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Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. To keep up with our latest features, sign up for the Weekly Edit newsletter and follow us @mubinotebook on Twitter and Instagram.NEWSGoodbye, Dragon Inn.The Tamil Film Active Producers Association has filed a writ petition to ban social-media film reviews for the first three days of the theatrical release, claiming financial losses due to negative “review bombing.” Theater owners have likewise proposed banning YouTubers from recording audience reactions in cinema lobbies and parking lots.The McL Cinema in Hong Kong’s Diamond Hill district has shuttered after just two years of operations, the seventh theater in the city to have closed this year. Insiders are bracing for the hit to the local film industry’s reputation and financial stability that could follow. For the past decade, Hollywood executives believed that brief theatrical windows would boost subscriber numbers for their streaming services.

The 19th Jogja-Netpac Asian Film Festival has wrapped in Yogyakarta (Jogja), Indonesia, with local feature “Yohanna” dominating the Indonesian Screen Awards while Neo Sora’s “Happyend” secured the festival’s top Golden Hanoman Award.

“Yohanna,” directed by Razka Robby Ertanto, collected five honors including best film, director, storytelling, performance, and cinematography (Odyssey Flores). Truong Minh Quy’s “Viet and Nam” took home the Silver Hanoman Award.

In other awards, “Ma – Cry of Silence” by The Maw Naing won the Netpac Award and Geber Award, while Hung Chen’s “When the Wind Rises” secured both the Blencong Award and Jaff Student Award. Behzad Nalbandi’s “Anita, Lost in the News” received a Special Jury Mention.

The festival program featured a masterclass with Taiwan-based auteur Tsai Ming Liang, which attracted filmmakers like Riri Riza, Mira Lesmana, Kamila Andini, and Jaff director Ifa Isfansyah. Three of Tsai’s works were screened: “Vive L’Amour...

1. Film Review: Abiding Nowhere (2024) by Tsai Ming-liang

If art is putting an emotion into something you create to transfer that feeling on to its audience, then Tsai certainly achieves something with “Abiding Nowhere” (and the Walker series in general). Beyond slow cinema, this is positively static, as the camera, and indeed the cast, barely move. The slowness, the silence – apart from the background noise – the time allowed to fully contemplate, create a relaxing series of shots to absorb yourself into, feeling your heart rate slow and eyes sigh in a natural progression to sleep.

2. Film Review: Victory (2024) by Park Beom-su

The production also makes the most of its leading ladies’ dancing abilities, choreographing largely pleasing cheerleading sequences, even if more acrobatic sequences, whose absence is fairly explained within the script, could have been welcome. Park Jeong-hoon’s cinematography shies away from being flashy, instead satisfied in capturing the pastel colours...

Arthouse cinema is still very much a broad term that covers a wide range of styles and genres, how should we consume cinema that feels more at home in an art gallery than a cinema? Tsai Ming-liang‘s “Walker” series has now hit double figures, with a variation on a theme much like Hokusai’s “36 Views of Mount Fuji”, with “Abiding Nowhere” being the latest.

Abiding Nowhere is screening at San Diego Asian Film Festival

A red-robed monk (Lee Kang-sheng) slowly steps across the landscape of various streets and landmarks of Washington DC. A static camera captures his slow motions, as he gradually makes his way from one side of the shot to the other. Another man (Anong Houngheuangsy) is also seen wandering some of the same locations, though at a slightly more normal pace, as what seems like everyday behaviour forms a striking contrast.

If art is putting an...

The last film by writer, director, and editor Tetsuichirô Tsuta, 2013’s “The Tale of Iya” didn’t get to make a big splash in the UK or US. But perhaps the association with names such as Lee Kang-sheng and Ryuichi Sakamoto will help move things along for “Black Ox,” a standout from the Tokyo International Film Festival’s fascinating and varied “Asian Futures” program, which showcases a variety of critical perspectives from across the continent.

“A certain island country is on the path to civilization.” That wry prelude is all the introduction we get before Tsuta plunges us into the story of a mountain man (Lee) whose life is framed by the assimilation of all peoples under one unified umbrella of “Japanese” identity during the latter half of the 19th century (starting around the time of the Meiji Restoration). If the festival’s opening film, the samurai epic “11 Rebels,...

Marek Šulík’s “Ms. President” was named the winner of the Opus Bonum section at Ji.hlava Documentary Festival Saturday.

The film, which also opened the festival, was one of the buzziest titles this year, provoking discussions about upcoming U.S. elections and zooming onto the fifth president of Slovakia, Zuzana Čaputová – the first woman ever to be elected to that role. However, after completing her term, she did not seek reelection. It was produced by Barbara Janišová Feglová.

The director told Variety that constantly forced to face “an aggressively misogynistic atmosphere in society, Čaputová was really tired after five years.” Now, it seems that “the populists have the upper hand.”

“It really feels like something out of a bad movie that could be called ‘The Return of the Bad Guys,’” he said.

Šulík’s win marked an end of an especially lucky night for Slovak and Czech documentaries, with...

