With the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic, the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) has once again announced an adapted online programme for its 51st edition commencing on January 26 to February 6, 2022. The full festival programme for both audience and Press & Industry (P&I) is available here: https://iffr.com/en.
Here is an overview of the selection of Asian films screening this year at IFFR 2022:
Programme IFFR 2022
Anatomy of Time
Jakrawal Nilthamrong • Thailand
*P&I Selection 2022 – Harbour
Anatomy of Time begins with the ending: the death of Maem's beloved spouse, a merciless former Thai army officer who fell from grace late in his career. Alternating between past and present, filmmaker Jakrawal Nilthamrong's second feature film – his first, Vanishing Point, won him the Tiger Award in 2015 – tells the story of Maem, the daughter of a rural clockmaker. She is seen as a young woman yet to discover herself in the 1960s, and in her present role as her dying husband's loyal caretaker – a man now hated by the Thai people.
Battlecry
Yanakaya • Japan • International premiere
*P&I Selection 2022 – Harbour
Japan is in the grip of a new drug: Golden Monkey. This mysterious substance not only gives the user boundless energy, but also changes its victims into shadow monsters – the perfect cannon fodder for fighting wars. In the animated sci-fi drama Battlecry, Haya hopes to put an end to this crisis. The World Bank employee is helped in this by Soji, a soldier on leave with a troubled past. Like his new comrade, he desperately wants to restore Japan to its former glory. Flashbacks to the old days, interspersed through this detective-style story, underscore the pair's tragedy even more.
Dragon Inn
King Hu • Taiwan
The epitome of a 1960s wuxia movie. The storyline and characters in Dragon Inn are very simple, a triumph of Hu's distinctive style. The action centres on the comings and goings of a small guesthouse, with particular attention paid to the props and set. As the film progresses, characters move in and out of the guesthouse and the fighting becomes increasingly intense. The scenes are precisely executed and varied, never once becoming repetitive, despite the close focus on the guesthouse.
Hit the Road
Panah Panahi • Iran
*P&I Selection 2022 – Harbour
Seatbelt… Mirrors… Handbrake… Clutch… Father, leg in plaster on the back seat, growls driving instructions. His hyperenergetic young son dances and jumps around the car. They bicker about the ill dog in the trunk, but from the passenger seat mother mainly tries to keep things light. The eldest son drives this unruly group – to which he does not seem to entirely belong – in silence, through broad Iranian landscapes.
Korean Ghost Stories – Ieodo
Choi Sang-sik • South Korea • International premiere
*P&I Selection 2022 – Cinema Regained
Korean Ghost Stories was a popular TV series telling tales of the eerie and the uncanny. This episode took its inspiration from a legend that originated on Jeju island, whose inhabitants claim that fishermen who vanished around Socotra Rock (known as Ieodo in Korean) were now in an empire ruled by women who did not allow any man to leave. The legend, it seems, was popular in the 1970s.
Modern Korea: The Age of Beasts
Jeong Jae-eun • South Korea • International premiere
*P&I Selection 2022 – Cinema Regained
“We endured gender discrimination for a long time, and now we're starting to speak out.” Sound familiar? This is from a KBS talk show taped sometime in the 1980s/1990s, when the Republic of Korea was faced with a paradoxical situation: on the one hand, economic growth and social reforms had changed the situation of women in principle – but not in practice, as White Slavery was rampant and rape a widely downplayed crime, while men behaved grosso modo as if nothing had happened and blah-blah'ed about women as flowers and some such.
The Mole Song: Final
Takashi Miike • Japan
*P&I Selection 2022 – Harbour
Nipple-targeting seagulls. Old men rapping in a bathhouse. Drugs smuggled as Italian pasta. Welcome back to The Mole Song's world. The third and final part of this series of manga adaptations, by IFFR regular Takashi Miike, is once again loaded with delicious madness. Following Undercover Agent Reiji (IFFR 2014) and Hong Kong Capriccio (IFFR 2017), this time the enemies are Italian mafia smuggling their ‘speed-a-roni' into Yokohama's port. Yakuza boss Papilon, fearing for his business, wants to stop them from entering, and so do the Japanese cops: Reiji works for both as an undercover agent. All these complications give cult director Miike a playground for crazed subplots.
