I hadn’t been to Filmex since 2015, owing mainly to the fact that for a while after co-founder Shozo Ichiyama resumed his role of chief programmer at the Tokyo International Film Festival, the two events overlapped to a certain extent. During and after the pandemic they were even held simultaneously. I had essentially gotten out of the habit of applying for a press pass, since I used to attend as the representative writer for EL Magazine (given that I was the only writer for EL Magazine, it went without saying) and EL stopped publishing in 2017. 

But this year the temporal gap between TIFF and Filmex (Nov. 23-Dec. 1) was several weeks, and there were a few movies at the latter that I had missed at the Busan International Film Festival, so I thought I’d return. Besides, they were celebrating their 25th anniversary. Alas, they didn’t accept this blog as reason enough to grant me a press pass, but they did give me a general pass (usually for industry people) for a nominal fee, so I was in. The more difficult part came when ticketing started and those with passes were asked to apply online through the ticketing platform that Filmex had contracted with. Unlike the similar system used by BIFF, applicants were required to register using their smartphones (with BIFF, any device would do), and while I do have a Japanese carrier, which is also required (thus blocking out foreign press and guests), for some reason my phone was unable to complete the “authentication” process needed to get into the system. Apparently, it had something to do with my carrier, Rakuten, which the fine print in the instructions warned me might make it difficult for me to sign up. I followed the extra instructions in the fine print but to no avail. Several days before the festival was to start, I still was unable to reserve tickets to the screenings I wanted to see and contacted the press rep at Filmex, who told me that ticketing issues could only be solved by the ticketing platform but that Filmex also had a means of reserving tickets online for those without phones. I filled out the spreadsheet with the names of the films I wanted to see and waited…and waited. No response. I sent another email and got no reply, so I went back to the fine print on the ticketing platform, which said at the very end that if all the stated remedies still didn’t yield success then I could call a number on the phone for authentication. The number was in the U.S. and that’s what I did. I got a recording and a prompt to type in a four-digit number sent to my registered email address and then I was in. 

I made all my ticket reservations hoping the screenings were not sold out yet, but I needn’t have worried. Of all the screenings I attended most were only half filled, and none had attendance over 70 percent. Part of the reason may be the venue: all the main screenings were at Marunouchi Toei, one of the last classic movie palaces in Tokyo (a balcony!), but still pretty old. Some of the screenings took place at smaller “mini-theaters,” but those were not accessible with my pass. In any case, I didn’t see many other people with passes at the screenings and only one or two I actually knew. 

Though I spotted Ichiyama hanging around during the festival, he wasn’t listed as a programmer. Still, his original mission for Filmex seems to be intact: showcasing mostly vanguard Asian and Japanese art films and a handful of European features. One complaint I’ve always heard about Filmex from others is that Ichiyama tends to highlight the same directors every year, which is not a problem for me since I like those director as well. This year, that club was represented by Jia Zhangke, Hong Sangsoo, and Lou Ye. I’d already seen Jia’s Caught By the Tides, the opening film, at BIFF so I was able to skip that (just as well, since the Filmex print didn’t have English subtitles). I did catch Hong’s By the Stream, the closing film, which wasn’t shown at this year’s BIFF for some reason, as well as Lou Ye’s An Unfinished Film. Lou was on the jury for the Filmex competition, which An Unfinished Film was not a part of, obviously.

Due to logistics, I only got to see eight films, and the only true dud was the Japanese feature, The Gesuidouz, about a hapless punk band led by a female lead singer who intends to commit suicide on a certain date, more or less as a kind of aesthetic gesture—not punk so much as Euro-nihilistic—but the group becomes a hit in its own way. I found it utterly amateurish in the worst way. Nominally a comedy, the movie’s jokes were not funny and, in any case, only make sense to Japanese viewers; the music was disposable; the storyline baffling. Even the post-screening Q&A, which the director did not attend, was a flat bore. 

I was most impressed by the two Indian films I saw, both of which, like the best film I’ve seen so far this year, All We Imagine As Light, were directed by women. Santosh, by the Indian-British director Sandyha Suri, is another harsh study of Indian gender discrimination but presented as a police procedural. A rookie female officer is caught up in the rape-murder case of a woman from a lower caste, forcing her to address her own prejudices toward marginalized social groups and the cruelties that Indian society in general are so quick to inflict on them. During the Q&A Suri said that, as a British production, it has been submitted by the UK as its representative for an International Feature Oscar, since it’s all in Hindi, thus giving India perhaps two possible Oscar nominees. I sort of doubt that. Then there was the debut feature by Shuchi Talati, Girls Will Be Girls, an English-language movie set at a private boarding school in the Himalayas during the 90s and centered on a teenage girl from a middle class family who is her class’s star pupil but also something of a klutz when it comes to social and personal matters. She takes up with a handsome transfer student who charms her mother in a way that makes her suspicious. The frankness and humor of the script make it a very different kind of coming-of-age story, one that conveys a bracingly unconventional take on adolescent desire. 