Malaysian director Tsai Ming-liang might be done with his semi-retirement. “I have a strong desire to make another feature film,” he tells Variety at Ji.hlava Documentary Film Festival.

“With my actors, we’ve been working together for such a long time. Recently, they’ve been starring in other people’s films and I want them to be in my film again. I am waiting for them to reach a certain age, and we will do it again. Hopefully, I’ll live long enough to see that happen. Just one more feature film! That’s enough for me.”

His biggest concern?

“My physicality. Do I still have the energy to shoot more films? Looking back, I can see I am different now, but I also like the idea of being old and having a different energy,” says the 67-year-old, still dedicated to “making portraits” of his actors.

“I want to...

“Black Ox,” a powerful rural drama from Japan’s Tsuta Tetsuichiro, has been picked up for world sales by Hong Kong and Beijing-based agency Asian Shadows. The film has its world premiere on Friday in the Asian Future section of the Tokyo International Film Festival and will go on commercial release in Taiwan the following week.

Set in the 19th century, “Black Ox” follows the life of a man, transitioning from a hunter-gatherer existence in the mountains to a life in the farm. One day, he comes across an ox, which somehow, he succeeds in leading back to his home. He lives with the animal, which becomes his companion in a life of changing seasons.

The Japan-set film is inspired by the “Ten Ox-Herding Pictures” a series of short poems and illustrations from the Zen Buddhist tradition that depict the path to enlightenment and spiritual awakening.

The cast includes the Taiwanese actor Lee Kang-sheng,...

Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia, who was awarded the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes film festival for her debut narrative feature All We Imagine As Light, talked about the challenges facing indie filmmakers in India during a conversation with Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda at Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF).

She also touched on how she felt about the fact that All We Imagine As Light was not selected by India’s Oscars committee as its submission for the Best International feature category, but was gracious about the snub.

Kore-eda was on the Cannes competition jury that awarded Kapadia’s film, and said he was impressed by her work, but due to the restraints of jury duty, had not been able to talk to her and find out more about her career. The Japanese director is a Cannes regular, winning the Palme d’Or for Shoplifters in 2018, while Yuji Sakamoto...

Singapore International Film Festival (Sgiff) has unveiled the full programme for its 35th edition, which includes honorary awards for Taiwanese actors Lee Kang-sheng and Yang Kuei-mei, and the launch of a Sgiff Industry Days conference.

Set to run from November 28 - December 8, the festival will continue to champion local and regional voices, with Asian cinema representing 80% of the line-up. The full selection comprises 105 films from 45 countries and features recurring themes of migration and displacement as well as the influence of technology on the medium of film.

The Asian Feature Film Competition, the festival’s main competition section, showcases nine features by promising directors across Asia,...

The Singapore International Film Festival is marking its 35th edition with 105 films from 45 countries, with Asian titles comprising 80% of the program.

Running Nov. 28-Dec. 8, the fest will host three world premieres of Singapore features, including Ong Keng-Sen’s “The House of Janus,” Wong Chen-Hsi’s “City of Small Blessings,” adapted from Simon Tay’s novel, and Jason Soo’s documentary “Al Awda.”

Among the international highlights are Amy Adams-starrer “Nightbitch,” David Cronenberg’s “The Shrouds,” Miguel Gomes’ “Grand Tour,” and a restored version of Bong Joon-ho’s feature debut “Barking Dogs Never Bite.”

Two special gala presentations are scheduled: Raam Reddy’s “The Fable,” starring Indian actor Manoj Bajpayee, and Myanmar-born Taiwanese filmmaker Midi Z’s “The Unseen Sister,” featuring Zhao Liying and Xin Zhilei.

The fest will present its Screen Icon Award to Taiwanese talents Yang Kuei-mei and Lee Kang-sheng. Yang, a four-time Sgiff performance award winner, recently appeared in “Yen and Ai-Lee,...

Tsai Ming Liang Guide: As the 20th century drew to a close, cinema, like other art forms, was undergoing a metamorphosis. Hollywood, in a desperate attempt to keep audiences engaged, embraced new technological advancements, such as improved visual effects. It sought to captivate the masses by blurring the lines between reality and imagination, producing sci-fi blockbusters like “Terminator 2” (1991), “Jurassic Park” (1993), and “Armageddon” (1998). However, thousands of miles away from sunny Los Angeles, another group of filmmakers across Europe and Asia consciously took cinema in a different direction. Rather than helping audiences forget the fourth wall, they aimed to reinforce it, creating films that were acutely aware of their own impact, intentionally distancing viewers from the on-screen events by withholding the cut.

In contemporary film theory, this shift is referred to as ‘Slow Cinema.’ To an avid cinephile, it is now a fairly common term. Maestros like Béla Tarr, Pedro Costa,...

The 28th Ji.hlava Intl. Documentary Film Festival, which runs Oct. 25 – Nov. 3, will offer 340 films, of which 129 are world premieres, 23 international premieres and 11 European premieres.

The program includes a retrospective of Swiss filmmaker Anne Marie Miéville’s work and a showcase of films by Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang.

