Richard Lloyd (1951-2026)

Posted on November 8, 2026 by philipbrasor

Richard Lloyd has died. Here is an interview I did with him in 2003 for the Japan Times.

Television stands test of time

BY PHILIP BRASOR

Sep 14, 2003

It seems every band that broke up in the decade prior to, say, 1985 has reunited in the past few years to take advantage of whatever shred of nostalgia still dangles from its reputation. Television, the guitar band that emerged from the underground New York scene centered on the Bowery dive CBGB’s in 1975, is one such band. But Television was never easy to categorize, and their reunion isn’t really a reunion according to Richard Lloyd, who is one of the band’s guitarists.

“The thing about Television is that we don’t convene and break up and reconvene,” he says over the phone from his home in New York City. “We’re back together. We’ve been doing shows for three or four years now, full-time, steadily.” When asked to define “steadily” he says, “About 10 or 15 shows a year. Basically, we do the shows we want to do. We’re not on the hungry career track. We’re not into touring little clubs, living off rice and beans.”

Historically speaking, Television broke up in 1978 shortly after releasing their second album, “Adventure.” In 1992, they reunited and released an eponymous album that, like their earlier two, didn’t dent the U.S. charts, though, also like those two, it received glowing reviews.

“Back in 92 we didn’t want it to stop, necessarily,” Lloyd elaborates. “But the record company did a number on us, so we took a break. And then we started getting offers in the late ‘90s. We were invited to All Tomorrow’s Parties, an English festival, and we decided that as long as we were going over we might as well do some other shows. That time we did Ireland, Scotland, England, Spain, Denmark.”

Television always seemed to be more commercially viable in England than they were in the United States. Their 1977 debut, “Marquee Moon,” made it to No. 28 on the British charts, and “Adventure” reached as high as seven. According to the archives, two singles even made it into the British Top 40, but for some reason Lloyd doesn’t believe it.

“If we cracked the Top 40, nobody notified me. What’s interesting about England is that it’s sort of like Japan. It’s a small country, so when something is big in England it seems really big. Smart people like Jimi Hendrix went over there, became famous, and then came back here. And it’s good for the English bands when they come to America. Everybody’s like, wow, they’re big already back home, and don’t realize it’s like being big in Connecticut.”

Lloyd is similarly unimpressed with bands emerging now, like The Strokes, who claim Television as an influence. He points out that while the band was appreciated it was never understood. “We hated [the punk label]. The only band we knew that could stand it was the Ramones. But it stuck and there’s nothing you could do about it.”

With its twinned lead guitars, Tom Verlaine’s surrealistic poetry and fragile vocals, and a willingness to stretch songs with improvisational bridges, Television was closer in method, if not spirit, to ‘60s experimental rock bands who treasured their instrumental abilities. The difference was that Television’s solos were not blues-based, and their song structures had no precedent.

They also rocked harder, an aspect that Lloyd contributed to more than Verlaine, who started the band and wrote most of its songs. Lloyd picked up the guitar to “chase Jimi Hendrix down the block. Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Buddy Guy, Mike Bloomfield. Those were my heroes. I wanted to gain admission to that kind of club.”

Television offered Lloyd a unique opportunity to help develop a new kind of guitar vocabulary, but after four years of playing the same songs night after night, he felt stifled. “When Television broke up I went through a kind of blue period. I didn’t want to do anything like that. Sometimes that’s smart and sometimes it’s just shooting yourself in the foot.”

He released a solo album, “Alchemy,” that was conventionally rockish, and while it received praise, it was overshadowed by Verlaine’s solo career, which seemed to chart the direction that Television might have followed had they stayed together: ever more adventurous, but also more tuneful and playful.

Some have claimed that the 1992 reunion CD is just another Verlaine solo album, but if it is, it’s his best solo album, and the reason is Lloyd’s contribution. However, despite recent rumors surrounding comments Lloyd made to Billboard magazine, the band is not planning on recording soon.

“We’ve got some new songs, and every once in a while we talk about recording. But we don’t have a record company. Now, of course, everybody will read what I just said to you and they’ll start calling me. ‘When is the record coming out? I want to sign you guys to Potato Head Records in Talahassee, Fla.’ I mean, it wouldn’t be hard to make a record. We’re just really lackadaisical.”

