Busan International Film Festival 2025, Sept. 22, part 2

Posted on September 22, 2025 by philipbrasor

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.

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Busan International Film Festival 2025, Sept. 22

Posted on September 22, 2025 by philipbrasor

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. 

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Busan International Film Festival 2025, Sept. 21

Posted on September 21, 2025 by philipbrasor

I finally saw Kokuho yesterday. I’m not on Toho’s mailing list so I wasn’t invited to any press screenings for the movie, and I didn’t catch it after it was released three months ago. I didn’t even know much about it until last month after it had stealthily risen on the Japanese box office chart to claim the top position, where it remains at this moment. Now it’s all the media talks about in Japan. It hasn’t been released here in Korea yet, but word-of-mouth is spreading, and Japanese films do pretty well here, which is both surprising and not surprising, so I assume it will be a hit here, too. I had heard mixed things about it from my friends in Japan, and, in a sense, it met whatever expectations I had of it. For those who aren’t familiar, the story, based on a famous novel, is about the son of a yakuza don who, in the 60s, is adopted by a renowned Kabuki actor and rises to the top of the Kabuki world as an onnagata (specialist in female roles), eventually overtaking the career of the Kabuki master’s own son and presumed heir. It’s supremely watchable and the Kabuki elements are incorporated smoothly and intelligently. It isn’t very deep, though, and mostly gets carried away with dramatic things that should be obvious, the most prominent being the treatment of seshu, or family succession. I would think that could be a topic ripe for extensive exploration in the Kabuki world, but the movie only skimmed the surface and approached the idea of an interloper dishonestly, because there are so many big stars in Kabuki who are adopted like Kikuo. Also, the script could have done so much more with the subtext of a Kabuki actor born into the criminal underworld, but it only used it as a plot point. 

At a completely different remove, Shin Suwon’s The Mutation demonstrated the director’s usual wily intelligence with a story that had a slightly fantastical edge, though in the end it was pretty conventional. I’ve always liked Shin’s work, especially her early, more daring stuff, like Pluto and Madonna; and her last movie, Hommage, was a genuine tour de force. The mutation of the title is a Black man named Se-oh, who was born and raised in Korea by Korean parents. He’s constantly mistaken for “an American or an African,” as he points out, but speaks no English and only knows Korea. His origin is the movie’s central mystery because his mother, before she died, always insisted she never slept with a Black man, so Se-oh must be a mutation of some kind. Constitutionally sullen, Se-oh embarks on a mystery journey and enlists the companionship of a woman named Sora, who is also recovering from a loss, the death of her female lover, who, we assume, committed suicide because of her own mother’s shock and resentment at her sexual orientation. The movie is quiet and doesn’t make a big deal out its characters’ disappointments, and I wish that the story didn’t feel so contrived in spots—epiphanies occur just when they are supposed to. I hope there’s an audience for it beyond Shin’s own devoted fan base.

The other two movies I saw were intense action films. The festival is showing the International Version of The Old Woman with the Knife, which has played a bunch of festivals this year to much acclaim. The premise is all there in the title: an old woman who is a legendary assassin. The world depicted in the movie is pure fantasy: the old woman, nicknamed Hornclaw, works for a secret corporation that carries out hits on contract. When the woman first joined the group as a young woman, the group only took cases to “exterminate pests,” meaning the victim had to be some kind of terrible person. Now, however, the group takes almost any job for money, which distresses Hornclaw but doesn’t make her want to quit. Then the group hires a young punk with considerable skills and a bloodthirsty attitude, who seems to have designs on Hornclaw. The action is predictably brutal and relentless, and the plot takes a few too many left turns on its way to an ending that doesn’t make as much sense as the director thinks it does.

The Furious, another kung fu battle movie that endeavors to revive the Hong Kong action genre, is extreme to the max. Though it’s the director’s feature debut, he’s worked as a stunt coordinator in Hong Kong for many years, and the experience shows in the intricate choreography. Even more surprising, the director, Kenji Tanigaki, is Japanese, a nationality that is pretty rare in the HK film industry. During the post-screening Q&A, Tanigaki expounded at length on the pedigree of his film, since it was made in Bangkok and filled with action stars from throughout Southeast Asia. The movie’s almost defensively generic action movie plot seems to be almost a joke, and Tanigaki was keen to suggest that it doesn’t really matter. Basically, a big corporation headed by an evil Japanese guy runs a human trafficking operation that targets children. When a Chinese handyman living in the unnamed Southeast Asian city discovers his daughter had been abducted, he goes to any length to get her back, and that includes single-handedly vanquishing hordes of goons with knives, pipes, and axes. Actually, he’s helped by a guy whose wife was investigating the abductions as a journalist and goes missing. The fight scenes are so fast, intricate, and complicated—and long!—that the audience at the screening erupted in cheers several times, and at the end of the film they practically gave Tanigaki a standing ovation, something I’ve never seen at Busan and probably never will, but this was the closest. 