The festival will be attended by U.S. director Kirsten Johnson, the creator of this year’s festival trailer, Italian director Roberto Minervini, Spanish filmmaker Albert Serra and Romanian director Andrei Ujică.

Marek Hovorka, the festival’s director, said: “The program of Ji.hlava shows the extraordinary power of documentary film. Documentary filmmakers replace the literalness of reality with playfulness and originality of thought. They show us the world as we could hardly see it ourselves – unless, like them, we would like to spend long years with a camera in those places.

“Dialogue has been important to Ji.hlava since its beginning,...

Japan’s leading indie film festival, Tokyo Filmex (November 23-December 1) has unveiled the line-up for its competition, opening and closing films, and other sections.

The festival, which marks its 25th year in 2024, will open with Jia Zhang-Ke’s Caught By The Tides, which played in competition at this year’s Cannes, and close with Hong Sang-soo’s By the Stream, for which actor Kim Min-hee won the Pardo for best performance at Locarno.

The 10 competition titles include the Georgian film April, directed by Dea Kulumbegashvili, which won the special jury prize at Venice this year; Girls Will Be Girls, the...

With titles like Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire and Mati Diop’s Dahomey, London Film Festival head Kristy Matheson, in her second year at the helm, inches further toward what appears to be an interesting strategic shift at the Lff: a full-scale embrace of the avant-garde.

Alongside Hunt-Ehrlich and Diop, experimental and deeply contemporary filmmakers such as Wang Bing, Payal Kapadia and Tsai Ming-liang feature throughout this year’s Lff lineup. The experimental mix-up, Matheson told us ahead of Wednesday night’s opening, is thanks to the enthusiasm of London’s “very cinema-literate audience.”

“There are so many amazing cinemas all across the city screening great work all year round. And that’s our core audience,” she said.

Opening the festival on Wednesday is Blitz, the latest feature-length project from Turner Prize- and Oscar-winning filmmaker Steve McQueen. Other headline titles set for the festival include Luca Guadagnino’s Queer,...

Queer East Festival: On The Road will head out across the country from September to December, offering its biggest tour yet and showcasing a remarkable line-up of contemporary feature films, documentaries and shorts as well as special events that highlight a wide range of LGBTQ+ stories from East Asia, Southeast Asia and their diaspora communities.

Founded in response to the systemic lack of East and Southeast Asian representation on stage, screen and behind the scenes, Queer East Festival was formed in 2020 and has made its mark across the UK with its bold programmes of LGBTQ+ cinema and visual arts, growing in popularity and size year-on-year, and celebrating its fifth anniversary this year.

Queer East Festival’s ground-breaking film programme challenges conventions and stereotypes giving audiences an opportunity to explore the contemporary queer landscape across East and Southeast Asia. With its fifth anniversary edition, Queer East Festival reaffirms a commitment to...

Scaring Up A Big Win

Jon Bell’s “The Moogai” was Saturday named winner of the Film Prize at Western Australia’s CinefestOZ festival. With a cash award of A$100,000, it is one of the richest film festival prizes in the world.

Sarah and Fergus, a hopeful young Aboriginal couple, give birth to their second baby. But what should be a joyous time of their lives becomes sinister when Sarah starts seeing a malevolent spirit that she is convinced is trying to take her baby. Fergus, can’t see it but desperately wants to believe her. He does not know if the child-stealing spirit real or is Sarah is in fact the biggest threat to the safety of their family. The film stars Shari Sebbens and Meyne Wyatt.

It is produced by Kristina Ceyton, Mitchell Stanely and Samantha Jennings and coproduced by Alex White. International sales are handled by the U.

With Stranger Eyes, ascendant Singaporean filmmaker Yeo Siew Hua transmogrifies what looks at first like a creepy crime thriller into something much more tricksy, potent and ultimately puzzling, yet still rooted in recognizable human fragility. Already scheduled to travel to further festivals after its premiere in competition at Venice, this cerebral, downbeat mediation on voyeurism, exhibitionism, identity, guilt and loss — all that fun stuff — could ride a wave of critical support to niche distribution beyond Asia, especially in cinephile markets.

Yeo’s work is known for its playful, pretzel-y approach to chronology and nested narratives, and while Stranger Eyes doesn’t dive as far as his A Land Imagined did into the meta end of the pool, it gets its feet wet. Like its predecessor, it starts in the middle and then flashes back, and drops in strange moments where time seems to shift for characters who overlap and parallel one another.

After becoming the first Singaporean filmmaker to win Locarno’s Golden Leopard for A Land Imagined, Yeo Siew Hua will break new ground again with mystery thriller Stranger Eyes, which is the first Singapore film to premiere in-competition at the Venice Film Festival.

The Singapore-Taiwan-France-u.S. co-production stars a Taiwanese ensemble cast featuring legendary actor-director Lee Kang-Sheng, Wu Chien-Ho, Annica Panna and Vera Chen. Malaysian actor Pete Teo and Singaporean actress Xenia Tan also appear in the film.

