Vancouver International Film Festival's Dragons and Tigers Award 2011

Poster for Eduardo Roy's Bahay Bata (Baby Factory)

From Tony Rayns, regarding the Vancouver International Film Festivals Dragons and Tigers Award 2011:

This year’s jury comprised (in alphabetical order) Simon FIELD from Great Britain, Ann HUI from Hong Kong and YANG Ikjune from South Korea. 

The jury has decided to award two Special Mentions.

The first goes to BABY FACTORY by Eduardo ROY Jr from The Philippines. The jury admired the film’s unique mixture of documentary and fiction. The film addresses the cruel realities of overpopulation in a country where birth control is neither taught nor freely available, and we salute it for its candour and directness.

The second goes to RECREATION by NAGANO Yoshihiro from Japan. The film focuses on a case of lethal youth crime. We admired its unique atmosphere of ennui mixed with apprehension, and the brilliant interaction of the cast. Strangely enough, given the cruelty and desperation of the story, the film never for a moment loses its sympathy for the characters.

The 2011 Dragons & Tigers Award for Young Cinema goes to:

THE SUN-BEATEN PATH by the Tibetan director Sonthar Gyal from China. The jury admired its remarkable cinematic qualities, and its ability to tell a moving story with complex emotions through one face and one landscape. We were also impressed by the way the film draws such distinctive characters and by its persuasive evocation of Tibetan culture. It brings us a powerful voice from a new ethnic cinema.

10.9.11

Still more Vancouver Festival Films (Oliviera, Hui) --and one Filipino (Ad. Castillo), just because

Yang Ik Joon's Ddongpari (Breathless, 2009) does, at times, induce that eponymous state, especially when debt collector Sang Hoon (the director doing triple duty by also writing the film's script and playing lead actor) goes into action. I don't know what Yang is like in person but onscreen he's a singular presence, small eyes taking a steady bead on you (his moving target), jaw settling into a particularly grim line, hands working themselves into fists, prior to letting them fly. He talks insolently, contemptuously, his language a string of firecracker profanity; he collects debts by beating the money (and will to resist) out of his clients. He's dedicated enough (or unstable enough) to work overtime, pummeling his next-door neighbor or even a passerby gratis, without even expecting a fee.

This portrait of a near-sociopath bully would be compelling on its own but Yang goes a step further by introducing Yeon-hue (Kotbi-kim), a teen-aged schoolgirl who, as it turns out, is his match in foul language and possibly his superior in perverse fearlessness (he has his fists to back him up; she has nothing but sheer attitude). She defies him, wins his respect, and later his trust; the film plays out like Beauty and the Beast with the lovers suffering a severe case of potty-mouth; the effect is startling and unsettlingly funny at the same time.

Yang tries to go a step further--tries to explain Sang and Yeon's personalities by showing either their past or home life. These scenes seem trite and sentimental; seem like the kind of melodrama Sang and Yeon would rather laugh at than accept as their respective back stories. It's a measure of their appeal that we would prefer to take Sang and Yeon as they are--straight, no chaser, no sympathy or psychotherapy or any such syrupy nonsense.

Yuri Nomura's eatrip (2009) is a lovely documentary but no less substantial for being beautifully shot and lit--witness the sequence at the Tsukiji fish market where a seller talks about the lightness of tuna in spring, and how much richer the flesh is in winter when the fish eats fattier foods, then in a sudden change of tone notes how the supply of fish is dwindling all the time. It's a sobering moment, balanced by the woman who grows her own produce theorizing that it's best to eat root vegetables during the new moon, when all energy is drawn downwards, and best to eat leaf and fruit during the full moon, when all energy is drawn upwards.

The central section depicts a tea ceremony, where the tea master explains that "water and mountain are the essence of the Earth and of Buddha...what is Buddhism? It's all living things. Therefore all living things are a part of Buddha!" He's far more persuasive when explaining that a light blue sweet on a plate represents the Earth, with the translucent blue outer dough representing water, and the bright green bean center representing solid ground. "Eat the sweet first," he explains. Eating the sweet first, apparently, prepares tongue and throat for the tea, allows one to taste the tea's best flavors, instead of only its bitterness.