Nonetheless, Rhino Records is releasing three Television albums later this month: remastered versions of “Marquee Moon” and “Adventure” with bonus tracks, and a 1978 live show recorded in San Francisco. “They sent the stuff for our approval. They’re treating us very nicely, and, to tell you the truth, they didn’t have to.” Television didn’t leave much of a studio legacy. What you got on those two albums and the rarely heard self-released single “Little Johnny Jewel” (one of the bonus tracks) was pretty much everything the band knew.

“The song ‘Adventure,’ which was recorded for the album ‘Adventure,’ is one of the bonus tracks. We never finished the song. But it sounds like it might as well be done.

“There’s a lot of Television bootlegs out there,” he says when asked about the live album. “I think we rival the Grateful Dead in bootlegativity. I think [the show] is one of the better ones that’s been circulating. They took it and remastered it. I remember it distinctly because we were particularly loud. Somehow at that show we had these amps that The Rolling Stones used at one of their outdoor concerts. They were huge. You have to turn them up to get a decent quality sound, and we were playing these things in clubs. From the stage I’d watch people’s beverages dance across the table and fall off.”

If he can’t get enough volume with Television this time around, he can probably get it with Rocket From the Tombs, another ‘70s band that caught the reunion bug. “Yeah, we go back out on tour in November and December. It’s great. I feel like I’m in the Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath world.”

RFTT was the legendary Cleveland band that spawned The Dead Boys and Pere Ubu, and while they were closer to pure punk than Television was, Lloyd says it wasn’t difficult to step into the shoes of the band’s late guitarist Peter Laughner.

“I remember they opened for Television in 1975 in Cleveland. We showed up at the sound check and they were having a fist fight. I thought, get these people away from us. And then they played and I thought, wow, they’re really good. But I knew they weren’t going to last, they were too volatile. And Peter Laughner died shortly thereafter. That’s the way it is. I’m sure I did much more harm to myself than he did to himself, but he’s croaked and I’m not. Now I’m playing his guitar parts.”

Lloyd also has his own band (now on hiatus), teaches and dabbles in outside production work. For that matter, the other members of Television seem to have full musical lives apart from the band. In other words, nobody has to open a Starbucks franchise, but considering the limited repertoire that Television has always had to contend with, isn’t it sometimes difficult to be Television circa 1977 forever?

“Well, of course we’re going to play ‘Marquee Moon’ and ‘See No Evil.’ I don’t have a problem with it, but I don’t have to sing them. I can imagine how some songs might. . . . I mean, sometimes I say, ‘Why don’t we do this one?’ And Tom will say, ‘Not this time.’ You know what I mean? That’s understandable, but there’s no problem in revisiting the old material. It’s all embedded in the muscles.”

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Review: Voices

Posted on November 7, 2026 by philipbrasor

Few national cinemas have looked at their troubled histories with as much candor as South Korea’s. For sure, in many of the historical movies the country has released since throwing off their long dictatorship in the late 80s the Korean people have come off as victims, but most of the perpetrators of human rights crimes in the country were Koreans too, albeit those in positions of authority. It’s notable that Korean filmmakers have made dozens of films about the brutality of their Japanese overlords during the colonial period, but even in those movies the worst villains tend to be Korean collaborators rather than Japanese occupiers. And movies that cover Korean postwar history have addressed the atrocities carried out by the Rhee, Park, and Chung regimes, such as the Gwangju Massacre of 1980, in various modes of detail. However, there is one atrocity that has not been talked about until very recently, and that is the wholesale killing of civilians on Jeju Island in the late 1940s, which is often referred to as the 4.3 Incident. Tensions had been increasing between native inhabitants of the island and forces both official and unofficial that came there from the peninsula to quell labor unrest starting in the spring of 1947. On April 3, 1948, members of the Workers Party of South Korea erupted in an insurgency against these interlopers, attacking police stations and ad hoc right-wing elements. Retribution was swift and unmerciful, with at least 14,000 residents slaughtered, and some 40,000 clandestinely forced to flee to Japan.

