I almost missed Filmex this year. I received a message in my Gmail inbox while the Tokyo International Film Festival was going on, reminding me to apply for a press pass. I managed to submit the application just under the deadline, but I completely forgot about it until two weeks ago, just a couple of days before Filmex was supposed to start. I hadn’t received any confirmation for my application so I thought the festival had messed up or turned me down. I considered the latter possibility unlikely since they had approved me last year even though I hadn’t attended Filmex for many years. So I wrote them a note asking what was up and almost as soon as I hit the send button thought maybe I should check my Gmail spam folder, something I rarely do, and, sure enough, the approval notification was there. As with last year they didn’t accept me as a press person but gave me a general pass, for which I had to pay a fee of ¥3,000.

This year the festival returned proper to Asahi Hall on the 11th floor of what I still refer to as the Mullion Building in Ginza after spending last year mostly at the Toei Theater across the street, which has since been closed. My pass only allowed me to see films at Asahi and not at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho, which means I only attended on opening day and the weekends, since those were the only times Asahi Hall was used. Asahi isn’t the best place to watch movies—the screen is set far back from the front of the stage and the sight lines aren’t the best, but the sound is good.

Because Shozo Ichiyama, the TIFF programmer who launched Filmex as a more Asia art house-oriented mini-fest, has since gone back to TIFF only one of the usual Filmex suspects had a movie screened this year: Tsai Ming-Liang’s latest docudrama, Back Home, which I didn’t see, even though I used to be a big fan of his work. His latest stuff just seems like variations on an inert theme—usually someone going about a tedious task. I had hoped Filmex would show Hong Sangsoo’s latest film, since he’s a festival fixture, like Amos Gitai (whose latest Ichiyama snagged for TIFF) and Jia Zhangke, that you can always count on, but not this year. 

Still, the selection was compelling, and there were a few films that were at Busan that I wanted to see but didn’t get the chance to. One was the opening film, Cai Shangjun’s The Sun Rises On Us All, which won the Best Actress award at Venice for Xin Zhilei. I don’t know who she was up against, but she probably deserved it, considering what she had to work with. She plays Meiyun, a woman in her late 30s who is reluctantly pregnant since the father is a married man. While at the hospital, where she learns of the viability of the baby, she runs into her old lover, Baoshu (Zhang Songwen), who avoids her like the plague. Obviously shaken, Meiyun tries to forget the encounter but can’t and eventually goes back to the hospital where he’s being treated for stage four stomach cancer. Despite his obvious determination not to talk to her, she forces her way back into his life and even brings him back to her tiny apartment since he doesn’t have any money or support, having been recently released from prison after serving a sentence for manslaughter. Over the course of the movie we slowly learn that he went to jail for her and that she abandoned him in time. Now she hopes to make up for her actions, which she admits were callous and self-serving. Her affair with the married guy obviously can’t survive her bid at redemption, but while Xin and Zhang go full speed ahead into their respective turns at self-lacerating guilt and toxic resentment, Cai doesn’t seem to know where it’s all headed. When it’s emotionally hot it’s white hot, but it sort of fizzles out as the narrative conviction fades. What I found most interesting was the workings of the Chinese medical system, which are predictably Byzantine even though the people who operate it are quite empathetic. In other Chinese movies, doctors and nurses are usually presented as being hung up on procedure that has no room for a bedside manner. 

The closing film was also Chinese: Huo Meng’s apparently autobiographical Living the Land, which premiered at Berlin. Set in 1991 in an agricultural region of China that most people would consider pre-modern, since all the farmwork is done by hand and there is absolutely no machinery, the film is told from the POV of 10-year-old Chuang (Wang Shang), whose parents have joined the rural exodus to the big cities of the south for factory work, leaving him in the care of his grandparents and other relatives. Though normally such abandonment would be treated melodramatically, Chuang adjusts quickly and naturally to his new surroundings, and Huo presents it all in with unhurried deference to the rhythms of the village. Though there are veiled and sometimes pointed allusions to the political eruptions of the past, including the unearthing of remains of people killed during the Great Leap Forward, for the most part time seems to have overlooked this corner of the continent, and the dramas are domestic and intermural: marriages, deaths, gossip, and neighborly bickerings. And, of course, there is always the battle with nature, which here is complicated near the end when the big bad world comes calling in the form of oil prospectors, meaning that the land will now have a completely different use that may obviate the need for people whose only life has been connecting with the soil. Though there’s nothing particularly novel about Living the Land, Huo’s own proximity to the material is economically conveyed and is thus deeply felt by the viewer, which makes it remarkable in its own way.