Urf
Geetika Narang Abbasi • India • World premiere
*P&I Selection 2022 – Cinema Regained
Lookalikes are as much part of Indian popular cinema's romance with stardom as the super celebrities they – sometimes more and sometimes less – resemble. The Juniors, as they are popularly referred to, live a paradoxical existence all of their own: if one meets Kishore Bhanushali on the streets, it is like time is out of joint, for he looks like Golden Age-icon Dev Anand – in the 1960s! It is fitting that Bhanushali is also a stand-up comedian, as the Juniors are in equal parts paeans to and parodies of the original stars. The Juniors even have their own films, which are often satirical revisions of beloved classics.
2022 Official Selection – Press & Industry
The P&I Selection includes titles selected for the Tiger Competition, Big Screen Competition and Ammodo Tiger Short Competition, with Harbour, Bright Future, Limelight, Cinema Regained, Short & Mid-length programmes and more.
Further details including access are available here: https://iffr.com/en/screeningroom
Tiger Competition
The Cloud Messenger
Rahat Mahajan • India
Uniforms, morning roll call, order, and discipline determine life at a prestigious boarding school somewhere in the Himalaya's misty foothills. 16-year-old Jaivardhana is not thriving in this authoritarian environment. An opportunity for temporary respite from this strict regime presents itself, when a former teacher visits the school and offers interested students a photography workshop. During Mr Sapru's inspiring lessons, the young people do not learn about depth of field or shutter speed, but they do learn to open their senses and experience the world around them.
To Love Again
Gao Linyang • China
Wearing identical dresses, the same bouquets and deliriously happy, older couples stride out of a communal wedding. In Xian, China, getting remarried en masse is nothing unusual. It is also a celebration of what was previously impossible owing to socio-economic conditions. Now, however, elderly couple Li and Nie are facing up to death. In small ways and big: a dying female friend has her eye on a potential suitor for her husband; their fridge breaks down; the grave of Li's deceased first wife has to be vacated. Guilt-ridden about her death, he gladly offers her a final resting place in the grave set aside for him and Nie. Maybe there will even be some space left, so Nie's late husband can join them? The wounds of the political upheavals of the past cut deep in this film that started so hopefully.
Yamabuki
Juichiro Yamasaki • Japan
A story of finding a place to root yourself when life's obstacles have dispirited you. Chang-su, a former equestrian athlete for the South Korean national team, was forced to give up on his dream early. He finds himself working at a quarry in the rural town of Maniwa in western Japan, where he lives with Minami and her infant daughter. Yamabuki, a teenage girl, begins to stage silent protests that blossom into community action, much to the dismay of her policeman father. The quiet surface of this rural town is gradually peeled off to reveal frustration and loneliness that, once given a voice, begin to connect people.
Big Screen Competition
Assault
Adilkhan Yerzhanov • Kazakhstan
Masked figures with machine guns march into the secondary school in Karatas, take the pupils hostage, and execute one of them. They make no demands. Silent terror is their modus operandi. Seeing as the army will take two days to arrive due to a snowstorm, maths teacher Tazshi decides to assemble his own assault team: his ex-wife, the gym teacher, the cowardly school principal, an alcoholic night watchman, the village idiot, and an incompetent chief of police.
The Harbour
Rajeev Ravi • India
In the Indian State of Kerala, a number of Communist parties still wield considerable power today. The basis for this was laid in the 1940s and 1950s, when left-wing leaders led an uprising against the oppression of workers and farmers. The divide-and-rule tactics, used by tyrannical bosses, was symbolised particularly by the ‘chappa' system, practised in the Mattancherry district of the port city of Kochi. This meant that day labourers were forced to fight one another for metal tokens entitling them to work. Union meetings were broken up by force.
