When we talk about ‘Asian cinema’ it’s always a bit of a misleading term. There isn’t a homogenous collection of Asian films any more than there is a European cinema that works as a singular entity.
It would be more accurate to talk about Asian cinemas, acknowledging the diversity of the mainland Chinese, Japanese, Hong Kong, South Korean, Taiwanese and Thai cinemas to name but a few. Each has their own unique cinematic history and sharply different takes on contemporary society.
We’ve already seen, for example, how inward-looking Japanese cinema has been this year, something that was reflected in the Japanese Film Festival. South Korea celebrated 100 years of cinema with fiercely patriotic films like MAL-MO-E: The Secret Mission and A Resistance playing at the Korean Film Festival in Australia, while Parasite and Bong Joon-ho earned the nation’s first Palme d’Or at Cannes. Over the last year, China’s indie scene has bucked the state-led trend with subversive masterpieces such as An Elephant Sitting Still or So Long My Son.
Yet for those of us living outside or adjacent to the Asia-Pacific region, the way we receive these films sometimes leads us to consider the experience in its totality. Australian distributors give us a weekly dose of ‘Asian Cinema’ that the major chains group together with soft marketing banners like ‘Cinema Asia’ or ‘Spotlight on Asia.’ Some weeks it’s a Chinese blockbuster and the next it’s a Korean slice of life story. Studio Ghibli revivals are a perennial totem in these categories.
This grab bag approach is a kind of cinematic fukubukuro, the Japanese term for those New Year sample bags filled with random merchandise. We primarily get our goody bags through festivals, whether it’s the country-specific bags mentioned above or the bigger suitcases of the Sydney Film Festival and Melbourne International Film Festival. We all curate our own experiences at these events and if your passion is Asian cinema, then you’ll find the big prizes.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that I have long put Asia in Focus on this site from its launch almost a decade ago. While we don’t have anything like the New York Asian Film Festival in Sydney, programs like the OzAsia Festival in Adelaide have emerged to recognise the need for this collective space.
Over the course of the last year, I’ve caught around 100 films from across Asia (about a third of my total viewing for 2019) and barely scraped the tip of the iceberg. After all, I didn’t manage to catch Makoto Nagahisa’s We Are Little Zombies, Mika Ninagawa’s No Longer Human or Takashi Miike’s First Love. I’m sure I’ll get around to looking back on them next year: after all, hindsight is 2020.
19 favourites of 2019
Parasite
The first South Korean film to win the prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, only a year after the Festival’s recognition of Japan’s sublime Shoplifters for the same award. While Bong Joon-ho’s work has been more nuanced or high-concept in the past – and the finale lingers a little too long – this film represents everything that is good about Korean filmmaking and will hopefully introduce more audience to its unique charms. Read the full review.
The Farewell
Lulu Wang’s second feature is funny, charming, heartbreaking, and genuine, with a terrific performance from Awkwafina. This will be on a lot of “best of” lists this year. At it’s heart, it’s a film about a daughter, a mother, and a grandmother filtered through the lens of the Chinese-American experience. It’s also a recognition of Asian cinema outside of Asia. Read the full review.
Promare
Describing the plot to a film like this is like trying to catalogue each element of a Jackson Pollock painting. Not just one of the best animated films of the year, but one of the most boundary-pushing pieces of anime in a long time. For the all of the seemingly chaotic shopfront, director Hiroyuki Imaishi and writer Kazuki Nakashima exhibit a very savvy awareness of the conventions of modern anime. So much so that they use all of them: the tropes, inside jokes, visual parodies, genre transitions, insane cutaways, and literal deus ex machinas. Read the full review.
So Long, My Son
Director Wang Xiaoshua’s sprawling multigenerational story about decades of social and economic change in China told through the sometimes tragic lives of a group of friends. Clocking in just shy of the three-hour mark, Wang’s leisurely pace spans entire lifetimes and allows for character exploration that is not typically seen outside of novels. Yet there is something special about allowing a film the space to develop characters and settings over an extended period, even if the hyperlinked tale of families beset by inherited sadness partially recalls last year’s An Elephant Sitting Still from the late Hu Bo. Read the full review.
