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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.