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 a film festival, this timely collaboration from a … more »
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 the decades. While these have largely been purists mourning the … more »
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 »
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