The film ends with a visually ravishing meal--light brown chicken poached in a green broth; what look like sauteed gizzards mixed with grain which are then steamed above the poaching chicken, picking up the flavor of both chicken and broth; a plate full of sliced radishes is lightly seasoned, is topped with gorgeous slices of raw whitefish; is in turn topped with a bowl of bright red strawberries--easily one of the most beautiful dishes I've ever seen. Does the film have some kind of overarching plan, a coherent point to make? I don't know; I suspect not. It rambles here and there, picking up other people's voices and opinions, at times pausing to show us how something is made. Much like the best dinner conversations, come to think of it.

Ann Hui's Tin shui wai dik ye yu mo (Night and Fog, 2009) was the rare festival film that I didn't like. Hui this time takes on wife-beaters, and like her Filipino contemporary Marilou Diaz-Abaya she goes about dealing with the subject in an impassioned, rather heavy-handed manner. These films are more about script and acting than about visual style, which is unremarkably competent--the script scrupulously goes about building the case against the husband (Simon Yam), closing along the way all avenues of escape for the girl (Zhang Jingchu). It's a case of city boy resents country girl, constantly putting her down, constantly undercutting her sense of security, and of self.

Mind you, it's not an especially bad film; it goes about its business with brisk efficiency and in its best and most moving moments gives us a glimpse of the kind of happiness the pair had (a quiet scene, for one, where Yam washes Zhang's hair) before everything goes horribly wrong. When they do go wrong though Hui pulls out all the stops, and you can feel the film slipping swiftly out of her control: Yam's angry husband becomes a teeth baring-monster, and Zhang can only gasp in humiliation and pain. We wince as well--partly in sympathy for Zhang (and what her director puts her through), partly in embarrassment for Hui. Subtlety like this belongs more in a Rob Zombie flick.

Manoel de Oliveira's Singularidades de uma Rapariga de Loura (Eccentricities of a Blond-Haired Girl 2009) shows the filmmaker celebrating his 100th birthday still in full control of his faculties. A little over an hour long, the film is a masterpiece of economical and graceful storytelling--not a single wasted image or gesture. The very first shot shows us a conductor punching tickets; the camera following left to right, right to left, as if asking us to guess who this story will be about, with the conductor presenting each candidate for our inspection. We finally settle on Macario (Riccado Trepa), who tells his sad story to a fellow passenger (Leonor Silveira). He is an accountant working for his uncle, and looking out the balcony of his office one day he sees in the balcony of the opposing building a blond girl (Catarina Wallenstein) playing with her fan.

That's all it takes: two balconies, a girl, her fan. Macario falls madly in love with her, of course, and for most of the film's running time Oliveira toys with the image framed by the two doorways and the space between the two balconies, the way fate toys with Macario's life. The opposite balcony is always tantalizingly close--you feel as if you can reach over and grasp the railing--yet Oliveira keeps us constantly aware of the gulf between them, as of the obstacles that must always be put in the way of two lovers in all romantic comedies (this one more dryly comic than most). At one point we listen to the girl reading Macario's love letter as across the way a different accountant occupies Macario's former office--Oliveira mocks her with the image of someone other than Macario sitting in his accustomed place; she keeps faith by facing pointedly away, reading the words of his letter aloud to herself.

The ending, of course, is purest irony (the script was based on a story by José Maria de Eça de Queiroz, a nineteenth century writer oft called the Flaubert of Portugal), with the film's final image possibly being Oliveira's best jest: The train pulling away from the camera, a joke on the joke Hitchcock pulled in the final image of North by Northwest (1959). Instead of cinema's longest penetration shot we have cinema's longest withdrawal shot, receding rapidly towards the horizon. Talk about onscreen lovers that feel blue, Macario possibly has the bluest pair of anyone I can remember.

Finally--not because it was in the festival but only because I just saw it again--Celso Ad Castillo's Patayin Mo sa Sindak si Barbara (1974), about a dead woman's determination to wreak unholy vengeance on her poor sister, is not a perfect film, not even a particularly good film, certainly not the finest of Ad Castillo's work (which at worst can politely be described as 'inconsistent,' at best goes beyond the reach of any other filmmaker in the Philippines, perhaps the world). Rosanna Ortiz's Ruth is the very definition of overwrought; Ad Castillo dwells over her jealous hysteria the way a sadistic police officer might over a criminal's interrogation, pressing foot to miscreant's neck and grinding his face into the dirt (we feel as if our face were being ground into Ms. Ortiz's). Some of the horror effects seem ludicrous today--the doll with glowing Eveready eyes, the rather monotonous 'twanging' sound indicating evil is afoot (if it's on foot, why would it twang?).