I saw two movies centered on high school girls. Amoeba is set in Singapore. Its director, Tan Siyou, said during the post-screening Q&A that the film hasn’t been screened in Singapore yet and most likely won’t be. I confess to being somewhat out of the loop when it comes to the city-state’s political situation, but the implication is that the strict authoritatian nature of the private girls school depicted is a reflection of the Singaporean government. The protagonist is Choo (Ranice Tay) a transfer student who apparently dropped out of the educational system for a spell. Bristling with attitude, she attracts the attention of three other like-minded students who form a “gang” as a means of venting their displeasure at the school’s tyrannical insistence on propriety. What’s interesting is that the school’s educational dogma is based on Confucianism, which is inherently hierarchical, so the rebelliousness of the gang seems custom made to appeal to Western sensibilities. Nevertheless, the gang’s idea of being “bad” is limited to mild smoking and drinking, speaking English in an American vernacular (in class they speak Mandarin), and making videotapes on which they crudely dunk on teachers and administration. It’s this latter recreation that gets them in hot water when the video is leaked, thus compromising the future chances of some of the gang who hope to advance to something better, even if Tan’s directorial outlook remains resolutely bleak. As she told the audience, she herself went through such an education and had to go abroad to satisfy her need to express herself. Of the four girls, only Choo seems capable of that kind of assertiveness.

The other high school movie had a narrower thematic focus and was the better for it. Yoon Ga-eun’s The World of Love is set in a Korean coed school, so the sexual element that tends to be central to stories of adolescence had more meaning than it did in Amoeba, which for all its insistence on being iconoclastic was relatively chaste. Unlike the gang members of Amoeba, Ju-in (Seo Soo-bin) is a lively, curious teenage girl who seems to get along with everyone, including her teachers and a boyfriend with whom she makes out with typical first-love fervor. Ju-in lives with her divorced mother and younger brother, and comes across as extremely well-adjusted, but there’s also something off about her cheerfulness, and as the story continues we notice not only the cracks in her facade but slowly come to understand that something untoward lurks behind her family life. The character setting these suspicions alight is a male classmate who is circulating a petition to prevent a convicted sex offender from gaining early release from prison and returning to their community. All the students sign the the petition except Ju-in, who objects to some of the wording in the document. The vehemence of her position leads to scandalization of the student body and teaching faculty, and Ju-in must try and protect herself and her family from the prying eyes of the community itself. Though its story is a bit too meticulously plotted, The World of Love is very effective in showing how well-kept secrets can blow up in ways that are more devastating than the purport of what they’re hiding.

Two years ago I saw Indonesian director Mouly Surya talk at the Tokyo International Film Festival about her opus, This City is a Battlefield, which was still unfinished but had been in development for years. One of the reasons work had been postponed was that she was offered the directing job for the Netflix action film Trigger Warning, and whatever she learned on that assignment, the action scenes in Battlefield are impressive, especially the opening scene showing Indonesian underground guerilla forces after the war fighting against the returning Dutch colonists and their British allies on the streets of Jakarta. It’s all very tense and bloody. Taken from a famous novel that during the post-screening Q&A at least one person in the audience admitted to reading, the movie displays fairly sophisticated production values even if Surya herself admits she struggled mightily with a tight budget. At the forefront of the anti-colonialist struggle is a trio of locals: violin teacher Isa (Chicco Jerikho), his wife Fatimah (Ariel Tatum), and their best friend Hazil (Jerome Kurnia), with whom Fatimah is sleeping, presumably because Isa is impotent. It’s a hackneyed premise that doesn’t fit that neatly into the sizzling intrigue that pushes the plot, which develops toward the bold assassination of a Dutch VIP at a swanky nightclub where Isa and Hazil are performing Gershwin. (“Rhapsody in Blue” gets worked to death on the soundtrack) Surya does well with the period touches and maintains an oppressive atmosphere of paranoia, what with all the things that can go wrong with the assassination scheme, but the romantic fatalism gets the best of her in the end. 

Israeli director Nadav Lapid’s Yes was the outlier at the festival. It reportedly received a mixed reaction at Cannes, with boosters saying it was brash and inventive, while naysayers found its politics horribly muddled. After seeing it I leaned more toward the latter opinion. It certainly is original in both presentation and outlook. A musician named Y (Ariel Bronz) and his wife Yasmine (Efrat Dor) lead a life of shameless hedonism by livening up rich people’s parties with acts of wild abandon. Following the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023, Y is approached by a shady agent representing an even shadier foreigner who wants to commission Y to write a new nationalistic anthem, a task that he throws himself into with all the fervor of someone who doesn’t believe in anything except his own bullshit. The subsequent retaliation against Gaza remains pretty much offscreen, though Lapid is careful to keep it within earshot, so to speak. It’s obvious what the director’s aims are, since his lampooning of Israeli capitalism and received values is pretty ripe, but sometimes his bombastic methods work against themselves. The most powerful scene is the one where Y’s ex-lover describes the Hamas massacre in graphic detail. Lapid offers nothing to balance it out except long shots of smoke rising from somewhere in Gaza. 

The last movie I saw at the festival in a way does balance out the message of Yes. Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk is a documentary by exiled Iranian director Sepideh Farsi mad up of video chats she had with 24-year-old Palestinian photographer Fatma Hassona during the siege of Gaza from June 2024 to April 2025. It’s a harrowing and heartbreaking film that I will discuss in detail later this week in this blog when it opens theatrically in Tokyo.