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Busan International Film Festival 2025, Sept. 20

Posted on September 20, 2025 by philipbrasor

I spoke to two people yesterday who have been working with and within the Korean film industry for a number of years, and both pretty much thought the new Competition Section of the festival is not going to achieve what the festival hopes it will. This is the first year that BIFF has had a Competition Section outside of the New Currents Award, which is for indie art films by emerging filmmakers. The idea of a Competition Section is mainly to gain attention from the media, who like nothing better than a battle. I’ve always admired BIFF because it took itself seriously as the premiere Asian film festival and didn’t bother with stunts like competitions. It just showed quality films. But apparently the festival has hit a wall after COVID and the film industry itself is crumbling, so they have to do something. The trouble is, all the highest quality Asian films try first to get into competitions at the big Western festivals, so there are few left for Busan. Consequently, the films in the BIFF Competition are mostly also-rans, which isn’t to say they aren’t good, but rather that, like the movies that are in the Tokyo International Film Festival Competition Section, nobody really cares that much about them. The two people I talked to said as much.

One of the Competition films I saw yesterday may be a case in point. En Route To is an earnest Korean indie youth film that tackles some weighty issues with a distinctive dramatic flair, but it’s probably not original enough to make a bid impression. A girl attending a boarding high school is knocked up by her teacher, who then disappears after he learns the girl is pregnant. The girl decides to get an abortion, thinking if she does, the teacher will come back, but she has no money for the pills she has to buy illegally on the internet, so she steals money from her roommate, who sells vape liquids to fellow students under the table. This series of events leads to a kind of bitter friendship between the two girls, especially since the roommate is the daughter of a single mother—an illegitimate child who thinks the other girl is better off getting rid of the baby, but then the other girl changes her mind. Besides dealing with its tricky themes frankly and honestly, the movie is always surprising in the choices it makes, though in the end the story becomes a bit too contrived. Everything doesn’t have to fit into place so perfectly.

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Busan International Film Festival 2025, Sept. 19

Posted on September 19, 2025 by philipbrasor

Been plagued by technical problems ever since I arrived. I bought a Wow card, which you can charge with any denomination of currency and use pretty much everywhere in Korea, including public transportation, which is what I bought it for. The first day it wouldn’t work and I had to go to the station office and they explained to me that I had to set up part of the card just for transportation. It took me a while to figure out how to do that but I finally did. Then, one of my email accounts doesn’t work at all here, not on my phone nor on my computer. It’s always worked here before, so I don’t know what the problem is. Then there’s the ticketing system, which was changed. I haven’t had too much trouble getting the tickets through the online system, though the first day I felt like one of those K-pop fans trying to get a ticket to their favorite idol’s concert. The problem came when I had to pull up the mobile ticket on my phone at the entrance to the theater. It just wouldn’t come up. Fortunately, a volunteer who spoke English believed my story and let me into the theater after the movie started. I had no problem at the next screening, but this morning it happened again, though I was finally able to produce the ticket by logging out and turning off my phone and then starting the whole procedure again. I got in with a minute to spare.

I attended the press conference for Jafar Panahi, who won this year’s Asian Filmmaker Award. As he pointed out a number of times, he was at the first BIFF in 1996 and has been here a half dozen times since, but there was a long gap when he couldn’t attend because he was either in jail or forbidden to leave Iran. The press conference took place before the press screening of his latest film, the Palme d’Or winner It Was Just an Accident, so he didn’t talk much about the film. He talked at length about the movie being submitted for an Oscar the day before yesterday. None of his movies have ever been in Oscar contention because the Academy receives nominations from countries, not individuals or producers, and in Iran Panahi is persona non grata. But this year, France was gracious enough to submit his film because it’s one of the producing countries. I don’t know what that means for France’s submission of a French-language film, because it didn’t come up. He also talked at length about the regime’s ban on his filmmaking activities and how he resisted. “My co-writer was put in jail and just got out,” he said. “He’s spent one-fourth of his life in prison. Under a dictatorship, you must find a way to make the films you want to make; you have to pay for this struggle.”