Because both survivors of this massacre and families of those who perpetrated it still remain on Jeju, the incident is almost never mentioned, but several years ago a memorial to the victims was erected on a park on the island and earlier this year a fiction film, Hallan, which depicted some of these atrocities, was released theatrically. Now comes a full-on documentary, Voices, that attempts to present some of the last living witnesses to the horrors of the period. Central to the story is the testimony of four women, or, in actuality, three of them, since the fourth woman, who witnessed the worst of the worst, can’t bring herself to remember out loud, and so her son talks in her place. The other three speak about wholesale rape and murder, about how their parents, anticipating the bloodshed to come as right-wing paramilitary troops landed on the island, forced their daughters to marry as teens because they thought these troops and police would not rape married women. Of course they were wrong. In fact, one woman, who was 7 at the time, recalls seeing a young bride, eight months pregnant, hung from a tree naked and bayoneted to death by these right-wing soldiers.

Labor activists who fought this incursion also committed atrocities, often against their own people in order to prevent them from falling into the clutches of the enemy and informing on them. The trigger for all this terror was the election in 1948 sponsored by the U.S. military that would eventually divide the country in half, a choice the residents of Jeju opposed, but not because they were communists as their persecutors insisted. Rather, it was because they believed the Korean people could not survive in a divided country. Another contributing factor that comes to light in the documentary is that, like Okinawans vis-a-vis “Yamato” (the rest of Japan), Jeju Islanders have a precarious relationship with the rest of Korea, and thus have always been scapegoated by those with axes to grind. Labor unions after the war were considered crucibles of “reds” that had to be eradicated at all costs. Though Voices still seems to leave a lot out, it pays tributes to the survivors in the only way it can, by listening to what they have to say as well as what they can’t bring themselves to say.

In Korean. Now playing in Tokyo at PolePole Higashi Nakano (03-3371-0088).

Voices home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2024 Storyon Co., Ltd.

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Review: Verity

Posted on November 6, 2026 by philipbrasor

Due to either timing or ambition, Anne Hathaway has been ubiquitous on movie screens this year in a way she hasn’t since winning an Oscar some years ago. In this curiously inert thriller based on a bestselling potboiler by Colleen Hoover she plays a Hoover-like novelist who lives in the kind of rich splendor you’d expect of a tech billionaire, except as the movie opens she isn’t exactly living. Verity Crawford is in a semi-vegetative state owing to an automobile accident, but her publisher has a lot riding on her popularity, which is based on a series of connected books she hasn’t finished yet. In the opening scene, there’s an ominous meet-cute between Verity’s husband, Jeremy (Josh Hartnett, someone else we’ve seen a lot of this year after being in the silver screen wilderness for ages), and a young, relatively unknown writer named Lowen (Dakota Johnson, also…never mind), who is on her way to a secret meeting arranged by her agent with Verity’s publisher when she witnesses up close someone get hit by a car, splattering her with blood. Jeremy, who just happens to be walking by, chivalrously offers her his shirt.

It turns out Jeremy is going to the same meeting. The publisher wants Lowen to ghost-write Verity’s next novel secretly based on Verity’s copious notes since their styles are so similar. Hesitating at first due to her own literary goals, Lowen eventually agrees when the price gets too high to refuse, and she is soon ensconced in the couple’s rambling Vermont mansion-on-a-lake along with their very young son and Verity’s full-time nurse. Lowen takes to the work like a duck to water but while searching through the stacks of notes comes across a thumb drive containing a draft of Verity’s memoir that paints her as a sociopathic depressive capable of killing her own children, and, as it turns out, her son is a twin whose sister died before the accident that made Verity bedridden. At this point, the director heightens the already creepy atmosphere with jump scares that make Lowen think Verity isn’t as comatose as she looks. Moreover, Jeremy is making serious moves on the younger writer that eventualy pay off.

Though Verity is seen in a lot of flashbacks derived from the memoir, Hathaway’s main presence as an actor is in those scenes where she portrays someone who is, in medical lingo, “non-responsive,” and for what it’s worth she’s the only convincing presence in the film, but that’s not to say Johnson and Hartnett do hack work, but rather that their characters are such poorly drawn suspense-movie stereotypes that nothing they do feels plausible. The requisite twists not only make no sense, they contradict one another in mounting succession until the end, when Hoover or the screenwriter, Nick Antosca, literally loses the plot. Potboilers should boil.

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Verity home page in Japanese

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Tokyo International Film Festival 2026

Posted on November 5, 2026 by philipbrasor

Here are links to the articles I wrote for the TIFF 2026 web site.

