Aloners (Hong Sung-eun, South Korea 2021) Introverted and independent Jin-a (Gong Seung-yeon) works as a top customer service agent in a Seoul call centre, resides alone, and is content with shutting …
One year ago, TIFF was planning its first-ever modified edition just as a third wave of the pandemic was about to decimate Ontario and much of Canada. Burdened with the …
76 Days (Anonymous, Chen Weixi & Wu Hao, USA 2020) Remarkable for being one of the first documentary features about Covid-19 off the assembly line—and also the first to screen at …
Enter “cinema is dead” in a search engine and get ready to smile at a list of film personalities who have been declaring the death of cinema with regularity over …
Lightning has struck twice for South Korean cinema because when it reigns, it pours. Last year, Lee Chang-dong’s Burning premiered at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival to rave reviews, started …
37 Seconds (HIKARI, Japan/USA 2019) An astonishing directorial debut from Osaka-born filmmaker HIKARI, this moving coming-of-age drama is about Yuma (Kayama Mei), a skilled manga artist with cerebral palsy who desires …
Asian films that first premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival each February tend not to travel to Toronto in September. The reasons vary, but it’s often down to matters …
Asian films at the 44th Toronto International Film Festival (5-15 September 2019) are holding steady at less than twenty titles. Although the figure reveals a chronic flatlining of the festival’s …
Chikaura Kei’s confident debut feature is the story of a Chinese economic migrant whose shaky existence begins to unravel after a string of deceits and crimes he has committed to …
Full spoilers ahead. If there was any doubt about what kind of genre Murakami Haruki’s 1983 short story Barn Burning is, writer-director Lee Chang-Dong has called it by adapting the …