As usual, I retreated earlier than usual on my last day of the festival. I leave tomorrow morning very, very early, and I’m hoping the subway gets me to the airport on time. The first train is 5:21 am, and my flight is at 7:50. I estimate that I can get to the airport at around 6:10, which wouldn’t normally be a problem, but last time the line to get through security was ridiculously long. But that was during a holiday. I’m seriously thinking about taking a taxi, but I still have some money left on my transportation card. Some habits are difficult to shake.

I saw two movies in the video library this morning. The first, 10s Across the Borders, purports to be a Southeast Asian version of Paris Is Burning, the classic doc about the Ballroom Voguing scene that was born in New York in the 80s. This doc, from a Singapore-based filmmaker, shows how the Ballroom craze spread in Southeast Asia, specifically the Philippines, Malaysia, and Thailand. The doc is impressive in explaining not only how the scene developed in Asia, but how “houses” from New York were sort of franchised in these countries by devotees who perfected their moves in local Ballroom competitions in order to pay their way to New York where their efforts were blessed by the originators of the form and then sent back to Asia. Interestingly, the two most famous and successful franchisees are hetero cis women from Japan and the Philippines. Ballroom, of course, was initiated by Black and Latino trans women in New York, and the scene has always been closely associated with the LGBTQ community. The dancers that dominate the doc are gay men from Thailand—Sun is a BIPOC whose mother was a Thai sex worker and father is Norwegian—and Malaysia. More than Paris Is Burning, 10s Across the Borders feels like a music doc. The tracks are extreme bangers and director Chan Sze-wei captures the dancing with an expert feeling for how it relates to the music. The movie is a banger, too.

Without Permission is one of those film that list Iran as a country of origin, but, like Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just and Accident, it has no official approval from the Iranian authorities, as the title indicates. It’s an odd film in that it starts out feeling like a documentary and then turns into something completely different. The director, acknowledging right from the start that he was never going to gain permission to film in Iran the movie he had in mind, explains that he would have to do it clandestinely. His avatar on the screen is an actor who plays a director who lives overseas and returns to Iran as a “visitor,” and then starts auditioning children to act in his movie, which is about the restrictions he has to face as an Iranian filmmaker. Referencing Kiarostami at length, the movie shows how early classic Iranian cinema concentrated on children’s stories so that the directors could put across their ideas about what Iranian society was really like. Without Permission is basically a gloss on that idea, though I, for one, found it confusing in the beginning since it didn’t make its purposes clear. The avatar director’s idea is a movie that shows children coming to terms with what they perceive as romantic love and trying to act it out on screen, but, of course, the director’s plan is eventually caught out, first by an enraged parent, and then the authorities, who take the director into custody to find out his real motives. A subplot involves the director’s AD, a woman who is trying to separate from her husband because the man she fell in love with doesn’t seem to exist any more. Confusing but provocative nonetheless.

The best movie I saw today, and maybe the best of the festival for me, was Left-Handed Girl, directed by Taiwanese filmmaker Tsou Shih-ching, who is Sean Baker’s AD. In fact, Baker not only produced the movie, but edited and co-wrote it. And you can see his signature style in every scene, which is not meant to take anything away from Tsou. The movie is about a family of females—single mother Shu-fen, who is starting over in Taipei with a food stall, and teen daughter I-Ann and preschooler I-Jing, who is the titular southpaw. Gradually, we come to understand their circumstances, how Shu-fen’s husband abandoned them with debt and mostly messed up the life of former ace student I-Ann in the process. I-Jing’s provenance remains a mystery until the end, and I’m kicking myself for not catching on to the solution. but along the way, the movie has both an honesty in its depiction of women’s lives in Taiwan and a passion for filmmaking rigor. It’s a real movie in that it keeps you enthralled through every unlikely development. 

I finished the day in perfect style by meeting Korean director Shin Suwon for coffee. I wrote about her new movie, The Mutation (the Korean title translates as Birth of Love), in an earlier post. She explained the origin of the story, which is actually a novel that wasn’t written by her (she has published fiction in the past) and how she came to adapt it for the screen. I was most interested in hearing about the lead actor who played the Korean Black man who knows nothing except Korea. It turns out he is, in fact, a Korean who speaks no English, though, unlike the character in the movie, he knows his father, a Nigerian national who apparently spoke English around the house. However, his son resisted speaking English for reasons that can probably be ascertained. But like the character in the movie, he has also had to contend with discrimination from other Koreans and Suwon used much of his experience when writing the script. He mainly works as a model and has never acted before. Suwon asked me about the dialogue since she was afraid that some of the expressions used by the Koreans in referring to the Black protagonist would be offensive to subtitle readers, but I assured her they were appropriate in getting her point across. More significantly, when I asked her if she had any indication if the movie might be released in Japan (it’s already been picked up by Finecut, a respected foreign sales agent in Korea), she said she was afraid that the lesbian portion of the story might make it difficult. I don’t think it would be a problem, but maybe I’m naive.