Shyrmauyq Q&A

The Great Spirit World Talk Show

Red Before Dawn Q&A

Trees Are Watching Q&A

Even If Hell Came Q&A

My Wife Cries Q&A

Angela Schanelec interview

Sister Brother Manhole Cover Q&A

Crosscut Asia+ Side by Side Symposium

Until the Day Ends Q&A

The Night That Binds Us Q&A

TIFF Lounge: An Evening of German Cinema

Ulrike Ottinger interview

Women’s Empowerment Talk: “Her Gaze”

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Review: Urchin and Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill

Posted on October 23, 2026 by philipbrasor

European filmmakers do addiction and homelessness better than their North American or Asian counterparts, mainly because they avoid the sentimentality and presumably requisite pathos often associated with depictions of both conditions. In terms of British representation, I’d like to think this quality has something to do with Ken Loach, who has made explorations of the indignities of living on the margins his metier, but it probably has more to do with British naturalism, a staple of UK cinematic style that stretches back before Kes. The UK actor Harris Dickinson has chosen to look squarely at both conditions in his debut directorial feature, Urchin, which focuses on one individual, Mike (Frank Dillane), who is already at the bottom when we see him, sleeping rough on a London sidewalk within earshot of a Christian street preacher who seems oblivious to his plight.

Dickinson, who also wrote the script, doesn’t provide any background on the twenty-something Mike except a tossed-aside comment that he was adopted, and we aren’t given any clue as to how he ended up in his situation. His panhandling method is totally ineffectual, thus lending creedence to the old saying that homelessness is hard work. Moreover, maintaining his habit, which seems to encompass both alcohol and any illicit drug, feels random and sloppy. He essentially hits up other junkies for scores, including a skinny guy named Nathan (Dickinson himself) who looks worse off than him. Eventually, he does the unspeakable and mugs a man who is trying to help him get a meal. He gets caught and sent to prison for 8 months, where he kicks his habit and seems ready to lead a straight life. Dickinson includes a rather lengthy scene in which a social worker explains to Mike his new digs in a halfway house and his mandatory counseling sessions, a scene that recalls the best kind of expository work by Loach. After Mike starts working at a cheap hotel in the kitchen, he seems on the road to recovery. He even manages to make friends with a pair of female co-workers who take him out for a night of karaoke that Dickinson stages for ultimate empathetic value.

But if you’ve seen this kind of story before, whether by Loach or anyone else, you know the routine: Mike will fall down and get back up and fall down again. His flaw is a total lack of courage when he has to confront his true nature, so when his counselor suggests he meet with the man he mugged, he disintegrates. Later, the same thing happens when he falls in love with a fellow worker named Andrea (Megan Northam), who is attracted to his wounded candor but soon realizes how immature he is. He flinches and that’s that. The movie’s rock is Frank Dillane, who subtly shows us Mike’s insecurities in ways that feel not only natural, but insightful. And then Dickinson compromises these choices with occasional cutaways to Mike’s fantasy world, which explain really nothing and, in the end, just makes it hard to decide if Mike has any future at all. Probably not.

The singer-songwriter Judee Sill was herself homeless for a time and a junkie for most of her adult existence. She died from drug-related causes at the age of 35 in 1979. These aspects of her life were not hidden. If anything, she talked about them openly, even enthusiastically (she also admitted to being a prostitute, though some people who knew her felt she often resorted to hyperbole). The documentary Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill does a good job of connecting Sill’s personal problems to the uniqueness of her songs, even if it’s a bit pokey in execution.

A native Californian whose father owned a tavern with a piano, Sill was mostly self-taught as a musician, but after her father died when she was only 6 her mother remarried a man who reportedly abused her, so she ran away and fell in with a bunch of street thieves. In a juvenile reformatory she got into gospel music, which not only juiced her piano-playing skills but gave her religion that she never shook. However, after getting out her mother died of alcoholism and, unwilling to live with her stepfather, ran away again, this time shacking up with jazz musicians—she supposedly turned into a wicked bass player—who used big time. After quickly developing a $150-a-day habit she was busted repeatedly. It was at this point, around 1968, that she became a singer-songwriter and started hanging out at the clubs on the Sunset Strip, where a young David Geffen found her odd songs fusing spiritual ecstasy with romantic longing, classical-style melodies, and exaggerated vowels compelling enough to help her get an agent. Some years later when Geffen launched Asylum Records, the premiere Laurel Canyon folk-rock sanctuary, Sill was the first artist he signed.

