philipbrasor.com

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.

The Japanese constitution, like the American one on which it was modeled, guarantees the people the right to be happy, a rather amorphous concept that’s difficult to pin down legally, but usually it is interpreted to mean that everyone should be able to live their life the way they want to as long as it doesn’t violate another person’s right to live their life the way they want to. During the climactic courtroom scene in this feature film about the 1964 trial of a gynecologist for providing gender assignment surgery for trans women, the main witness, a trans woman who had been a patient of the defendant, was asked by the judge if she was “happy,” and she replies that she thinks she is, but that her idea of happiness may not be the same as another person’s. 

Though the witness, whose name is Sachi and is played by the trans actor Miyu Nakagawa, isn’t saying anything particularly profound, in the context of the trial and, by extension, the movie itself, the remark’s ramifications are clear: Who exactly is Sachi hurting by wanting to live her life as a woman? And why should the doctor be punished by making her wish come true? That is, in fact, the kernel of the case, which takes place in 1964, since the police arrested Dr. Akagi (Takashi Yamanaka) not because he provided sex change operations, but because many of his patients were “blue boys,” the local slang for male prostitutes, some of whom were trans women. Prostitution was illegal, but since the law defined prostitution as a transaction between a man and a woman, male prostitutes who served men weren’t doing anything illegal. Even if the blue boys arrested had undergone gender assignment surgery, legally they were still considered men and couldn’t be prosecuted for prostitution, so the police targeted the doctor who made the changes possible, charging him with violating drug and eugenics laws. If that doesn’t make complete sense, it’s mainly because Japanese law is quite malleable in the hands of people who wield it, but that really isn’t the aim of the movie, which is to explore the lives of trans women at the time and how they coped with social oppression. In that regard, Sachi is a ringer, because she is not a prostitute, and though she works as a waitress, she is not in the “water trade,” meaning the night time entertainment business where most of the other trans women in the movie are employed. The infinitely patient and sympathetic defense lawyer, Inaya (Ryo Nishikido), badgers Sachi into testifying because she aspires to be a “normal woman” in that she favors most of the so-called feminine attributes that were considered wholesome during that time. And, in fact, she is living with a man, Iwamura (Ko Maehara), who knows she is trans but wants to settle down with her in a traditional marriage-like situation even if it is legally impossible. 

Director Kasho Iizuka, who is a trans man, presents the case and the dramatic side stories in a straightforward way that highlights each character’s stake in the trial, which sometimes means the wider world gets shortchanged. We get a glance into Iwamura’s family life when his mother comes to visit and assumes Sachi is a woman, but the only real contrast to the demimonde depicted is Inaya’s home life, which is mainly provided to show how hard he’s working for his client. In fact, the hardest working people in the movie seem to be the tabloid reporters who sensationalize the trial in expected ways, drawing attention to the group of trans women (all of whom are played by trans actors) whose lives will be most affected by the outcome. That’s the focus of the drama, which entails tragedy and even some hilarity amid the persuasively staged sense of community. 

In Japanese. Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063).

Blue Boy Trial home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 Blue Boy Jiken Film Partners

The edit of this 2022 Korean movie intended for release outside of Korea contains opening title cards in English that glancingly refer to the Sewon ferry accident of 2014, a disaster that claimed the lives of hundreds of children who were on a school excursion. Presumably, Korean viewers don’t need this information to appreciate the story they are about to watch, which focuses on two best friends who are somehow connected to the incident, though the first-time director, actor Cho Hyun-chul, keeps the viewer constantly off balance by circling around the matter. On the surface, The Dream Songs is a reverie on youthful ardor, the kind that best friends can feel to the point of infatuation, and is similar in tone and purpose to another recent Korean movie, So Long, See You Tomorrow, which also explores the fraught relationship between two adolescent best friends. The differences, however, are more striking. The pair in The Dream Songs are female, the one in So Long male. And while both movies trade in the kind of what-if fantasias that only cinema can deliver, The Dream Songs actually feels like a dream with its hazy, soft-filtered photography and narrative non sequiturs.

The movie starts with Se-mi (Park Hye-soo) at her school desk waking from a dream in which she imagines her BFF Ha-eun (Kim Si-eun) dead. Panicked, she begs the rest of the day off from her teacher to visit Ha-eun, who is in the hospital recovering from injuries sustained in a run-in with a bicycle. Relieved that her friend is not only alive but seemingly recovered enough to leave the hospital, Se-mi tries to convince Hae-un to join the rest of the class on the following day’s big school trip to Jeju Island. Hae-un is not going, and not just because of her injury. She doesn’t have the cash for it, so she and Se-mi concoct a plan to sell an old camcorder gathering dust in Hae-un’s father’s study. This plan leads to a series of misadventures that are sometimes confusing in their blend of intrigue and serendipity, but reveal Se-mi’s bond with her friend as something deeper than infatuation. At one point, she spies a note in Ha-eun’s diary about a mystery person whom she seems to have a crush on and commits herself to finding out who it is. This mission causes a rift between the two friends that results in Hae-un’s disappearance and Se-mi’s reckoning with her own immaturity, which peaks during a brilliantly staged scene in a karaoke box as Se-mi’s interpretation of an over-wrought love song turns into something hair-raising. 

At some point, Cho, who also wrote the script, switches the nominal POV from Se-mi to Ha-eun and it takes the viewer a few minutes to adjust to the difference in sensibility. The movie becomes more melancholy, less impassioned in its emotional contours, and the viewer comes to an organic realization as to what the movie is trying to say—not tuned to plot machinations or sudden revelations but rather to a change in feeling that’s steeped in meaning. The digressions about lost pets and mistaken stalkers make sense not in a logical way, but in how they point to truths that should have been obvious all along. Part of the mystery has to do with teen attitudes. Cho lets his young actors live in their age-appropriate speech, which we in the audience can only partly penetrate; but not understanding what each remark is specifically supposed to convey doesn’t shut us out of their world because the movie’s meaning transcends language. It’s a dream that attempts to assuage the lingering pain of loss with memories of what love really felt like. 

In Korean. Opens Nov. 14 in Tokyo at Shibuya White Cine Quinto (03-6712-7225).

The Dream Songs home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2021 Film Young Inc.