Yeo conceived the Stranger Eyes project more than 10 years ago but he and Akanga Film Asia’s veteran producer Fran Borgia hit several “dead ends” with funding.

“We decided that we were going to try something else and pitch different projects, so that’s how A Land Imagined came about,” Yeo told Deadline.

A Land Imagined, Yeo’s second feature, also went on to clinch Best Original Screenplay and Best Original Film...

I always find it difficult to write about performances. Whenever I try I feel like I’m merely describing an actor’s work––how they talk, how they move––and the best among them have a way of turning those choices into an alchemy that makes all adjectives redundant. But there are some for whom the task is twice as hard because their films do not just star them, but adjust to their auras; it’s as if they were shaped by their presence. Lee Kang-sheng is one such actor, that rare performer whose craft makes all words seem tired. I’m incapable of doing justice to the sight of him staring at the window in the opening moments of Tsai Ming-Liang Days, or walking at turtle speed clad in a monk’s orange robe in the director’s Walker series. All I can do is talk about the calm...

At first it seems a premise shamelessly lifted from Michael Haneke’s “Caché”: A couple is disconcerted to receive an unmarked DVD in their mailbox, playing it to find footage of themselves being unwittingly filmed as they go about their day. But just as Haneke’s film took what seemed like a starting point for an effective domestic horror movie and pushed it into thorny sociopolitical territory, the slippery, shape-shifting psychodrama “Stranger Eyes” likewise has more on its mind than just the question of who’s watching who. Solving one mystery unexpectedly quickly before diving into deeper, more searching uncertainties of human behavior and relationships, the third feature from Singaporean writer-director Yeo Siew Hua gradually reveals a broken heart beneath its sleek, chilly veneer.

Yeo’s previous feature, the fluorescent neo-noir “A Land Imagined,” put him on the auteur map in 2018 by winning the top prize at Locarno, and...

Big World Pictures has acquired U.S. and Canadian distribution rights to Iair Said’s “Most People Die on Sundays” from sales agent Heretic. The existential comedy, Said’s fiction feature debut, was an official selection in the Acid sidebar at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

The film is set for a theatrical release in early 2025, following a fall festival run. Said previously directed the documentary feature “Flora’s Life Is No Picnic.”

“Most People Die on Sundays” follows David, a young middle-class Jewish man described as corpulent, homosexual, and afraid of flying. He returns to Buenos Aires from Europe for his uncle’s funeral, only to learn that his mother has decided to disconnect his father’s respirator. The story explores David’s struggle with existential anguish as he navigates his new reality.

Said explained the film’s genesis: “When my dad died, we had to pay $10,000 to...

Let's put aside the film analysis for now. What we have here is merely a local TV news segment challenging the label of “documentary”, just good enough in quality as bonus on DVDs to encourage the purchase of a particular edition (as seen with the Criterion Edition of “Boat People”), usually finding its way soon after onto YouTube under Creative Commons licenses. No significant work on structuring or editing has been undertaken; the result is a compilation of Dv Cam footage, often with intrusive background sounds, along with archival materials and photographs, all patched together. That said, is the film worth viewing? Certainly, if you have an interest in Ann Hui or the English era of Hong Kong.

Check the interview with the director

Produced by Peggy Chiao as part of a Taiwanese series titled “Personal Memoir of Hong Kong” which includes contributions from Stanley Kwan among others, the project...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. To keep up with our latest features, sign up for the Weekly Edit newsletter and follow us @mubinotebook on Twitter and Instagram.NEWSThe Souvenir Part II.Equity, the British entertainment industry trade union, has greeted the incoming Labour government—the first in fourteen years, having won in a landslide—with demands for reforms to the government’s arts funding.Meanwhile, across the Channel, snap French parliamentary elections resulted in an upset victory for the leftist coalition Nouveau Front Populaire over Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally, which had promised to privatize, at least partially, the national television and radio broadcaster, amid other cutbacks.IATSE has released more details regarding its tentative contract with AMPTP, including allowances and limitations around the use of artificial intelligence.Teamsters Local 399 is still bargaining with AMPTP and may still be far from resolving issues...

Indian superstar Shah Rukh Khan will be feted by the upcoming Locarno Film Festival with a career achievement award, celebrating his more than 100 credits across a multitude of genres.

The Bollywood star will receive the award in the festival’s Piazza Grande on August 10. He will then also participate in a public conversation the next day.

The festival will also screen 2002 hit costume drama Devdas, in which Khan plays a man whose life spirals out of control after his family forbids him from marrying his childhood sweetheart.

Previous winners of Locarno’s Pardo alla Carriera include Francesco Rosi, Bruno Ganz, Claudia Cardinale, Johnnie To, Harry Belafonte, Peter-Christian Fueter, Sergio Castellitto, Víctor Erice,, Jane Birkin, Dante Spinotti, Costa-Gavras, and, most recently in 2023, Tsai Ming-liang.

“To welcome a living legend like Shah Rukh Khan in Locarno is a dream come true. The wealth and breadth of his contribution to Indian cinema is unprecedented.

Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan will be honoured by the Locarno Film Festival with its Honorary Leopard achievement award in recognition of his outstanding career in Indian cinema spanning more than 100 films “in a breathtaking multitude of genres,” it announced on Tuesday.

Khan, who is known in India as “King Khan,” will be making the trek to receive the award on Aug. 10 on the Swiss fest’s 8,000-seat Piazza Grande open-air venue where his 2022 love triangle drama “Devdas” – in which Khan plays the titular character, a tragic romantic alcoholic – will screen, followed by an onstage conversation on Aug. 11. “Devdas,” which scored a BAFTA nomination and won numerous Indian awards, marked the first time many Western audience members were exposed to mainstream Bollywood.

“To welcome a living legend like Shah Rukh Kahn in Locarno is a dream come true!” said Locarno artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro in a statement.

Nazzaro went...

It was just yesterday we learned Robert Zemeckis was taking another ambitious formal gamble in his career with Here. His adaptation of Richard McGuire’s comic, which spans a single space from 500,957,406,073 Bce to the year 22,175 Ce, was shot from a single Pov, without movement or zooms. A Forrest Gump reunion between Zemeckis, Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, and writer Eric Roth, the first trailer has now arrived ahead of a November 15 release. Call it his The Tree of Life, Wavelength, or Tsai Ming-liang film, but it’s fascinating to see a director take this approach on a wide studio release.

Here’s the synopsis: “From the reunited director, writer, and stars of Forrest Gump, Here is an original film about multiple families and a special place they inhabit. The story travels through generations, capturing the human experience in its purest form. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, screenplay by Eric Roth & Zemeckis...

Everything is ready for the 14th edition of the Festival Internacional de Cine Unam (Ficunam), which will take place from June 13 to 20 in Mexico City. As part of the Atlas section, we will finally be able to see Harmony Korine’s new experimental film in Cdmx: Aggro Dr1ft, starring rapper Travis Scott and notorious for having been “shot entirely through termal lens.” This section, dedicated to international auteur cinema, also includes recent works by Wang Bing (Youth (Spring)), Mati Diop (the documentary Dahomey), Tsai Ming-liang (Abiding Nowhere), Kleber Mendoça Filho (Pictures of Ghosts), Pedro Costa (The Daughters of Fire), and Hong Sang-soo (A Traveler’s Needs). Straight from Cannes comes Payal Kapadia’s Grand Prix-winning drama All We Imagine as Light. This Mumbai-set film is part...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Am I Ok? (Stephanie Allyne and Tig Notaro)

A romantic comedy that functions best as a fable of friendship and self-reflection, Am I Ok? is the kind of lightweight, amiable movie that just barely earns the emotional beats at the heart of its story. Set in Los Angeles, it follows the converging life events of two best friends, Lucy (Dakota Johnson) and Jane (Sonoya Mizuno), soul sisters with opposite personalities who tell each other everything—except for the big secrets they’ve been harboring from each other. How they respond to hearing them fuels Stephanie Allyne and Tig Notaro’s gentle and wobbly feature debut. – Jake K-s. (full review)

Where to Stream: Max

Dad & Step-Dad (Tynan DeLong)

Following the stellar comedy Free Time,...

Illustrations by Maddie Fischer.Find all of our Cannes 2024 coverage here.Eephus.Founded in 2011 by a group of college friends in Boston, Omnes Films is a production company that’s quietly created some of the most unique American movies of the last half-decade. Now based in Los Angeles, Omnes came to prominence in 2019 with Ham on Rye, a magical-realist coming-of-age fable set in suburban Long Island that solidified the collective’s four main players: director Tyler Taormina, cinematographer Carson Lund, producer Michael Basta, and music supervisor Jonathan Davies—all of whom have subsequently directed their own films under the Omnes banner.Omnes’s two latest projects, Eephus and Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point (both 2024), directed by Lund and Taormina, respectively, both premiered in Cannes as part of this year’s Directors’ Fortnight—a programming decision further confirming the section’s renewed interest in American cinema following the inclusion of The Sweet East,...

CAAMFest 2024 had its own fair share of student films – and this year, we gathered up five (!) student teams to speak to one another. The roundtable consisted of generous description of “student,” including a PhD and a high schooler, MFAs and recent grads. Harleen Kaur Bal, a PhD student at Uc Davis, told us about “Unpacking Immigration,” a short film about Punjabi workers at meatpacking plants in California. UCLA grad Emory Chao Johnson recalled their graduation film, “默 (To Write from Memory),” an experimental mother-child film about gender transition. UCLA grad Jacqueline Chan's nostalgic short “Chan is Fishing” meditates upon her father, an aging Hong Kong immigrant, searching for a spot to fish in the desert. San Diego State University crew Laura Skokan, Shao Chiu Yen, and Nguyen Ha Uyen Phan recounted their experience behind “The Fanatics,” a true story-inspired tale about slipping into a Taiwanese cult. Finally, NYU-bound Kaiya...

