Tomoka Konishi and composer Benjamin Bedoussac are instrumental in paving the film’s fluid rhythm with their unobtrusive splicing and score.

Director, screenplay: Go Furukawa
Cast:  Ryuhei Maruyama, Yoko Maki, Kira Miura, Akira Terao
Producers: Naoto Inaba, Yasunori Naruse, Yuko Hiraoka
Director of photography: Tomoo Ezaki
Editor: Tomoka Konishi
Music: Benjamin Bedoussac
Production company: Free Stone Productions
World sales: Kadokawa
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (New Currents)
In Japanese
126 minutes

The Japanese invasions of Korea in the 1590s are now largely considered (and feted) as the turning point in the history of Korean nationalism: the much-documented idea of civilian militias fighting off well-armed aggressors has long fueled the public imagination of what a Korean national identity could and should be. Amidst the many films and TV series revolving around this historical episode, Uprising is certainly an outlier. Rather than rising up against alien intruders, ordinary Koreans are seen mostly revolting against their own domestic tormentors, in the shape of an entrenched ruling class who considers its power over the people as divine and unquestionable.

Bookended by scenes charting the demise of a real-life egalitarian commune and then the birth of a fictional one, Uprising is a raging clarion call for social justice. It doesn’t hurt the cause, of course, that the message comes packaged in a high-octane action thriller boasting a stellar cast, high-end production values (thanks to Netflix’s backing) and the presence of Park Chan-wook as a producer and a co-screenwriter. The Oldboy auteur’s creative input is more than evident, as Uprising boasts of his trademark extreme violence, his love of noirish brotherhood and betrayal of men, swirling music in 3/4 time and dialogue sprinkled with jet-black humour.

Separated by their social class, the poor but dexterous orphan Cheon-yeong (Gang Dong-won, Broker) and rich but feeble scion Jong-ryeo (Smugglers) is brought together by an authentic friendship born out of skewed dynamics. Coerced into living in Jong-ryeo’s aristocratic house as a slave, Cheon-yeong becomes a training companion for his young master, to the point of taking a martial arts examination at the royal court for him so that he can establish his first footing in the circles of power.

Their relationship falters when Jong-ryeo’s father reneges on a promise to set Cheon-yeong free. The conflict soon comes to a head when a wave of Japanese warriors, led by a brutal general known as the “nose snatcher” (Jung Sung-il), sweeps into the capital. With the royal family fleeing town and the nobility in disarray, the slaves turn on their masters to avenge generations of suffering and pain – a circumstance which leads to misunderstandings, murders and a falling-out between Cheon-yeong and Jong-ryeo.

Perhaps more importantly, this deadly turn of events doesn’t just turn them into bitter enemies, it simply reveals how they can’t defy their roles in a system they can’t get out of. The unambitious yet chivalrous Cheon-yeong joins an anti-Japanese brigade and becomes one of its best warriors; the embittered Jong-ryeo, burning with vengeful rage, rises in the ranks to become the confidante of amoral and paranoid monarch Seonjo (Cha Seung-won) – a position he uses and abuses for his own aims.

Through their trials and tribulations, the corruption and greed of the authoritarian regime of the day is very much brought out into the open. Pleading for Cheon-yeong’s help and protection, a villager actually says, “The corrupt officials are even worse than the Japanese invaders!” Indeed, as the story continues, we see the rulers ignoring the plights of the people in pursuit of self-glorifying white elephants, while their Rasputins readily propose to undermine the country’s safety by corralling enemy soldiers who have surrendered into their own private armies.

However much the Japanese invaders serve as mere backdrop to these personal and political problems, their existence – or at least that of the “nose snatcher” – is essential for the film’s bombastic, swashbuckling finale. Having spent his career as a production designer and then a director of psychological thrillers and biopics, Kim shows he is just as savvy directing complex action sequences as he is in bringing a poverty-stricken, war-ravaged 16^th century Korea to life.

Director: Kim Sang-man
Screenplay: Shin Chul, Park Chan-wook
Cast: Gang Dong-won, Park Jeong-min, Cha Seung-won, Kim Shin-rock
Producers: Park Chan-wook, Yoon Suk-chan, Back Ji-sun
Editor: Han Mee-yeon
Music: Alan Tyle, Cho Young-wuk
Production designer: Lee Nak-yum
Costume designer: Cho Sang-kyung
Production companies: Moho Film, Semicolon Studio
World sales: Netflix
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (Opening Film)
In Korean
127 minutes