Weathering With You
Modern master Makoto Shinkai returns after the 2016 crossover hit Your Name with a wonderful bit of magical realism, with a bit more of an emphasis on the latter. What’s great about this film is that it follows many of the same tropes and basic structure of the filmmaker’s previous works – not to mention the music of Radwimps – but still feels fresh and immediate. With compelling leads and simply stunning visuals, this is one of the best animated films this year. Read the full review.
Hotel By the River
If you are a follower of Hong Sang-soo’s films, you probably have a firm idea what you’re getting into. His plainly shot features, with loose plotting and semi-autobiographical leanings, will feature a familiar cast drinking, sleeping, and walking around public places. With moments of surprising visual poetry and a familiar cheeky humour, this is Hong Sang-soo at the top of his game. A film that deals with duality and dreams as abstractly as a David Lynch outing, and filled with equal parts subtle allegory and plain-faced realism, this is classic Hong. Read the full review.
The Gangster, The Cop and The Devil
This was a surprising gem from the last year. Allegedly based on a true story, Man of Will director Lee Won-Tae delivered a mid-year treat of a slick cat-and-mouse thriller with enough twists, cool set pieces, and solid performances to make this better than the average bear. Crafted as a showcase for the leads – the ubiquitous Ma Dong-Seok and Kim Mool-Yeol (fresh from Illang: The Wolf Brigade) – the Se7en meets Heat formula continues to work well 25 years later. Sylvester Stallone’s production company has already hired Ma to reprise his role for the US remake, so check this out for cool credits before that’s released. Read the full review.
Manta Ray
Following its premiere at the Venice International Film Festival last year, cinematographer turned director Phuttiphong Aroonpheng’s film was one of those gems that just drops in the middle of festival season and both surprise and delights. Set in a Thai coastal region known for Rohingya refugees, it’s a hypnotic film that feels at times like a documentary (think: Kazuhiro Sôda) blended with existentialist wandering (think: good Malick). Half a year after seeing this, its final moments are still with me. Read the full review.
Little Nights, Little Love
You know those films that you just love but you realise will probably never find a huge audience? That’s how I felt about this film from Rikiya Imaizumi, who also explored love, loneliness, need and longing in Just Only Love this year. A multi-layered narrative that ponders big questions with little stories is an absolute delight – and has a catchy theme song too! Read the full review.
Another Child
This is the directorial debut of actor Kim Yun-Seok, perhaps best known for films such as The Chaser (2008) and 1987: When the Day Comes (2018). Working from his own screenplay, co-written with Lee Bo-ram, this is a strikingly beautiful yet quietly emotional film that relies on the performances of its two young leads, Kim Hye-Jun and Park Se-Jin. Beautifully shot by Hwang Ki-Seok (Saint Janet, Avengers: Age of Ultron), this complex coming-of-age story establishes Kim Yun-Seok as a triple threat of writer, director and actor. Read the full review.
Fagara
With Heiward Mak’s directorial career being on the quiet side for the last few years, following long stretches between Diva (2012) and Good Take, Too! (2016), it’s arguable that her screenplay for Love in a Puff (2010) may have been seen the apotheosis of her filmography. At least until now. Co-produced by Ann Hui, this is a contemporary drama about the tension between expectation and tradition in modern China. Along with The White Storm 2: Drug Lords and Line Walker 2, FAGARA represents an exceptionally strong year for Hong Kong cinema, even in the midst of massive social turmoil. Read the full review.
Ride Your Wave
Masaaki Yuasa makes a (mostly) grounded romantic comedy? What’s even more surprising is just how well it works. Anime filmmaker Masaaki Yuasa first made a name for himself with 2004’s Mind Games, and the likes of Space Dandy, Lu Over the Wall, Devilman Crybaby, and the sublime Night is Short, Walk on Girl have rightly earned the prolific director a rabid fanbase. One of the broadest of Masaaki’s films, it’s a beautifully animated musing on grief. Read the full review.
Leftover Women
A fascinating documentary, but every time the audience collectively laughed at something that seemed antiquated or alien in terms of attitudes to marriage and children, I couldn’t help but feel we recognised something in ourselves. Would be an interesting companion piece with this year’s One Child Policy.