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Review: The Phoenician Scheme

Posted on September 19, 2025 by philipbrasor

As a comic filmmaker, Wes Anderson often doesn’t seem to be in on his own jokes. His overly fussy sets and precise camera movements feel so intense that it’s the intenseness that evinces laughs rather than what’s actually going on in the story. In his latest concoction, Benicio del Toro plays Zsa-zsa Korda, a very rich international arms merchant who is constantly the target of assassination attempts, which he just barely escapes. Despite the character’s name and del Toro’s somewhat exotic makeup, not to mention the extreme globetrotting that takes place throughout the film, Korda seems American through and through. With each additional brush with death, he gets closer to religion, a position Anderson has fun with by inserting what he calls a “Biblical troupe,” including F. Murray Abraham, Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Bill Murray as God, judging Korda for his mortal and venal sins. It’s obvious these sketches are all in his head, but guilt is a powerful thing and the plot revolves around his scheme to achieve redemption, presumably for all the suffering he’s caused through his business dealings.

However, in order to do this he has to finalize those business dealings still in play and appoint an heir. Though he has nine sons who live in close proximity, he chooses his estranged daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton), who is about to take her vows as a nun. She goes along with his morally dodgy scheme because she somehow thinks she can change his evil ways during the process, which is so hurriedly explained as to be meaningless in terms of plot motivations. What it does is set in motion a series of encounters centered on transactions with other shady characters who Korda wants to finance his scheme, most of whom he has dealt with in the past. And while the individual set pieces are also funny, they feel so dramatically cut off from one another that their only real purpose seems to be to allow another A-list star to take part in the film, a methodology that has become synonymous with Anderson. These stars include Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Mathieu Amalric, Jeffrey Wright, Scarlett Johansson, and Benedict Cumberbatch looking like someone you would never imagine him playing. 

Anderson’s films are always a cornucopia of colorful characters and odd sequences, but it’s difficult to sort out what exactly is going on in the movie because there’s just so much stuff, and the whole theme of regaining one’s soul gets lost in the highjinks. In order to make sense of it you have to keep your eye on Korda—or, more precisely, del Toro playing Korda—in order to determine just how seriously he takes all this soul-searching. My estimate is: not very much. One of Anderson’s strong points is creating characters with distinctive personalities that stay with you, and Korda, while clearly an intelligent man who knows the real price of his impact on the world, is obviously out to cheat fate and get into heaven without actually changing his evil ways. That Anderson can get us to not only understand this impulse but actually grow fond of the guy during the course of the movie is a rare accomplishment. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978), Shibuya Parco White Cine Quinto (03-6712-7225), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

The Phoenician Scheme home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 TPS Productions LLC & Focus Features LLC

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Busan International Film Festival 2025, Sept. 18

Posted on September 19, 2025 by philipbrasor

Fairly smooth trip from Narita to Busan yesterday—except when I got to Korean immigration, which was packed. I’ve never waited that long before, and consequently, I wasn’t able to get to the Cinema Center before the badge desk closed to pick up my press credentials. They close at 3 pm, which seems pretty early for the first day of the festival, but I guess it’s because they need everyone to work the opening ceremony.

Which I attended. Naturally, the red carpet introductions went on way too long and the ceremony itself was pretty boring. Lee Byung-hun was the emcee, and he was affable and all, but the script was terrible, just filled with cliches about the glory of cinema. I can appreciate how far the festival has come in 30 years, but there was this whole subtext to the speeches that implied Busan was a lowly backwater in 1996, and maybe it was, but they should have mentioned that once and let it be.

The only reason I endured the ceremony was to watch the opening film, which stars Lee: Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice. This was the Korean premiere (the World Premiere was Venice, where it got raves), so it was a big deal. The movie opens wide in Korea next week, I think, and pre-sales have hit a record. It’s very good. And very strange. I was expecting a black comedy but not one as convoluted as this. In a sense, it’s about how a man can be driven insane by his reliance on routine. Lee’s character loses his job at a paper manufacturer and can’t countenance working for any other industry. As it happens, several other “pulp men” have also lost their jobs at other paper companies and are looking for work, so he endeavors to knock them off in wild and woolly ways. They all can’t imagine toiling for anything except paper, which is a great metaphor that Park plays up brilliantly. It’s also about the fragility of Korean masculinity, a common enough theme in Korean movies but the twist that Park and Lee give it here is unique. I’ll have to see it again.