Plenty of famous contemporary talking heads, including Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, and J.D. Souther, a former lover, attest to Sill’s musical genius. Her journals, which are reproduced graphically, contain reams of self-lacerating prose that reveal she knew just how great she was but would never be able to break through in a commercial way. It takes someone like Linda Ronstadt (interviewed over the phone) to point out that Sill, who was not “conventionally beautiful” by the standards of early 70s rock-related show biz, was difficult to promote by Geffen or anybody else, and so while her more successful peers were in awe of her gifts, the public could not care less. For sure, her defeated nature fed her addictions, but it was the character of the business that denied her the living she deserved. Ironically or not, she is now revered as a foundational influence by many present-day indie folk artists, some of whom are also interviewed, including Natalie Mering (Weyes Blood) and Adrianne Lenker and Buck Meek of Big Thief, who sing her praises to high heaven. The movie isn’t likely to draw a lot of people, but those who see it will certainly want to check out her music, which is where its real value lies.

Urchin now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670).

Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill now playing in Tokyo at Yebisu Garden Cinema (0570-783-715).

Urchin home page in Japanese

Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill home page in Japanese

Urchin photo (c) Dream Space Films Ltd/British Broadcasting Corporation/The British Film Institute 2025

Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill photo (c) 2023 Onwards & Upwards LLC. Exclusively licensed to TAMT Co., Ltd. in Japan

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Review: Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom

Posted on October 22, 2026 by philipbrasor

In the stop-action claymation world of Nick Park’s Aardman Studio, pets and domesticated animals not only display more common sense than their human overlords, they often possess specific skills that would put tech bros like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg to shame. Gromit, the pet canine of inventor Wallace in Aardman’s most famous series, is arguably the genius behind the duo’s creations, and the more juvenile Shaun the Sheep, who first gained exposure in a Wallace & Gromit short, demonstrates similar talents in his new feature-length film, which is essentially a horror comedy, but part of the horror is what can go wrong with technology that is not properly vetted.

Timing is often everything with Aardman, and this latest adventure takes place before and during Halloween. The farm animals Shaun lives with are looking forward to the holiday when their dumb farmer-master accidentally destroys the pumpkin patch that Shaun has so lovingly cultivated. Deflated but not defeated, Shaun, using a science manual, concocts a growth formulation that will bring the pumpkins back to life quickly, but the process gets out of hand and the pumpkins grow to monstrous size. Moreover, some of the serum contaminates the farmer’s bathroom and gets into his own hair growth medication (he’s bald), and once the formula does its stuff too well, he essentially turns into Bigfoot; or that’s what the folks in town mistake him for, resulting in a Frankenstein-styled persecution campaign, complete with torches and pitchforks. The script mostly cycles through horror cliches for its jokes (watch out for the Psycho reference), but also finds time for Aardman’s typical sentimental side, which is mainly concentrated in the subplot of the local female veterinarian falling in love with the farmer even while he’s covered with fur and despite his intelligence issues.

Unlike the previous two Shaun features, this one feels more like the TV show, which is not a complaint. Essentially, the slight plot is there to string together the wildly inventive slapstick set pieces, something that Aardman has always excelled at. It should be noted that The Beast of Mossy Bottom was not directed by Park (Steve Cox and Matthew Walker, if you’re keeping score), which may explain the relative lack of cohesion. Few writer-directors in the animated world outside of Pixar possess Park’s totally harebrained approach to storytelling, best represented by his masterpiece The Wrong Trousers. Shaun is a spinoff, but a proud one.

Opens Oct. 23 in Tokyo at Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Shibuya Humax Cinema (03-3462-2539).

Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2026/Aardman Animations Ltd & Richard Davies

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A conversation with Neeraj Churi

Posted on October 17, 2026 by philipbrasor
Cactus Pears

Neeraj Churi is a UK-based Indian businessman who runs a company called Lotus Visual Productions, which provides production assistance and advice to independent filmmakers who address LGBTQ+ themes and characters.