Mr. Jimmy
Led Zeppelin fans and process junkies will get a wealth of material from this impeccably shot documentary that looks at a man striving for technical perfection. Regardless of your “thing” – or whether you feel the titular guitarist’s quest is folly – there’s a connection we can all feel to his attempts. After all, the trying is the thing.
Jeux De Plage
In case you couldn’t tell from the title, which roughly translates as “beach games,” debut director Aimi Natsuto is a little bit inspired by New Wave French cinema. Sitting somewhere between the French New Wave and Hong Sang-soo, this delightful bottle film sees chaos swirl around a trio of young women and the toxic masculinity that surrounds them. Here Natsuto quietly catalogues the everyday examples of toxic masculinity. Read the full review.
Ohong Village
Taiwan’s cinema is having a bigger presence in Australia thanks to the Taiwan Film Festival in Sydney. Director Lim Lung-Yin’s intimate debut that serves as both a meditation on the divide between personal past and present, but a look at generational differences and the literal submersion of our own origin stories. It thematically marks the boundary between the old and the new, offering westerners and Taiwanese equal access to the subtleties of generational divides, living up to family expectations, and reconciliation with the past. Read the full review.
The Third Wife
Ash Mayfair’s controversial feature is a hauntingly shot and moody affair that envelops the viewer from start to finish, commenting on patriarchal structure of today through the lens of 19th century Vietnam. Read Full review
Demolition Girl
Winner of the JAPAN CUTS Award at the 2019 Osaka Asian Film Festival, Genta Matsugami’s unlikely coming of age story follows Cocoa (in a marvellous performance from newcomer Aya Kitai), a 3rd grade high school student. Starring in fetish videos to make some extra cash, her good grades dangle the prospect of university in front of her – except she can’t afford it. Neither judging or praising its characters, there is a quiet strength to this offbeat but honest film from an arresting new voice on the Japanese film scene.
Clean Up
While this was technically a 2018 release, it did the Australian festival circuit in 2019 so it counts, right? When debut director Kwon Man-ki won Best Film at the Macao Film Festival 2018, he beat out the likes of Hiroshi Okuyama’s Jesus and Barnaby Southcombe‘s Scarborough. A moving and austere debut, it treads a delicate line in exploring guilt, redemption, and culpability. Although religion forms a large part of Jung-ju’s means of coping with the world, Kwon isn’t so much commenting on faith as he is on the way some people use it to assuage their own guilt. Read full review.
The best of the rest
It’s hard enough whittling down 100+ films into a list of 19 or so. The last part of the year offered up Ip Man 4: The Finale, with Donnie Yen reprising his titular role as the legendary Wing Chun grandmaster. While we didn’t need the film, it was a welcome addition to the throwback martial arts cannon – not to mention the second performance of Bruce Lee (Danny Chan) this year!
Between JAPAN CUTS, NYAFF and the Japanese Film Festival, I covered a lot of Japanese content too. Dance With Me almost made the list, with its a crazy blend of musical, road trip and social satire with a light (but effective) touch. Ayaka Miyoshi is wonderful in the lead. The release of Violet Evergarden: Eternity and the Auto Memory Doll was finally an excuse to catch up on this Kyoto Animation series, and what a ride it’s been. A testament to the legendary studio following tragic arson attack on the studio that killed 36 people in July this year, and a warm-up for 2020’s worldwide release of the continuation film.
The short and sweet WHOLE, a meditative and intimate debut from brothers Bilal and Usman Kawazoe, explores the notions of cultural and personal identity in Japan through the lens of hāfu (ハーフ). Finally, Randen: The Comings and Goings of a Kyoto Tram is a film that’s not what it seems. Actor/director Takuji Suzuki joins the tradition of the Japanese train movie in a very local movie filled with romance, in-jokes about indie filmmaking, and maybe a little bit of magic?
Elsewhere across the ponds, South Korea’s Innocent Witness is a surprisingly sensitive treatment of autism that also posits the radical notion that lawyers are also humans. Your Face one that I was on the fence about for a while, at least before writing 1,000 words on the recent works of Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang.
Of course, it’s hard to let any list go with a mention of Sion Sono, who not only released a single outing this year in The Forest of Love – but it got a rapid release internationally on Netflix!