Difficult to say what happens next, but Ad Castillo, after playing with dolls and cheesy sound effects in the film's first half lays aside the childish toys and tries a different tack--silence, shadows, the stretching of a moment of tension to sadistic length. At one point he evokes the scene where Arbogast (Martin Balsam) climbs the stairs in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960)--only unlike many a Hitchcock imitator, he manages to pull it off.

After all the bloodletting and screaming and buried corpses, one remembers Barbara declaring to Ruth (rough translation): “yes I love Fritz, but never at the cost of your happiness! Our love was a quiet love, a tender love, giving, self-sacrificing, concerned for the other's welfare. It was not based on anger, or hate, or jealousy! It was not based on vengeance!” The film's true horror lies in Ruth's all-consuming jealousy towards her sister, how she must possess everything Barbara has on her own terms even if it cost her everything, even if it costs her her life.

(poster from Video48)

More Vancouver Festival Films (Serbis; Face; Lebanon; ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction)

Merly (Mercedes Cabral) and Alan (Coco Martin) and unruptured boil in Brillante Mendoza's Serbis

Did I mention that almost nobody I talked to in the festival liked Kore-eda's Air Doll, not even David Bordwell, who's an admirer of the director?

Ah well. Bordwell finds the execution "overcute" and "underdeveloped," but what's "overcute," anyway? The film plays into male notions of female fantasy figures, the same time it offers some kind of critique (the doll herself finds her owner's attentions distasteful, preferring the company of a gentler, geekier video store clerk), and there is something faintly prurient about the early scenes of Nozomi (Du-na Bae, in a courageously unselfconscious performance) standing in her (squeaky clean, rather breathtaking) altogether, totally vulnerable and defenseless, because the idea of putting on clothes doesn't even begin to occur to her.

But I submit that Kore-eda avoids excessive preciousness by focusing on the details--the latex squeal when her hands rub against objects, the occasional moments when she can't help but notice her translucency (either her shadow isn't dark enough or the gases flowing within her fingers are visible), the running gag about another woman's pantyhose lines, which she mistakes for latex mold lines. If one can imagine an American remake (and god knows, the idea of an inflatable sex doll come to life is asking for just such a catastrophe), one can imagine these details being simultaneously sanitized ("not so much nudity, please, and no shots of her cleaning out her removable vagina") and pumped up for slapstick content, with Jim Carrey mugging his face off to plenty of loud music cuing audience laughter.

Bordwell compares the ending to that of Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses. Truth to tell, Oshima's ending left me cold (as I think Oshima intended); Kore-eda's comes off more as a tragic misunderstanding, the kind found in doomed romances or tragedies. Kore-eda's film attempts, as does Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence, to evoke the pathos of the unanimated--how, we imagine, they might be helpless to determine their own fate, and how, we imagine, they would suffer accordingly (beyond that, I think , is an attempt to evoke the pathos one feels when empathizing with inanimate objects--when, at one time or another in our lives, we ourselves feel helpless to determine our fates). Between Spielberg and Kore-eda, though, I think the lighter (and hence more effective) touch is Kore-eda's.

After Air Doll I decided to hell with it and attended a midnight screening, which can often be fun; the crowd is rowdy, the movie usually of the lowbrow, grindhouse persuasion--in this case Kevin Hamedani's ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction. Easy to say Hamedani is no George Romero, and that his zombie picture is too clunky to gracefully shoulder the weight of political metaphor and satire that it is meant to bear, and that anyway the zombie effects are second-rate (owing to a presumably low budget), but zombie flicks are judged more by their gut impact than their subtlety (until we come to the more recent fast-moving remakes, in which case I go all medieval on them). But the picture burns with the fire of a filmmaker out to prove a point, and easily the movie's most unsettling image isn't of the beheadings or flesh-eating or the swinging zombie guts, but of a half-crazed (all-crazed?) man threatening to hammer a young Iranian girl's foot to the floor if she doesn't confess to being involved in some evil Middle-Eastern plot to convert all Americans into zombies.