Ammodo Tiger Short Competition
Nazarbazi
Maryam Tafakory • Iran
After the revolution in 1979, Iran prohibited the depiction of men and women touching on the silver screen. Since then, directors have relied on every cinematic trick in the book to mirror the ecstatic release of tension through touch – but often it is the game of glances that is enough to set a scene ablaze. Nazarbazi collages these saturated cinematic moments into a poem about Iranian film, that also echoes our own time of physical distancing.
Harbour
The Alleys
Bassel Ghandour • Jordan
In the streets and alleys of Eastern Amman, relations between the locals are determined by rumours and violence. Hustler Ali and Lana, the daughter of a beauty salon owner, are passionately in love, but have to keep this hidden. When Lana's mother, who disapproves of their relationship, falls victim to an unknown blackmailer who shows her a video of the young turtledoves, she turns to local gangster boss Abbas for help. This sets off a chain reaction of unforeseen, often shocking events involving several residents of the neighbourhood. And, has Ali made up his respectable foreign employer, or not?
Amrus Natalsya Who Recreates the Dispossessed in Twilight
Mahardhika Yudha • Indonesia
In 1965, Indonesian artist Amrus Natalsya was one of the many artists arrested during the violent purge of communists and their sympathisers, after the failed coup by the September 30th Movement. Natalsya was released in 1973. A film about political inspiration and a critical, humanist perspective; about shaking off imprisonment, surviving, and maintaining your own artistic convictions; about the painted low-relief panels so typical of Natalsya; about a prominent artist, for whom the 1945 revolution is far from completed.
Barbarian Invasion
Tan Chui Mui • Malaysia
Is it a comedy? An action film? A philosophical treatise? Barbarian Invasion is all of these, even if it starts off quietly – timidly almost. Li Yoon Moon drags her young son around with her; the sole purpose of his existence seems to be to exhaust his mother. She arrives to visit someone who at first seems to be an old friend, but we soon realise he is actually a director looking to cast her for his latest project. Are we going to make a Hong Sang-soo film, she asks? He is more interested in a Malaysian Bourne Identity, and asks her to undertake three months of intensive martial arts training for the role.
Cahiers noirs
Shlomi Elkabetz • Israel
One day, a fortune teller predicts that filmmaker Shlomi Elkabetz's beloved sister, actress and filmmaker Ronit Elkabetz will die young. Shlomi attempts to evade the grim prognosis during a night-time taxi ride through Paris. To no avail, it proves in this loving documentary.
Chavittu
Sajas Rahman, Shinos Rahman • India
Somewhere in the Indian state of Kerala, a theatre company prepares for its performance during festivities. They arrive early, rehearse their piece, and put the finishing touches to the scenery. This alternates with atmospheric scenes of men rehearsing, singing, and perfecting choreographies at a remote location in nature. In the meantime, the theatre slowly fills with other acts, family, and organisers who sometimes interfere with the theatre group. When evening has come at last, various acts are performed and speeches are given before the group can finally stand in the spotlights.
Crescent Night
Gurvinder Singh • India
After 15 years in prison, for committing a murder to save his father's honour, Modan returns to his village in Punjab. In his absence, the village's power structure has shifted towards a landowner, to the detriment of his family. Worse still, his brother is the landowner's lapdog.
Drown
Lim Sang-su • South Korea
Do-woo runs an old motel – adjacent to a lake with thousands of Korean War victims at its bottom – as well as caring for his mother who has dementia. One wintry day she disappears without a trace. In her stead, a cute little dog appears. Everyone helps kind-hearted, somewhat shy Do-woo search for her. However, when his mother is not found, rumours arise that he may have killed her. Has he started having doubts himself? It does not help that he swallowed her tranquillisers on the day she went missing, and cannot remember a thing.
Let Me Hear It Barefoot
Riho Kudo • Japan
Naomi, a student dropout, only believes in things he can touch. However, when he really wants to touch someone, he recoils. As is the case when he befriends Maki, a happy-go-lucky young man who lives with Midori, a blind woman who dreamily expounds about places she has never been. When Midori becomes seriously ill, Maki and Naomi send her tapes from an imaginary trip around the world. Their relationship becomes more intimate whilst recording, but they only dare engage in rough, painful horseplay.
