The 53rd edition of International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) will take place from January 25 to February 4, 2024. The full festival programme is available here and official ticket sales will commence on January 12. Here is an overview of the selection of Asian films screening this year at IFFR 2024 (synopses summarised from the IFFR 2024 website):
Harbour
Trolley Times
Gurvinder Singh
153′ | India | 2023 | International Premiere
IFFR regular Gurvinder Singh returns to the festival with his first documentary feature “Trolley Times”, an unvarnished grassroots record of the protests that borrows its title from the newspaper printed and distributed at the camping site. The farmers recount their grievances directly to the camera, their words conveying a truth absent from state-aligned mainstream media, their timeworn, dignified faces familiar from Singh's fictional work.
100 Yards
Xu Haofeng, Xu Junfeng
108′ | China | 2023 | European Premiere
The 1920s, Tianjin. Master Shen has passed on, bequeathing his martial arts academy to star apprentice Qi, instead of his own son An. Consigned to a dull if respectable bank job, An itches for a new duel with Qi to stake his claim. When Qi upsets the academy with his dubious plans for expansion, An sees an opportunity to recover lost territory.
Anubhuti
Anirban Dutta
96′ | India | 2024 | World Premiere
The mythical cowherdess Radha and poet-saint Meera vie for the attention of their blue-skinned paramour-god Krishna. Singled out by the poet Jayadeva as Lord Krishna's favourite inamorata in his twelfth century epic love poem Gita Govinda, Radha is often characterised by feelings of jealousy and heartbreak at Krishna's eternal fickleness. Meera, on the other hand, was a sixteenth century poet-saint whose relationship to Krishna was one of constant devotion and unfulfilled yearning, sentiments immortalised in her poems that continue to be sung today as musical compositions.
Anirban Dutta's highly stylised musical performance piece “Anubhuti” sets these mythical and historical figures together in a love triangle with Krishna, charting Meera's mental states and fluctuating sentimental fortunes: from a pining, distant admirer who can only access her beloved vicariously through Radha, to an amorous equal who shares Krishna's affections with simplicity.
Born in Gunsan and after seven years, I was repatriated to Japan…
zonpilone
239′ | South Korea | 2023 | International Premiere
A bamboo forest becomes a city with bustling streets that then smoothly transform into photographs: never really in focus, ever more fragmentary and blurred. “Born in Gunsan and after seven years, I was repatriated to Japan…” begins as a formidable exercise in fūkei-ron, only to turn into a meditation on what remains of the past, with worlds, eras and personal views colliding.
The Cursed Land
Panu Aree, Kong Rithdee
128′ | Thailand | 2024 | World Premiere
After the death of his wife, Mit moves with his teenage daughter May to a derelict mansion in a Muslim-majority suburb of Bangkok. A thorough sceptic, Mit gets rid of the talismans in the house, defying the warnings of the locals, and in the process unleashes a furious djinn and its 200-year-old curse. As Mit sinks into delirium and self-harm, May must undertake a journey to the south to seek help.
Dear Kaita Ablaze
Sato Hisayasu
101′ | Japan | 2023 | International Premiere
Murayama Kaita, a Japanese painter, novelist and poet died in 1919 at the age of 22, leaving behind an impressive and time-defying body of work. In his most recent film, Sato Hisayasu offers a surreal, time-crossing, meta-layered essay on the artist, his originality and his legacy.
Devastated
Ashish Avikunthak
86′ | India | 2024 | World Premiere
In confrontational conversations with his wife and his lover, a middle-aged Indian policeman opens up about his work as a ‘sacrificial assistant', a state-designated agent tasked with extra-judicial killings of Muslim men. Elsewhere in the city, Lord Krishna and the prince Arjuna enact a dialogue from the Bhagavad Gita. Paralysed into inaction during battle by human considerations, Arjuna seeks the counsel of Krishna, who instructs him on the moral duty of a warrior.
Elegies
Ann Hui
101′ | Hong Kong | 2023 | European Premiere
Like the emblematic neon lights that brighten its nights, poetry and memories fill the streets of Hong Kong and bring them to life in the most recent film of Ann Hui, “Elegies”.
Fire on Water
Sun-J Perumal
120′ | Malaysia | 2024 | World Premiere
Karthi, a disgruntled assistant on commercial productions, is working on an honest, personal film script, but his project is without industry backers. In the dispiriting pursuit of his dream, he loses his love and sinks into alcoholism, until he meets a kindred spirit adrift in the world. Fire on Water, the sophomore feature from Sun-J Perumal (“Thaipoosam”, 2007), zeroes in on a highly particular and rarely seen milieu: the travails of artistically minded filmmakers within the Tamil media industry in Malaysia.
Hungry Ghost Diner
We Jun Cho
116′ | Malaysia | 2023 | Dutch Premiere
After her long-unseen uncle mysteriously turns up one night at her food truck in Kuala Lumpur, Bonnie drives home to her semi-estranged father in a village up north. With a sudden lockdown preventing her return, she is forced to spend the night at the family-owned café, where she encounters the ghosts of those dearly departed gathering around for a scrumptious meal.
A Spoiling Rain
Arai Haruhiko
137'| Japan | 2023 | European Premiere
In exchange for his overdue rent, Kutani, an out-of-job director in Japan's declining adult film industry, is recruited by his landlord to evict another tenant, Iseki. A struggling screenwriter, Iseki is surprised by the rain-drenched Kutani's unconventional manner and invites him inside to dry off. Over several drinks, the men recount their failed relationships, unaware that they have more in common than they expect.
Who'll Stop the Rain
Su I-hsuan
114′ | Taiwan | 2023 | European Premiere
“Everyone is like a new canvas that can be painted in different colours.” So speaks art student Chi-wei, who is about to enter a turbulent phase of her young life in which all matters of politics, sexuality and creativity are open to question. Su I-hsuan's film revisits the memory of a prolonged strike at a Taiwanese art school in the 1990s, in which the students protested the cause of ‘creative freedom' in the face of patriarchal authority figures who insisted on conformism and conventionality. Worse still, the art history curriculum is entirely Westernised and Taiwanese art is accorded no value. This is a system seemingly impervious to the waves of social change that began earlier, like the 1990 Wild Lily student movement.
Makbetamaximus
Khavn
80′ | Philippines | 2024 | World Premiere
Inspired by Shakespeare's ‘Scottish play', hyper-prolific and creative multi-hyphenate Khavn De La Cruz delivers a maximalist commentary on the nature of war, ambition and the foibles of humanity.
The Missing
Carl Joseph E. Papa
90′ | Philippines | 2023 | European Premiere
When withdrawn animator Eric is asked by his mother to check on his estranged uncle, he is wrenched out of his isolation and confronted with repressed childhood memories and sinister extraterrestrial beings.
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