The two Chinese movies I saw, Ye’s An Unfinished Film and American director Elizabeth Lo’s documentary Mistress Dispeller, were necessarily quite different from each other though they both managed to evoke up-to-the-minute portraits of Chinese society. Unfinished tried to pass itself off as a documentary, but it wasn’t. Set just before and during the pandemic in a hotel not far from Wuhan, it concerns a film crew that is trying to finish a queer underground film that was begun a decade earlier and never finished. The movie’s whole dramatic thrust swivels 180 degrees once the COVID virus is at large and the hotel is subjected to a strict lockdown. I found the change in tone so startling that I couldn’t quite adjust to the second half’s chilling sense of desperation, but it’s an impressive addition to Lou’s ouevre if only because it’s like nothing else he’s made. Mistress Dispeller‘s subject, on the other hand, is so specifically concerned with an arcane business practice that it often feels more like a mockumentary. The title refers to an actual profession: a person who is hired, almost always by a woman, to break up her spouse’s affair with another person. Though the mistress dispeller initially works on the problem as a kind of agent provocateur, her purposes are clear to everyone involved. The most interesting thing about the film is that all the principals agreed to be filmed and, eventually, presented to audiences. And while the movie is well made, its topic is way too narrow to offer any edifying value. 

The Hong Sangsoo was much better than his other 2024 release, A Traveler’s Needs, which I saw at BIFF. In fact, I’m tempted to say it’s one of his best, though that’s a difficult call when it comes to Hong since his movies are so similar in tone and theme. By the Stream is one of his more plot-driven films, concerning a retired actor who is requested by his university instructor niece to help her stage a student skit at a school festival. Hong manages to fit inappropriate sexual relations, political scandal, and the vagaries of academic life into his story without making them feel gratuitous or superfluous, all while presenting his usual alcohol-fueled discussions of life and lassitude. The best thing the movie’s got going for it is Kim Minhee, who plays the niece. As Hong’s production manager and life partner, she has more insight into the director’s methodology than any other actor and adapts to the emotional ebb and flow of the dialogue-heavy material naturally. 

Another director I’ve liked in the past and a regular Filmex fave, Tsai Ming-liang, born in Malaysia but based in Taiwan, had two films at the festival though both were interchangeable, being the final two installments of Tsai’s monumental “Walker” series, which started in 2012. All ten films depict Tsai’s eternal muse and lead actor, Lee Kang-sheng, dressed in the red robes of a Buddhist monk and walking very slowly and deliberately through various landscapes. Since the one I saw, Abiding Nowhere, was partly financed by the Smithsonian Institute, it takes place in Washington D.C. with Lee doing his ultra-slow motion thing through some of the city’s most famous landmarks. These tableaux are juxtaposed with another actor carrying out quotidian activities, such as making instant ramen. The purpose is extreme contrast, not only between the monk and the actor, but between the monk and the other people in his immediate environs, and while I admit a little of this goes a long way, there is something soothing about it all as a visual experience. You can easily doze off and wake up without missing anything.

The last film I saw at the festival, The Damned, by Italian director Roberto Minervini, was a curiously denatured Western about Union soldiers sent to the western territories of the U.S. during the Civil War to protect the area from who-knows-what. A cross between The Revenant and Aguirre, Wrath of God, the film’s action was purposely confounding as we were never told exactly who the faceless men were who attack the contingent, which is made up mostly of new recruits, both young and old. Stuck in the Montana wilderness in the dead of winter, those who are not killed by gunfire fall victim to the elements. Along the way, much philosophical water passes under the bridge in the dialogue, which was way too anachronistic for my tastes; and yet the movie has haunted me since I saw it. Minervini really knows how to capture the loneliness of displacement.

I missed two movies I now wish I had taken time out to see: the feverish Vietnamese reverie Viet & Nam, about two mineworkers who embark on a torrid love affair; and Blue Sun Palace, a film by Chinese-American director Constance Tsang about undocumented Chinese workers in Queens, New York. I assume they will be released in Japan sometime in the near future, because they seem to be receiving sufficient buzz.