Malik
Mahesh Narayanan • India
Ali Sulaiman is the godfather in Ramadally, a small Indian coastal town where Muslims and Christians live peacefully side by side. He has worked his way up by smuggling, and has given local society a big boost with a school and charitable work. Sulaiman is loved, but also feared and hated – even by his own family. While preparing to go on a pilgrimage, he is arrested on suspicion of the murder of a criminal competitor in a nearby town, long ago. The arrest unleashes a chain of violent events, intrigues, and memories of how he obtained his wealth.
On the Job: The Missing 8
Erik Matti • Philippines
Eight years on from his crime drama On the Job, filmmaker Erik Matti is back with another critique of corruption in the Philippines, that is at least as confrontational as the last. In the course of three-and-a-half hours, this follow-up shows how politicians, journalists and gangsters keep a depraved, merciless system going.
Special Delivery
Park Dae-min • South Korea
A car covered in dents, cracks, and blood spatters might not seem like a desirable object to most people, but Eun-ha sees it differently. In Special Delivery, she routinely picks up an old banger from the police station. And then puts the pedal to the metal. Eun-ha is a taxi driver who specialises in criminals and fugitives. This rough-and-ready driver has an arsenal of tricks and stunts for when robbers need the fastest possible getaway. And business is good – until a screaming kid bangs on her car door. His father has been taken by merciless debt collectors, so Eun-ha has little choice but to look after the young boy.
Bright Future
Blue Island
Chan Tze-woon • Hong Kong
Although the Chinese government promised that Hong Kong would retain separate status until 2047, in recent years the Chinese state has consolidated its power over the metropolis. Large-scale protests by the populace have been brutally suppressed. This mix of documentary, fiction, and visions of the future reveals the current state of desolate depression among the people of Hong Kong. “A desperate attempt to capture the final moments of a sinking island”, as maker Chan Tze-woon himself puts it.
Hawk's Muffin
Krishnendu Kalesh • India
A plane drops an atomic bomb, after which the pilot is ordered into hiding by the command centre. They have even rented a piece of jungle for him, where he starts a micro-community. However, a power struggle ensues between his half-blind granddaughter Ruby, the insomniac bodyguard, the priest appointed as her guardian by the pilot, and a policeman who says he is family. Things explode when Ruby befriends a mysterious stranger.
Journey to the West
Kong Dashan • China
One UFO sighting after another proves false. He has to beg for money to keep his space-exploration magazine afloat. There are no messages in the TV static. Nevertheless, Tang Zhijun continues to believe in alien life forms and heads to the mountainous southwest of China, to investigate after watching a mysterious online video. He is accompanied by a drunk, a girl with insomnia, and a cynical staffer. For Tang, the moment of truth comes when they meet a young poet in a village, who says he is in contact with aliens.
Kim Min-young of the Report Card
Lee Jae-eun, Lim Ji-sun • South Korea
This drily humorous, bittersweet tale about the rocky road to adulthood starts when students Jung-hee, Min-young and Sanna suspend their high school poetry club to concentrate on preparing for their finals. When they try to reconvene the meetings online after the summer, it becomes apparent how much they have all grown apart.
Zalava
Arsalan Amiri • Iran
Is a demon haunting Zalava? Young sergeant Massoud does not think so. It is 1978, in the wake of the Iranian revolution. Massoud has been summoned to the remote Iranian-Kurdish village of Zalava with the assignment to banish a demon. The village is inhabited by former nomads who are united in their strong superstitious beliefs.
Limelight
Love After Love
Ann Hui • China
When her parents move back to Shanghai, young Weilong decides to stay in Hong Kong to finish school. She moves in with her aunt, Mrs Liang, who leads a shadowy but very affluent life. She is a central player in the world of Hong Kong's pre-war beau monde. Innocent Weilong gradually falls under the influence of this environment full of rich ‘uncles' and mysterious women. Against her better judgment, she falls for the charming George: a playboy who has no plans to work or settle down.