Churi’s most well-known production is probably Cactus Pears, an Indian film about a young man who returns from the city to his home village to preside over the funeral of his father and in the process reacquaints himself with a childhood friend who, he soon surmises, is having casual sexual trysts with men who live in the vicinity. They reignite their friendship, which soon turns erotic, while both navigate the various familial and social pitfalls of the village culture. The film has won several awards over the past year or so, including the Grand Prix at last year’s Tokyo Filmex.

I met him in early October at the Busan International Film Festival, where two of his feature films were being screened. Lovers in the Blue Night centers on a Muslim couple living in Mumbai who are flood refugees from Bangladesh. The husband works as a rat killer while the wife does phone sex work at a night club. The husband eventually falls into a sexual relationship with a thief from the Untouchable caste.

The other movie Churi accompanied was About an Intimate Matter, which deals with two childhood friends living together in Kolkata. One teaches at a public secondary school. A student leaks some private FB photos of the teacher, who is then called before the school administration and interrogated about her private life, since it is assumed she is having an intimate relationship with another woman. The interrogations affect both her job and her relationship at home.

Our conversation took place at the guest lounge in the Busan Cinema Center.

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Review: Truth & Treason

Posted on October 16, 2026 by philipbrasor

Angel Studios is a production company that makes Christian-themed movies. Along with the seemingly requisite New Testament reenactments you also get things like Sound of Freedom, an action movie, according to their PR page, that’s about a “former government agent turned vigilante who embarks on a dangerous mission to rescue hundreds of children from traffickers,” which tends to sound more political in nature. This is the second Angel production I’ve seen centered on the true story of a German person who actively opposed Hitler during World War II. The first one, Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin, was about a Lutheran clergyman who took his faith’s pacifist dogma as gospel and thus not only refused to serve Hitler’s war machine but conspired in his assassination. Like that movie, Truth & Treason has English dialogue (spoken by mostly English actors), presumably because its target Christian-leaning audience is not the subtitle-reading type. Also like the previous movie its dramatic thrust is difficult to resist.

Our hero is Helmuth Hübener (Ewan Horrocks), a member of the Hitler Youth whose precociously fine prose style earns him an internship at City Hall at the tender age of 16. We see Helmuth clowning around with his pals, all of whom seem to dig American jazz, which, of course, is verboten in 1941 when the film opens; but Helmuth also dislikes bullies, thus preparing the viewer for his eventual anti-Fascist development as a political thinker. At first, Helmuth dedicates his literary skills to the fine art of bullshit, but after his older brother returns from France with a contraband short-wave radio, Helmuth starts listening to the BBC and becomes completely converted, convinced that Der Fuhrer is lying to the masses. However, the straw that breaks the camel’s back is when he notices how his Mormon-Jewish friend, Solomon, is persecuted by his very own bishop. Helmuth then turns into an underground pamphleteer, clandestinely turning out anti-Nazi screeds on red paper and soliciting like-minded friends to post them all over town. These notes attract the attention of the local Gestapo investigator, Mussener (Rupert Evans), who launches an all-out search for the author, thinking, of course, that it must be an academic of some seasoning since the style is sophisticated. It takes him time to come around to the truth that the red cards are being written and distributed by mere adolescents. 

Director Matt Whitaker employs a parallel narrative structure meant to rachet up the tension as Helmuth’s activities become more involved and Mussener slowly closes in. The story thus becomes a kind of detective tale on Mussener’s side and a breathless series of anti-authoritarian epiphanies on Helmuth’s, reinforced by the self-serving hypocrisy of the bishop of the Church of Latter Day Saints and the obvious use of torture against resisters to the Reich. In that regard, it’s effective as melodrama but deficient in introspection. All the characters’ motivations are right there on the surface so when the hammer comes down, it comes down exactly when and where you expect it to. Unlike with Bonhoeffer, in which the doomed protagonist is given plenty of opportunity to contemplate his small place in the universe, Truth & Treason gives us a hero whose overriding impulse to do right springs from youthful hubris. Ironically, it seems to be the older, more cynical Mussener, whose philosophical nature has been compromised by his loyalty to a corrupt state, who expresses the most human qualities in the face of Helmuth’s truth-telling. Helmuth remains a sincere Christian stalwart to the end—protective of his friends, defiant toward Nazi bullies—but comes across more as a scriptwriting construct than a genuine human being. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978).