The intimate and naturalistic Mandarin-language drama “Blue Sun Palace” has nabbed the French Touch prize from the Cannes Critics’ Week jury, putting Chinese-American writer-director Constance Tsang on the map as a talent to watch after her feature debut. Certain to see future festival action, the drama about three working-class Chinese immigrants in Flushing, NY, the film succeeds with touching performances from Ke-Xi Wu (“Nina Wu”), Lee Kang Sheng (Tsai Ming Liang’s iconic actor) and Haixpeng Xu (“Where Echoes Never End”) that could tempt distributors in the coming months.

Although the borough of Queens is pone of the most diverse places on the planet, the insular world of “Blue Sun Palace” is almost solely Chinese, unfolding in New York’s largest Chinatown. Taiwanese Amy (Ke-Xi Wu) and mainlander Didi (Haixpeng Xu) work along with two other women in a massage parlor with an exclusively male clientele. The sign on the door stipulates “No Sexual Services,...

For the past three years, the American Cinematheque has presented “Bleak Week,” an annual festival devoted to the greatest films ever made about the darkest side of humanity. This year, the festival will not only be unspooling in Los Angeles June 1 – 7 — with special guests including Al Pacino, Lynne Ramsay, Charlie Kaufman, and Karyn Kusama — but will travel to New York for the first time with a week of screenings at the historic Paris Theater starting June 9.

“We are honored to co-present ‘Bleak Week: New York’ in partnership with one of the most beautiful movie palaces in the world,” Cinematheque artistic director Grant Moninger told IndieWire. “This year, over 10,000 people will attend ‘Bleak Week: Year 3’ in Los Angeles, proving that audiences are hungry for such powerful and confrontational cinema. Many people thought they were alone in their desire to explore films with uncomfortable truths, but the truth is that they are part of a large community,...

Cannes film festival

Close attention is required for this sombre but impressive Taiwanese feature debut about exploited illegal staff, and their patients and gangmasters

Taiwan-based Wei Liang Chiang and You Qiao Yin have made this feature directing debut in the Directors’ Fortnight selection at Cannes. It evokes an almost Zen state of suffering and sadness – a feeling that penetrates the film’s fabric like months of steady rain in a rural landscape.

If that sounds like a daunting prospect, it is, and this movie requires patience and attention, a calibration of your viewing expectations to match its stasis. Yet it’s an andante tempo that makes its moments of drama, and even sensation all the more striking. The film’s executive producer is Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien: his influences are there, and there is also something of the work of Tsai Ming-liang.

As the Cannes Film Festival and the Marché du Film are both set to open on the 14th of May, Taiwan Creative Content Agency (Taicca) is making a big splash with films and projects it has supported selected in multiple sections. It will also be making its presence felt with several projects pitching at the market. Six films supported by Taicca co-production initiatives or investment will premiere at the festival. These are Rendez-Vous Avec Pol Pot in Cannes Premiere, The Shameless in Un Certain Regard, Locust in Critics Week, Mongrel in Directors' Fortnight, Colored in the Immersive Competition, and Missing Pictures: Naomi Kawase in the Immersive Selection. Further Taiwanese talent will be on show as Traversing the Mist by Tung-Yen Chou is also selected for the Immersive Competition; actor Eddie Peng is headlining Black Dog in Un Certain Regard; and actors Lee Kang-Sheng and Wu Ke-Xi feature in Blue Sun...

Cannes parallel section Critics’ Week opens Wednesday with French director Jonathan Millet’s psychological manhunt thriller Ghost Trail (Les Fantômes), starring Adam Bessa as man in in pursuit of a faceless, former torturer.

Running from May 15 to 23, the compact line-up will showcase 11 first and second works features by emerging directors, seven in competition, as well as 13 short films.

Deadline caught up with Artistic Director Ava Cahen on the eve of the 63rd edition.

Deadline: You’re on your third selection as Critics’ Week artistic director. How was it this year?

Ava Cahen: We always put the counters back to zero. So everything felt new, even if it’s my third year. We received a few more films than normal and screened 1,050 features. It’s hard when you’ve only got 11 slots. Obviously there were a lot more than 11 films that we would have liked to have welcomed. There was a lot of discussion.

Zee End Is Nigh

Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd., the disappointed bride in the failed engagement between Zee and Sony India, has formally ended its quest for a merger. On Tuesday, it withdrew its application before the industry regulator National Company Law Tribunal and said that it will focus instead on internal growth. Pulling the Nclt application also makes it somewhat easier for Zee to pursue its arbitration and other legal actions against Sony.

The plan to merge the two mid-size film and TV businesses was on the table for over two years, but finally (acrimoniously) collapsed in January 2024. Sony is also seeking restitution from Zee, which it says failed to live up to the agreed merger terms. Since the wedding bells stopped ringing, Zee has also announced that it will slice its workforce by 15%.

Netflix Starts Filming Guillaume Canet’S ‘Taken’-Style Thriller

Guillaume Canet, whose latest directorial outing “Asterix and Obelix: The Middle Kingdom...