Hong Sang-soo's Like You Know It All is his second feature on HD, and am I imagining this or has Hong become more ostensibly funny? The film tells the story of a director named Koo Gyung-nam (Kim Tae-woo) invited to sit in as jury member at the Jecheon International Music and Film Festival. It adds something if you've ever been to a film festival before, or served as jury in one--the ubiquitous shoulder bags filled with goodies, the neverending round of polite greetings, the endless catalogs and promotional handouts and calling cards--Hong gets every detail right (Jecheon as depicted onscreen seems like a modest-sized festival, though it could have grown since, or maybe Hong didn't have the budget or inclination to use bigger sets). Add attractive, eccentric, possibly insane festival programmer Kong Yun-hee (Uhm Ji-won) into the mix, and Hong in effect puts poor Koo through the metaphorical and literal wringer, with women alternately enticing and rejecting him, men either inviting or threatening him, fans at times praising, at times humiliating him, and Koo himself wondering just what he had done the night before when he was drunk to deserve this kind of treatment.

Add to this the unmistakable hint of melancholy (Koo is always finding something to regret in either the recent or distant past in his relationships with women (with concurrent repercussions on his relationships with men)), and one might say Hong has executed a light but satisfying omelet of a film--deceptively simple, but flavorsome.

Programmer Shelley Kraicer made it clear (on the Vancouver catalog and when he spoke to me) that he regarded Tsai Ming Liang's Face, about a film crew attempting to stage a film version of Oscar Wilde's Salome, a masterpiece; everyone else, apparently, begs to differ. I wanted to like it, I really did, but where the pacing in Tsai's previous films was leisurely and uncompromising here it felt soporifically slow; where his storytelling was deadpan unpredictable here it felt obtuse and nonsensical. I wondered what made the difference and someone offered this explanation: "He's cut himself off. Where before he was full of angst towards his life and sexuality, now it's all about his love for French cinema. Moreau, Baye, Ardant, Leaud, references to Truffaut--it's all magic and new to him where we've been familiar with all this Francophilia for years, even decades. It's killing his films."

Possibly--all I know is that something's seriously missing in this picture whatever it is. To be fair the imagery is often heartstoppingly beautiful, and there is one sequence--Salome kissing the dead head of John the Baptist--that's incredible, even great (don't want to say too much about it except that instead of using dramatic music or even music of any kind, Tsai employs the ambient sounds found in a deserted abattoir to terrible, unforgettable effect).

Samuel Moaz's Lebanon might be described in the catalog as a "cross between Waltz with Bashir and Das Boot;" I would call it a transposition of Kevin Reynolds' The Beast to Lebanon, albeit with a greater intensity and claustrophobia--much of the film takes place inside a tank, and any contact we have of the outside world comes through the driver's tiny periscope, or through the upper hatch, a moon-shaped aperture through which authority (an Israeli troop commander who seems to have all the answers (at least for a while)) and terror (a Christian Phalangist full of unreliable information and even less certain loyalty) enter from the outside world. One might see the tank as a steel womb inside of which the men overstay their welcome (their gestation period?), wallowing in their own increasingly unbearable filth and refusing to leave the safety of their armored uterus.

Moaz captures the stench of waging war inside a tank--the ever-rising level of rancid water on the vehicle's floor, complete with a flotilla of cigarette butts and paper wrappers floating about its oily surface; the ever-thickening layer of grime and sweat covering the tank men's wide-eyed faces like so much makeup; the increasingly congealed gluey mess dripping from the interior walls (an explosion had sent foodstuff (Matzoh meal?) flying everywhere, and in the film's one hilarious running gag (and, come to think of it, politically weighted line of dialogue) the troop commander keeps demanding that the men "clean up this mess").

One festival viewer had hesitated to go see Lebanon; he said he didn't want to watch Israeli propaganda. I can see it being propaganda all right, but aimed at whom I'm not quite sure--the Israeli commanders order the use of illegal phosphorus shells and order the tank to fire on innocent civilians; the men inside the tank are frightened and barely know what's going on. We know only as much or less, because Moaz has made sure that everything we see and hear are what they see and hear; the experience is a harrowing one.