Truth & Treason home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 Truth&Treason, LLC

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Busan International Film Festival 2026, Oct. 12

Posted on October 12, 2026 by philipbrasor

For some reason I didn’t have any trouble getting tickets to the movies I wanted to see yesterday, my last full day at the festival. Of course, since it was my last full day, I spent half of it in the video library trying to catch up on some movies I didn’t get to see over the previous 5 days. I was surprised that only about half the Competition films were available in the video library. I would think those would be the films they want to promote the most.

I’ve only seen two Competition films, and one was yesterday: Ibuku, from Indonesia. The title means “my mother,” but the character whose mother is described only appears in the beginning and at the end. She is a young Indonesian woman who has been imprisoned in Saudi Arabia for killing her employer, purportedly to save her honor. Sri went to SA as a migrant worker to escape an abusive marriage that was forced upon her by her parents. Her father has already committed suicide, presumably due to his gambling debts, and the titular mother, Sum, does nothing but struggle to survive. Sri leaves the country because she doesn’t think her mother supports her leaving her husband, but the bulk of the movie just shows Sum’s struggle, and then her desperate attempt to raise money when she discovers her daughter’s plight. It’s a fairly standard Southeast Asia melodrama, though it has a kind of twist ending I found compelling, in that Sum’s ultimate sacrifice is not for her daughter, but for her community, making it all the more moving.

I’m a fan of Asgher Farhadi, even his previous French language feature, The Past, though I didn’t see his last movie, which was in Spanish. Parallel Tales screened in Competition at Cannes and received mostly bad reviews, so I wasn’t expecting much. And, yeah, it isn’t half as good as some of his best Iranian stuff, but I found it entertaining. Isabelle Huppert plays a cantankerous novelist who lives in squalor in a nice Paris apartment. She derives inspiration for her latest book by spying on the apartment across the street, where three people do sound effects for movies and videos. She essentially makes up a story about their various love lives. Into her own life comes a young, supposedly rehabilitated thief who her niece has hired to help her clean up the apartment to prepare for its sale, and this guy somehow inserts himself into the cross-neighborhood situation, causing heaps of trouble in the process. The biggest complaint I’ve read is that none of this is even vaguely plausible, though I still thought Farhadi got the disparate pieces to fit together fairly snugly. And it’s got a pretty impressive cast. Other than Huppert there’s Vincent Cassel, Catherine Deneuve (as Huppert’s snooty editor), and Virginie Efira, whom I saw the day before in All of a Sudden.

Speaking of Iranian masters, I watched On the Road With Abbas Kiorastami in the video room. A documentary put together from various videotapes the late Kiorastami recorded while driving around the country revisiting some of his most famous filming locations, it has a rambunctious, mischievous air to it. Since he was famous for using non-professional actors, he tends to run into many of the people who were in his films, now living lives that are slightly elevated since they were once in a Kiarostami production. On hand in a lot of these clips is his former assistant, Jafar Panahi, who’s like the crew’s class clown, mugging and carrying on for the camera. It’s mostly a film for film nerds, because it doesn’t really reveal anything about Korastami’s methods or even his feelings about movies; though he’s always saying things like, “that boy’s face is perfect for the cinema” and commenting on how photogenic a landscape is. He’s also naturally great with kids. 

The last movie I saw seemed an appropriate closer. Homesick is a documentary by the Danish filmmaker Tanya Sorensen, who was adopted from Korea as a baby by a Danish couple in the late 80s. The movie is essentially an attempt to come to terms with her heritage, which she has slowly pieced together over the years even though she has never been able to meet her birth mother face-to-face. Though Sorensen does a good job of explaining how the Korean adoption system essentially trafficked in babies, she also puts to the lie the cliche that these babies had better opportunities by being adopted to so-called first world countries. Sorensen’s adopted parents divorced before she was 2, and then her father, a violent man, destroyed a second marriage before drinking himself to death, leaving her alone. I wasn’t too crazy about the stylistic touches that tried to connect the director to her Korean heritage, but it’s a very powerful indictment of the paternalistic state.