It didn’t end until almost 11:30, so I had to rush back to the beach for the Opening Reception, which wasn’t as crowded as it usually is. There was way too much food. I hope they didn’t throw it all away.

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Review: The Monkey

Posted on September 18, 2025 by philipbrasor

The best thing about Osgood Perkins’ adaptation of the Stephen King short story is the titular toy, whose malevolent intentions are obvious just by looking at its sick grin and wide-open eyes. Unlike the windup monkey you’re more likely to imagine, this one doesn’t play crash cymbals, but rather a drum, and as soon as it starts striking those skins someone in the vicinity dies a comically horrible death. Perkins, who made the deliciously demented but dramatically uneven serial killer movie, Daddy Longlegs, knows how to get the viewer’s motor running, and opens with what amounts to an origin story, with a U.S. military officer played by Adam Scott desperately trying to return the toy to some Southeast Asian emporium and, in the process, causing the disembowelment of the proprietor, who apparently didn’t know what his merchandise was capable of. It’s the first of many crass jokes and a pretty effective one. 

This officer is married and has twin sons (Christian Convery), and for reasons unexplained he abandons them. Inevitably the boys discover the toy in the closet and turn the key, which leads to a number of deaths. As it turns out, one of the twins hates the other for the bully that he is and thinks he can use the monkey to get rid of him, but that’s not the way things work (“It doesn’t take requests”), and in the process it’s the boys’ mother (Tatiana Maslany) who dies. Skip ahead two decades after the twins, adopted by their aunt and uncle, a pair of swingers, throw the cursed simian down a well and we find them estranged and still suffering separately for what happened. The more sensitive one, Hal (Theo James), is divorced and trying to forge a relationship with his adolescent son, Petey (Colin O’Brien), whom he sees only once a year so as to keep him as far away from the monkey’s telepathic attention. Right on cue, his toxic brother, Bill (also James), calls him and says he has learned that the monkey has somehow returned and plans to get rid of it once and for all. As it turns out, the toy has come into the possession of a weirdo named Rick (Rohan Campbell), who knows it’s something special but unaware exactly how special. When Bill steals it from him, Rick attempts to get it back and, literally, all hell breaks loose.

It would be easy to dismiss The Monkey as a piss-take on the Final Destination series, but King’s characteristically clever plotting and Perkins’ witty direction combine to emphasize the nihilism at the core of the best horror movies. We all will die, after all, hopefully not as spectacularly as the unfortunate people in this movie, but random death is more of a fact of life than we would like to believe. That is basically Hal’s and Bill’s curse, which is why they are so monumentally and permanently traumatized. Osgood, the son of Tony “Norman Bates” Perkins, who died of AIDS, and actress Berry Berenson, who perished in the September 11 terrorist attacks, knows whereof he directs. 

Opens Sept. 19 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011, Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), and from Sept. 26 at Kadokawa Cinema Yurakucho (03-6268-0015).

The Monkey home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 C2 Motion Picture Group, LLC

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Review: Black Dog

Posted on September 17, 2025 by philipbrasor

Lots of cliches move the emotional gears of this Chinese film, which won the top prize in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. The titular canine is an extreme outcast in a former mining town fitfully undergoing redevelopment on the eve of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The main character, an almost mute ex-con who has returned to the town, finds a job rounding up the numerous strays that get in the way of the redevelopment, and then bonds with a nameless, impossibly skinny black mutt: Two souls who find in each other a kindred spirit by default. Director Guan Hu demonstrates a genuine talent for framing action, though he gets an inordinate amount of assistance from the setting. This gray, disintegrating burg is perhaps the most depressing municipality in a Chinese movie since those communities abandoned to the Three Gorges dam project in Still Life by Jia Zhangke, who appears in Black Dog as the local extralegal fixer. 