Focus: Qiu Jiongjiong
A selection of films from one of China's most innovative artists and filmmakers are presented in this Focus programme.
Madame
This vibrant portrait of a trans performer who styles themself ‘Bilan de Linphel' (birth name Fan Qihui) is at the same time personally intimate and exhilaratingly expansive. It was filmed by Qiu Jiongjiong over a couple of days of interviews, plus several weeks recording their stage shows in Beijing. Episodes of confessional autobiography alternate with magnificent queer performances of torch-song standards. A tailor by trade, Fan is no lip-synching ‘impersonator': kohl-eyed, bearing a magnificent curly wig, they belt out the cynical, idealistic, broken-hearted, proudly defiant lyrics of jazzy numbers with a rawly expressive voice and an authority, a command of the stage that is awe-inspiring.
The Moon Palace
Qiu Jiongjiong's debut is a portrait of his father and the restaurant he ran for fourteen years. In this experimental black-and-white documentary, vivid evocations of Sichuan opera (including one about the great inebriated Tang poet Li Bai) alternate with elegies to wine by Qiu's father and reminiscences by Qiu's aunties about politics, art, persecution, and movie stars. Simulated interviews pastiched with non-synchronous sound, a superb hybrid score, and a curious dancing chicken round out this set of documentary gestures that magically coalesce into a patriarchal portrait that is rambunctious, probing, nostalgic, and critical.
Mr. Zhang Believes
Born into a Nationalist Kuomintang family in the 1930s, Zhang became a progressive young ‘leftist' and Communist Party supporter, after betraying his Nationalist father. Zhang joined the Communist Youth League and attended military college. Two years later, stigmatised by his family background, he lost his job and turned to journalism. In 1958, he was sentenced to five years' re-education through labour.
My Mother's Rhapsody
‘My mother' of the title is Lin Zhiguang, who is in fact the mother of director Qiu Jiongjiong's father. This thoroughly entertaining film is Qiu's expansive family chronicle, a documentary in the form of an art/folk tale. Lin, born to a wealthy family in 1926, lived through the Chinese civil war, the Communist Revolution, the Anti-Rightist Campaign, and more. A formidable seamstress, cook, and manager, she had seven children with her husband, Wang Junhui, the ticket seller for the famous itinerant Sichuan opera troupe, Xinyouxin.
A New Old Play
Qiu Jiongjiong's visually magnificent new film is a unique hybrid of fiction, historical reminiscence, and experimental theatre. Its overview of China from the 1930s to the 1980s is filtered through Qiu Yu, a Sichuan opera ‘clown' based on the director's own famous grandfather. As Qiu Yu negotiates his entry into Hades with two comic sidekicks, his departing soul reviews his childhood, his performances, family tragedies, and political perils.
Ode to Joy
An essential background for Qiu Jiongjiong's recent A New Old Play, this dazzlingly playful short documentary remixes a Sichuan opera company's dress rehearsal for its tribute to Qiu Fuxin, the director's grandfather – who was a legendary opera performer of ‘clown' comedic roles, and the real-life subject of A New Old Play. This exuberant celebration of a not-yet-lost past re-activates the memories of ageing, but irrepressibly vital, stage artists.
A Portrait of Mr. Huang
Part of Qiu Jiongjiong's ‘chatterbox' oral history trilogy, this short documentary focuses on current storyteller and ex-cop Huang Songnian. Qiu playfully splices montage cuts between Huang's wildly entertaining, sometimes very dark stories of intrepid forensic police work (including a super queasy tale of maggots and a body, and another of rural cannibalism), and disruptive yet oddly suitable Sichuan opera excerpts, pigeon portraits, and Qiu's charming chalk drawings.
Cinema Regained
Duvidha
Mani Kaul • India
Based on the eponymous Rajasthani folk-tale written by the venerable Vijaydan Detha, Duvidha is a deceptively complex story about a ghost who lives in a banyan tree. When he sees a newly-wed bride passing by on her way to her husband's ancestral house, the ghost is overcome with an uncontrollable desire. While the husband is pre-occupied with the pursuit of wealth, the tortured ghost plots a devious scheme involving supernatural identity theft in order to fulfil his dreams of love.