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Busan International Film Festival 2026, Oct. 11

Posted on October 11, 2026 by philipbrasor

I was finally able to see Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden yesterday at the only screening that would be taking place while I’m in Busan. I had missed it when it opened in Japan and, since it is mostly in French, decided it would be better to see it with English rather than Japanese subtitles. Of course, I was unable to get tickets through the guest ticket system, so I arrived early to wait in line for any empty seats. And it’s a good thing I got there early. More than 20 people ended up in line. I was #3, and when they finally counted the empty seats 15 minutes after the film started there were only 5, so I made it.

Fifteen minutes is a fairly big chunk, but All of a Sudden is three hours and 15 minutes, so not as big a chunk, relatively speaking, as it would be for a shorter film. It’s easy to get into, especially in the beginning, which takes place at a for-profit nursing home in Paris, where the manager has implemented a care system that privileges the elderly person’s “humanity” by treating their dementia seriously and adjusting the care to make sure they are not only comfortable but also engaged. The conflict arises when money comes into it, not to mention human resources, because the caregiving staff have to be trained to carry out this system and that takes time and money that the owners don’t want to spend. 

However, that’s just the starting point. The manager, Marie-Lou, is understandably frustrated by the pushback she gets when trying to make the system work and by accident meets a Japanese director, Mari, who is staging a theater piece in Paris. The theater piece deals with the idea that the so-called insane are not really that different from so-called normal people, and it speaks directly to Marie-Lou’s predicament. She corners Mari and they have a long discussion into the night that takes in everything from late stage capitalism (complete with white board presentation) to the behavioral changes that accompany aging. As it turns out, Mari is at the end of her own life because she has stage 4 cancer and could die at any time (thus the title). Some of the movie’s narrative premises are, on the surface, outlandish (both principals are fluent in each other’s language), but Hamaguchi makes them work through the strength of his convictions. In the end, it is simply a moving story about the bonds of friendship, and how they can actually transcend life itself.

I also saw two Iranian films. The first, Majid Majidi’s Midday Meal, is in the Competition Section and seems to have a good chance of winning, given the buzz around it. There aren’t that many Iranian fiction features at this year’s festival, and some of them were made outside of Iran because of either their subject matter or the director’s status vis-a-vis the government. Majidi’s movie seems relatively safe in that regard, and harkens back to the classic pre-millennial Iranian cinema, which addressed social problems by subsuming them in children’s stories. Midday Meal is about a village teacher who struggles to keep his school open after the regional “benefactor” cancels their support for school meals. Most of the kids, it turns out, are mainly coming to class for these meals, and once they are no longer available, they drop out, thus threatening the school’s existence, because the education ministry won’t fund a school if the classroom size falls below a certain number.

The teacher desperately tries to raise money so that he and his mother can feed the children themselves, and the movie credibly sets up one barrier after another to make these projects more and more difficult. In the end, the teacher resorts to subterfuge that feels almost immoral, and Majidi keeps the stakes high. It’s a great script, one that never feels strained for credibility despite its desperate reach for melodrama. 

The other Iranian film was completely different. Head to Head was made by a woman director, and the film’s protagonist is also a woman director, who is making a samizdat film at a relative’s residential compound featuring men wearing women’s clothing. The plot or even concept of her film is never explained, but she insists that the male actors stay in costume even while off camera, a directive that eventually makes them annoyed since the scarves on their heads are so stifling. That, in fact, seems to be the director’s point, and she becomes dictatorial in her insistence that they never remove their scarves. At first, this dynamic is played for all its comic potential, but about halfway through, after a police raid (mainly to arrest the female crew, who go about their jobs without any headwear; and not the men in hijabs, who, as it turns out, aren’t breaking any laws), the story turns serious and even scary. Though I’m pretty sure the movie was made in Iran, it would have had to have been made in secret, like the film-within-the-film. And it is pretty provocative.

The last film I saw was Revolving Lanterns, a Japanese documentary about a man who returns to his home town in Fukushima Prefecture after many years living in Tokyo. The earthquake and tsunami convinced him that he needed to reclaim his roots, but his town is in the mountains, and only contains 500 people, 70% of whom are over 65. I was expecting a fairly stylized, even abstract treatment of the area’s natural beauty, but it’s mostly the director hanging around old folks and getting their opinions on life in Fukushima and life in general. It’s very well made but has little value beyond its ability to capture a very small community’s vibe, which turns out to be not that special. It could easily be shown on NHK, though I’m sure NHK would insist on more voiceover narration. 

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