Cannes Critics’ Week, spotlighting first and second features, has unveiled the competition and special screenings selection for its 63rd edition running May 15-23.

Scroll down for full list of titles

Artistic director Ava Cahen, now in her third year in the position, announced the selection of 11 features chosen from 1,050 films screened. Seven films will vie for four top prizes in competition, chosen by a jury led by Spanish filmmaker Rodrigo Sorogoyen. Nine are first films that will vie for the Camera d’Or and three are directed or co-directed by women.

The sidebar will open with French director Jonathan Millet...

France’s Urban Distribution has shut its doors, the latest independent distributor to fold due to struggling ticket sales following the closure of Rezo Films’ distribution arm in March.

Urban Group’s thriving international sales and production divisions Urban Sales and Urban Factory will continue to operate, but its distribution arm, founded in 2011 by Frédéric Corvez and Mathieu Piazza, was officially liquidated on March 21.

Corvez confirmed the closure to Screen, explaining, “Over the years, we’ve seen our work come up against more and more obstacles” and citing the pandemic as an event that “undoubtedly transformed the industry”.

He described...

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Christopher Nolan, Spike Lee, Chantal Akerman, Theo Angelopoulos, Lynne Ramsay, Tsai Ming-liang, Michael Haneke, Lee Chang-dong, Terence Davies, Shōhei Imamura, Bi Gan, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Jia Zhangke, Wong Kar-wai, Yorgos Lanthimos, Denis Villleneuve, Céline Sciamma, Guillermo del Toro, Kelly Reichardt. Those are just a few of the filmmakers introduced to New York audiences at New Directors/New Films over the last half-century across over 1,100 premieres.

Now returning for its 53rd edition at Film at Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art from April 3-14, this year’s lineup features 35 new films, presenting prizewinners from Berlin, Cannes, Locarno, Sarajevo, and Sundance film festivals. Ahead of the festival kicking off next week, we’ve gathered fourteen films to see, and one can explore the full lineup and schedule here.

All, or Nothing at All (Jiajun “Oscar” Zhang)

In All, or Nothing at all, director Jiajun “Oscar” Zhang employs an experimental...

For 2024, Queer East Festival launches its fifth year milestone with a remarkable line up of film screenings, arts and performance events across London from 17 to 28 April 2024 and then across the UK later in the year. The programme includes contemporary feature films, documentaries and shorts as well as special anniversary and retrospective screenings that showcase a wide range of LGBTQ+ stories from East Asia, Southeast Asia and their diaspora communities.

Queer East Festival's ground-breaking film programme challenges conventions and stereotypes giving audiences an opportunity to explore the contemporary queer landscape across East and Southeast Asia. Amplifying the voices of Asian communities are the UK Premieres of features, documentaries and shorts exploring young queer love, gender nonconformity and asexual identity, as well as thought-provoking classics with the 20th Anniversary screening of Chinese-American romantic comedy Saving Face and 50th Anniversary screening of the once-considered-lost Japanese title Bye Bye Love. Furthermore, the festival's ‘Expanded'...

Even though we associate bad memories with certain places, it is with a mixture of sadness and perhaps sorrow when we see them suddenly disappear. The cinema of directors such as Tsai Ming-liang revolves around the concept of lost and forgotten places, the memories they hold and what they can tell us about our present. In their collaborative effort “Magic Mountain” directors Mariam Chachia and Nik Voigt visit Abastumani, a building set in the isolation of the Georgian mountains, which almost became the permanent home of Chachia when she was younger and suffering from tuberculosis.

Magic Mountain is screening at Museum of the Moving Image, as part of the First Look 2024 program

The documentary focuses on two aspects. The first consists of Chachia's memories, narrated in an off-camera commentary. She talks about how she became sick when she was younger and ultimately ended up in the sanatorium, which, if she hadn't eventually recovered,...

This year’s Hong Kong International Film Festival will open with the Asian premiere of All Shall Be Well, directed by Hong Kong filmmaker Ray Yeung, which recently won the Teddy Award at Berlin film festival.

Starring Patra Au and Maggie Li, the film tells the story of an older lesbian couple and how the surviving partner struggles to retain her home and her dignity when one of them passes away. The film premiered in the Panorama section at the Berlinale.

Japanese filmmaker Miyake Sho’s All The Long Nights, starring Matsumura Hokuto and Kamishiraishi Mone, which premiered in the Forum section of Berlin, will close the festival on April 8.

Gala screenings also include the world premiere of Hong Kong filmmaker Ho Miu-ki’s Love Lies, starring Sandra Ng, Cheung Tin-fu and Stephy Tang; Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s Gift, a collaboration with composer Eiko Ishibashi, which will be...

Much is open-ended about this realist yet dreamlike exploration of midlife crisis and regret set in Vietnam

The question of what the title means, or what the movie means, remain open; even so, this is a quietly amazing feature debut from 34-year-old Thien An Pham, born in Vietnam and based in Houston, Texas. It’s a jewel of slow cinema set initially in Saigon and then the mountainous, lush central highlands far from the city; it is a zero-gravity epic quest, floating towards its strange narrative destiny and then maybe floating up over that to something else. It’s compassionate, intimate, spiritual and mysterious in ways that reminded me of Tsai Ming-liang or Edward Yang.