Short & Mid-length Film
Bagthan
Sunil Pandey • Nepal
As more and more people move to the cities, the director's grandfather tells him how once the residents of their village lured a tiger into a stone cage. Past and present seem to intertwine in this reflection on migration, tradition, and memory.
Crystallized Memory
Chonchanok Thanatteepwong • Thailand
After his father disappears, a monk's son spends a day and a night around the temple, where mysterious crystals have recently started growing on a bird's nest. Intimate conversations, reflections, and a shared meal help him put everything into perspective and let go of the past.
Eternal Melody
Niranjan Raj Bhetwal • Nepal
In her dreams, a devout woman is visited by her deceased husband, stranded in the liminal space between death and the afterlife. With her son, she embarks on a mystic errand to help him on his quest for salvation. Religion, spirituality, and the universal human condition are intricately woven in this tale about the agony of accepting loss, while navigating the dissonance between letting go and holding onto that which has passed.
How to Improve the World
Nguyen Trinh Thi • Vietnam
How to Improve the World is a film about sound; about ear culture that is gradually losing out to eye culture due to globalisation. In an indigenous society in Vietnam's central highlands, a singer and storyteller speaks about listening, revealing how memory, history, and hearing are deeply intertwined in this community.
Lost Pearl
Steve Li • Hong Kong
While protests rage in Hong Kong, Kit spends most of his time on his father's fishing boat. The radio and his phone keep him abreast of the latest developments. He sometimes meets with friends, but his uncertainty about the future just keeps increasing.
Madhu
Tanmay Chowdhary, Tanvi Chowdhary • India
Childhood friends Satakshi and Madhyama reunite at a celebration during Durga Puja. As the night progresses, their feelings for one another are revealed to us through words of the past and the future, taking the audience on a beautiful Ferris wheel ride of love, hopes, and dreams.
Murmurs of the Jungle
Sohil Vaidya • India
As whispering trees pass on stories of gods and ancestors, various inhabitants of a small village in Western Ghats speak. Gradually, a story unfolds that encompasses all of humanity and its symbiotic relationship to nature. Woods turn out to form a bridge between present and past.
Nowhere to go but everywhere
Erik Shirai, Masako Tsumura • Japan
Following the sudden and unimaginable loss of his wife during the 2011 tsunami in Northern Japan, a man learns to scuba dive. Under the murky depths of the sea, his search for her – and for solace from grief – continues.
Shari
Nao Yoshigai • Japan
For some reason, there is very little snow in the winter of 2020 on the Shiretoko Peninsula, a special place located in the northernmost part of Japan where rare wild animals coexist with humans. The typical drift ice has not appeared yet, either. Although worried, the inhabitants of the village Shari continue their daily affairs: the shepherd bakes buns, a hunter prepares a dinner with venison, a fisherman picks up trash from the sea and another person observes flying squirrels in her garden.
Sonata for Smoke
Samson Young • Hong Kong
How can we capture smoke, something that always escapes our grasp? One way is by sound. In Kyoto, the Hong Kong artist Samson Young sets the stage for a series of theatrical events to trigger the emission of smoke. A man holds a boom mic – often so close it singes – to record the aftermath.
Songs for dying
Korakrit Arunanondchai • Thailand
In what might be his most personal film yet, Thai artist Korakrit Arunanondchai shares the last moments with his grandfather, where breathing and singing guide the transition from body to spirit. This moment anchors the dynamic collage, that brings together the 1948 Jeju massacre and pro-democracy protests in present day Thailand.
Tugging Diary
Yan Wai Yin • Hong Kong
Tugging Diary documents a footbridge in Hong Kong during the period of protest, rallies, and strikes. Both the internet and physical spaces act as critical communication platforms. Information circulates more widely and rapidly outside the mainstream media. These messages are continuously being altered, removed, renewed, or overlaid with other information.
