The assassination of President Park Chung-hee in 1979 has received a lot of cinematic attention in South Korea recently, as if some kind of floodgates were opened. Several years ago there was The Man Who Stood Next, which thoroughly probed the background of the killing, and last year there was the box office hit 12.12 The Day, which is also being screened at this year’s festival. A third film, Land of Happiness, opened two months ago in Korea and mainly focuses on the court martial of one army office who participated in the assassination. Curiously, it’s being shown at the festival as part of a Special Program dedicated to the films of actor Lee Sun-kyun, who committed suicide last year. It was Lee’s last film, and while he does play the soldier in question, he’s not the star, which is Cho Jung-seok, the actor who plays his lawyer. It’s quite a workout, in fact, and given Lee’s typically sullen acting demeanor, it surely overshadows the late actor’s performance. As for the film, it’s well made and jerks sufficient tears, but it seems the story has been over-fictionalized just for that purpose. More interesting is the casting of Yoo Jae-myung as General Chun Do-hwan, the man who led the post-assassination coup that is the story of 12.12, and as in 12.12 the producers decided to change his name, though everybody knows who he’s supposed to be. In that movie he was played by Hwang Jung-min as a mad villain, whereas Yoo sees him as a slick mafia figure whose evil is more sedate and cunning. It’s quite a contrast, and only proves how much the Korean film industry is willing to manipulate history in accordance with its aims. 

Evil of very different stripe is manifest in Black Box Diaries, Japanese journalist Shiori Ito’s documentary about the legal and psychological ordeal that followed her 2015 rape by veteran journalist Noriyuki Yamaguchi. Ito decided to direct the documentary herself, and while I’m not sure that was the best idea, she keeps the various facts and lines of development clear and incisive. Though most of the movie is in Japanese, the narration and titles are all in English, thus reflecting the fact that the producers are American and that it isn’t entirely certain the movie will have a Japanese audience. I spoke to the producer on Wednesday and he said that it would likely open in Japan in December, though Ito also told me there’s no guarantee yet, as if she’ll believe it when she sees it. The heart of the dramatic element is the police decision to not carry out the arrest warrant for Yamaguchi at the last minute, and the anonymous investigator who was in charge of the case tells Ito plainly that it was due to “pressure from above,” most likely Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whose hagiography, which Yamaguchi wrote, was scheduled to be published the same week as the arrest was to take place. Ito had no choice but to pursue a civil suit against Yamaguchi, which she eventually won, but it wasn’t easy, and she does an admirable job of explaining the nuts and bolts of her team’s legal strategy. 

Since Tibet isn’t a country but a region of China, the concept of a Tibetan diaspora would seem to be a given, and the omnibus film States of Statelessness explores by means of fiction filmmaking the shape this diaspora has taken. For the most part, Tibetans who left Tibet settled in northern India, and two of the stories take place there but reference relatives and friends of characters who are now living in North America and Europe. Naturally, the theme of exile dominates the four stories, written and directed by different people, and except for frequent mention and photographic representation of the Dalai Lama, the film has absolutely no political dimension. Nobody even mentions China. (I was offered an interview with some of the directors, but was told up front to not mention “politics”) Still, anything about exile automatically sparks in the viewer a desire to know the reason for the exile, and the stories focus on purely family matters: a daughter who is shut out of her mother’s funeral due to superstition; an artist who has a dustup with his wife because of a visit from a friend who has moved to the U.S.; a Tibetan boy who has lived in Wisconsin his whole life and is charged with bringing his father’s ashes back to his home town in India; and a Tibetan man who has settled in Vietnam after marrying a local woman. The presentation is uniformly bittersweet.

I always can find some Korean indie at the festival that is totally bonkers, and this year I chose So It Goes, which was a mistake. It’s basically Natural Born Killers with no budget. A young man and a young woman, who believe they are from a distant planet, go around casually killing people in the belief that life is pointless; except that they seem to get a kick out of it, which sort of messes up the motivation. There’s absolutely no structure or logic to the action, and the actors look as if they have received no direction, because in certain scenes they act at cross-purposes with one another. Put simply, it’s just amateur dross. I should have caught on by the snarky title.

The best film I saw yesterday was Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, which may be the last cinematic word on life in Mumbai, not to mention the most trenchant film I’ve ever seen on the situation surrounding Indian women, which is topical right now. There is no sexual violence in the movie, but Kapadia shows, through the relationship between three women who work in a hospital, how traditional roles shape their destinies in irrevocably negative ways. The main protagonist, Prabha (Kani Kusruti), is a veteran nurse who some years ago was forced by her parents into an arranged marriage, after which her husband moved alone to Germany for work and has broken complete contact with her, thus leaving her in legal and emotional limbo. Anu (Divya Prabha) is a younger, more free-spirited nurse who is having a clandestine affair with a Muslim young man while her parents ply her with possible fiancees. And Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) is a widowed cook who is socially non-existent, because her late husband left her without any kind of meaningful documentation. Kapadia weaves poetry and magic realism into a story that incorporates the big city as a separate, identifiable character. As one person puts it, Mumbai is a dream to many people, but it’s really an illusion.