It struck me yesterday that this may be the first edition of BIFF I’ve attended where there is not one new Hong Sangsoo movie. In fact, usually there’s two. It’s difficult to believe they didn’t invite his newest, What Does That Nature Say to You. I’m not sure about his feelings toward BIFF. Often he doesn’t show up for the festival and just sends the cast to do the Q&As. 

The reason it struck me is because I thought of Hong Sangsoo while watching Zhang Lu’s Gloaming in Luomu, which is in the Competition section. Like Hong’s movies it’s mostly wry dialogue and little in the way of plotting, and many of the characters drink a lot. Unlike Hong’s movies, it wasn’t very interesting. One reason I like watching Hong’s movies at BIFF is the audience. They laugh all the time, and I’ve learned to appreciated Korean humor through his movies. When I’ve watched his movies in Japan, either at festivals or at press screenings, the Japanese viewers in attendance almost never laugh. During Lu’s movie, which is about a young woman visiting the titular tourist spot because a boyfriend who ghosted her once sent her a postcard from the place, there was scattered laughter at certain points, and I assume it was the Mandarin speakers in the audience, but the jokes, while I got them, didn’t make the kind of impression on me that Hong’s do. I liked Zhang’s last movie, The Shadowless Tower, which delved into one man’s middle age dilemma in a believable way. I couldn’t figure out what exactly this woman was trying to do.

The other three movies I saw were much better. Maze is a Korean indie by a new filmmaker. It’s a good mystery that keeps its secrets well hidden until the appropriate time and then reveals just enough to keep you further intrigued. A woman who works for a detective agency quits and then offers to help a man whose request for help was turned down by the agency. He wants the woman to follow a certain man whom he say he’s never met, and give him pertinent information. The woman does this and, of course, ends up getting caught up in the conflict between these two men. The movie is mainly about depression, a condition that film is not particularly good at explaining, but through incident Maze somehow conveys the feeling in a palpable way. It’s probably too low key for stone mystery fans, but it shows a distinctive talent. 

Another feature debut was the Taiwanese Competition entry Girl, though the director, Shu Qi, is a movie veteran, having starred in most of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s later movies. It’s a kind of coming-of-age story set in the early 80s. The titular girl lives with her mother, step-father, and younger sister in a precarious relationship. Apparently, the girl’s real father knocked up her mother when she was a teenager, and the step-father then married her to take away the shame, but he’s an abusive drunk and the mother seems unable to get out of the marriage, so the girl starts acting out and is eventually exiled from the home. Though the story is pretty common, Shu gives it a slightly surreal edge and doesn’t skimp on the brutality, which can sometimes be nightmarish. As befitting an actor-turned-director, the performances are excellent. 

But my favorite movie yesterday was Ikaino, a documentary about the area in Osaka that is home to a huge Zainichi enclave, meaning Koreans who were born and raised in Japan. Though much of the information in the movie I already knew, especially the historical stuff, I found it an excellent primer on the Zainichi experience, since it interviewed so many old people whose memory of what went down in the 30s, 40s, and 50s is still good. The movie is a Korean production with a Korean director, and he delves deep into the racism that has hallmarked the Zainichi experience, though almost all the interlocutors in the movie speak Japanese. It did an especially good job of showing how the situation has changed for third and fourth-generation Zainichi, who don’t feel as much pressure to naturalize, though many do. The problem is still the government, which still bureaucratically discriminates against them, but now that Korean culture has a hip cachet in Japan, most young Zainichi lives are easier, but not as easy as they should be.