Lang (Eddie Peng) isn’t hated by everyone in town; only the butcher who blames him for the death of his nephew, the act that landed him in prison, though from what we learn it was mainly the nephew’s fault. Most residents remember Lang as a once-promising rock musician and stunt motorcyclist who worked in a local circus. With his father dying in a hospital and a sister who moved away, Lang has no family for support but gets by on the goodwill of good people, of which there seem to be many in this blighted place. The black stray has no such support, since he tends to bite people and everyone thinks he has rabies. At first, Lang tries to catch him in order to claim the reward but the stray’s wily intelligence impresses him and after the inevitable capture he grows fond of the animal and even fashions a custom-made motorcycle sidecar for him. Meanwhile, his father asks Lang to help him die in peace as the town is slowly torn down. The animals in the zoo Lang’s father used to manage are set free and join the strays in taking over the ruined neighborhoods while everyone is out in the Gobi Desert watching the solar eclipse. Though it’s a motif that’s eye-rollingly obvious, Guan pulls it off with some incredibly staged tableaux.

Black Dog is the kind of neorealist melodrama that’s constantly preparing you for an epiphany, and while a lot of the devices feel worn—Lang’s extreme reticence adds nothing to the story and feels more like a gimmick for garnering sympathy—the movie’s uniform tone of despair works in the end by not overplaying the sentimentality. One reason is how intensely natural the dogs are. Even in packs they seem more disciplined as actors than the humans. 

In Mandarin. Opens Sept. 19 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Cinema Qualite (03-3352-5645).

Black Dog home page in Japanese

photo (c) The Seventh Art Pictures (Shanghai) Co., Ltd.

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Review: Take Me Somewhere Nice

Posted on September 13, 2025 by philipbrasor

Alma (Sara Luna Zoric), who appears to be around 20 years old, is a Bosnian national raised in the Netherlands by her single mother, who brought her to Northern Europe with her father. At some point, however, the father decided he was “homesick” and went back to Bosnia permanently. As Ena Sendijarevic’s movie opens, Alma is also about to go back to Bosnia, a country she doesn’t know, in order to visit her father, who is in the hospital. Her mother (Sanja Buric), who confesses to having given up on her husband a long time ago (it’s not clear if they ever actually divorced), will not accompany her, and so puts her in touch with Alma’s cousin, Emir (Ernad Prnjavorac), to meet her at the airport. So begins a peculiar road movie that doesn’t offer much in the way of surprises, even if, like me, you know little to nothing about Bosnia except that it was embroiled in a horrific war in the 90s.

That’s probably because movies that take place in Eastern Europe and are made by Eastern Europeans tend to have the same sort of semi-ironic tone. The Bosnia that presents itself to Alma is itching to be European and failing miserably. Emir, an intense beanpole of a guy, doesn’t have a job, per se, though he claims to get by on “odd jobs” that are not described to Alma, who is left to wander the tacky malls and old streets of Sarajevo while Emir is off on some errand. Locked out of his apartment, she meets Denis (Lazar Dragojevic), who claims to be Emir’s “intern,” in the hallway of Emir’s building, and they eventually make out like teenagers, even though at this point the viewer may wonder what’s in it for Alma, who so far has come off as supremely cynical and dry in her pronouncements about what it is she likes. In any event, neither of these two male specifmens are any help in getting Alma to the hospital where her father is, since it’s in another town, and she eventually takes a bus and gets lost without her suitcase, a predicament that feels trite in that it offers Sendijarevic the opportunity to introduce Alma to some weird, slightly dangerous characters from whom Emir and Denis rescue her, much to her chagrin. Further adventures ensue, including a final reckoning with Alma’s father, the pillaging of his property, the reclamation of a suitcase that isn’t Alma’s but is nevertheless filled with illicit drugs, and an unfortunate encounter with some impolite thugs.

Sendijarevic maintains the ironic tone with brio, but her admirable style doesn’t overcome the problem of the main character. Alma feels more like a vehicle than a protagonist, and in contradiction to the sunny title—perhaps the central irony?—she never expresses anything that might indicate she has the capacity to enjoy herself. When she snuggles up to Denis or even Emir in a bit of incestuous hanky-panky it seems to be more for our delectation than for any reasons having to do with character development. Througout the movie Alma is dressed provocatively in mini-dresses and T-shirts, a portrait of nubile lassitude with no inner life. The optimistic ending doesn’t make us hopeful for Alma, because she hasn’t grown during the time we’ve spent with her. 

In Bosnian, Dutch and English. Now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).

Take Me Somewhere Nice home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2019 (Pupkin)

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