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell is presented in a calm, unforced realist style with many long, unbroken middle-distance shots, with closeups a rarity. There is a flashback and a dream-sequence presented in exactly the same way,...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For regular updates, sign up for our weekly email newsletter and follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSGoodbye, Dragon Inn.It’s getting harder to go to the movies. IndieWire surveys the state of cinemagoing in the US region by region as multiplexes continue to shutter. From downtown Detroit, the closest first-run theater is now in Canada.More than 500 pro-Palestinian demonstrators staged a sit-in at MoMA on Saturday, protesting the museum trustees’ alleged investments in weapons used by the Israeli military in Gaza. The museum closed its doors to the public and rescheduled planned programming.After confirming that three sitting representatives of the far-right AfD party had been invited to tomorrow night’s Berlinale opening ceremony, amid public outcry, the festival has now disinvited them.REMEMBERINGRocky II.The tributes to Carl Weathers continue to roll in after his death last week at the...

A shot of an empty sidewalk with graffiti on the wall. The sounds of cars and people dominate the moment. Slowly, a man dressed in a red robe enters the scene. He is barefoot and has a shaved head. For those familiar with Tsai Ming-liang's works, he is recognisable as Walker, the central figure of a series of meditative experiments which started in 2011. In the latest entry, which marks the character’s tenth appearance, the quiet monk navigates the streets of Washington DC, allowing the hectic American society to unfold before his presence. The Taiwanese director remains consistent in his determination to experiment with time, testing the audience's patience once again and rewarding those who seek tranquillity amid the rush of frantic life.

Played by Lee Kang-Sheng, a frequent collaborator of Tsai, the walker wanders through vast parks, train stations and around the imposing Washington Monument. The static camera...

Taiwan International Co-Funding Program (Ticp) from Taiwan Creative Content Agency (Taicca) continues to make an impact at the 74th Berlinale. Black Tea and Shambhala enter the main competition, while Sleep With Your Eyes Open competes at Encounters. Festival veteran Tsai Ming-Liang scored two official selections with his latest documentary Abiding Nowhere in Berlinale Special and The Wayward Cloud at Berlinale Classics Special.

Black Tea is Abderrahmane Sissako's follow up feature after Timbuktu with Taiwan as a key location and two Taiwanese actors Chang Han from A Brighter Summer Day and Wu Ke-Xi of Nina Wu playing alongside Nina Mélo in this cross-cultural romance. The film also received investment from Kaohsiung Film Fund.

Also in the main competition is Shambhala, the second feature from Nepal's Min Bahadur Bham, which sees a woman journey across the Himalayas to prove her innocence. Liao Ching-Sung and Roger Huang are two executive producers from...

Taiwan-based auteur Tsai Ming-liang, who has two films in the Berlinale this year, is a contrarian who would be almost at home working with art-galleries and museums as cinemas and film festivals. Indeed, his new “Abiding Nowhere” is part financed by the Smithsonian Institute.

“Abiding Nowhere,” which premieres on Monday in the Encounters section and consists of lonely wanderings through Washington DC by a barefoot monk, is, by Tsai’s own admission, “not a normal film.”

“It does not have a story or a plot. There are no performances and no language. It shares similarities with my other films, but pushed to extremes. Perhaps it is incomprehensible,” said Tsai, Friday, at a Berlin masterclass. “I’m not trying to tell you anything through script or performance. It could be perfect for a gallery or museum, but I still hope it plays in theaters.”

It is the second time that Tsai...

As we experience the ongoing rise of the cities around us, a rise defined by such aspects like gentrification and real-estate deals, we also witness the creation of a new hierarchy within our society. The process is one which sometimes escapes the eye since it has been subtle and accepted in the perception of many, but considering our lives have become so fast these days, perhaps this should not come as a surprise. Director Tsai Ming-liang, among few filmmakers in the world, has apparently decided to take the time necessary to observe this process in all of its consequences, creating a kind of cinema often referred to as “slow cinema”. His eleventh feature “Stray Dogs” is another example of his approach to filmmaking which observes the aforementioned process and also its repercussions for the people living in the city.

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Beware, spoilers! You may witness the most astonishingly beautiful allegory of death in a movie. The kind of long takes that flashed your mind and remains diffused long after the details of the plot are forgotten. But Shh… these few words should be enough to convince you to watch “Tomorrow is a long time”, the first feature-length film of Singapore's brilliant new formalist, Jow Zhi Wei.

Tomorrow is a Long Time is screening at Black Movie

In a fantasized Singapore, as an archetype of any tropical Asian modern city, the 17 years old Meng is raised alone by an austere hard-working father after his mother has left home, seemingly without an address. Meng's narrative has been clearly devised upon two distinct movements. The first part immerses us in the day-to-day life of this dysfunctional family surviving in a cold and harsh society. While the silent Meng is struggling to exist among...