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 to be free from the shackles of her extremely … more »
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 of taste, or to political considerations such as pride, which … more »
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 Asian programming, as with last year, there’s at least a … more »
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 support his new life in Japan starts to catch up … more »
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 tale as a well-behaved arthouse thriller complete with revenge and … more »
Ash is Purest White (Jia Zhangke, China/France 2018)
Since his mid-career lane switch in 2013, Jia Zhangke has ditched the sluggish arthouse gloom that made him a brand in favour of speedier genre exploits to stay relevant. Still intact … more »
Graves Without a Name (Panh Rithy, Cambodia/France 2018)
Panh Rithy’s latest documentary in his stable of Cambodia-centric films ranks as one of his saddest titles within his lifetime’s duty to document critical aspects of the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal reign during … more »
When a British newspaper interviewing Kore-eda Hirokazu in 2015 asked how he felt about his signature family dramas often being compared to those of the late Ozu Yasujiro, the respected Japanese director countered that he thought his films were more … more »
Running 6-16 September 2018, the Toronto International Film Festival’s 43rd edition offers a stunningly diminished number of Asian feature films—the fewest in at least the last several years. Although market vagaries and audience metrics may have conspired toward this … more »