Managed to see Brillante Mendoza's Serbis, about a day in the life of a provincial movie theater, where they show uncut versions of softcore porn movies and the action in the darker corners of the auditorium are far more interesting than what's happening onscreen. In terms of hygiene the theater can give the tank in Lebanon a run for the money; it's almost as claustrophobic (a dark cavernous space surrounded by an intricate network of rooms and stairways), it has its share of rank sewer water, and people have terrifyingly red and swollen boils growing out of their behinds (come to think of it the relative darkness in the tank made the mess there a touch more tolerable). There's graphic sex aplenty and fellatio plunked front and center for those who appreciate that kind of action, and there's the slapstick interlude of a thief running up and down the theater's stairways seeking escape (if he got lost I don't blame him).

One less-then-enchanted viewer told me "I can tolerate the sex, the boil, the endless stair-climbing. What I can't stand is the goat--why is there a goat in the theater? I don't understand the goat."

I sympathize. But anyone who's actually attended a screening in one of these brokedown movie palaces knows that the occasional non-biped often wanders into its reassuringly shadowy interior--I've heard birds fluttering about in these places, even the occasional bat, and once in a while you hear a cat meowing for leftovers. Plenty of odd things can happen in a Filipino grindhouse, including a patron urinating into an empty soda cup beside you (apparently he couldn't be bothered--or didn't dare--to look for the men's room).

Should we understand the goat? I think these places are beyond understanding, just as I suppose Filipino life can be beyond understanding--like the theater it's full of lust and filth, and everyone's too demoralized to bother trying to keep it fully, continuously clean (the moment when the men's room is flooded is strangely the single most moving moment for me with its silent despair, its patient mop sweeper standing ankle-deep in dark water). The script by Armando Lao--who I used to call the Philippines' most underrated scriptwriter, now less underrated (and thankfully more active)--seems shapeless, lackadaisical, and Mendoza directs his script with a general lethargy, punctuated by the occasional surge of energy (a bursting boil, a bout of oral sex, a thief dangling from a balcony). But Lao and Mendoza (with the help of a wonderfully unglamorous cast that includes Jaclyn Jose, Julio Diaz and Gina Pareno) have carefully attained that lethargy, it's the kind of everyday rhythm fellow Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz strives for and achieves in his hours-long epics, set in the countryside.

Call this then, like Lebanon, an elaborate womb metaphor, with the people trapped inside too self-absorbed and terrified to seek escape, only too happy to wallow in their own waste and fester. If there's anything at all compensatory in these less-than-ideal conditions, it's that the theater snack food seem tastier than the cardboard pap found in most movie theaters, with hot meals over rice, pork rinds sprinkled with spicy vinegar, and boiled duck egg (complete with feathery, days-old fetus for a protein surprise) available at the lobby. Just don't use the men's room afterward.

More on Jang Kun-Jae's "Eighteen" and Ralston Jover's "Bakal Boys"

Announcement of Dragons and Tigers winners

I'm the hairy dude that makes the dramatic announcement. For some strange reason the focus of my eyes had changed, hence my dramatic whipping off of glasses prior to reading out the director's name.

As for Bakal Boys (which, for the record, I liked very much)--perhaps the film's one major weakness, apparent on first viewing, is the director's seeming admiration--perhaps too much so--of the camerawork of frequent collaborator Brillante Mendoza (Jover had written the script for Mendoza's Foster Child, Tirador, and (easily my favorite of Mendoza's work to date) Manoro). The Dardennes brothers' style of handheld long takes has, for better or worse, become the signature style of the Filipino independent film production.

Jover does develop his own distinct light, a burnished sunset glow where Mendoza usually opts for a harsher, more realistic palette. Paradoxically, while Jover confines himself to warmer colors, his setting is noticeably bleaker than Mendoza's--a desolate concrete landscapes dominated by gigantic rusting machinery, with makeshift shacks that cover the concrete like an encrustation. The sea is the only other major presence, an endlessly roiling, rhythmic mystery, a source of both danger and possible delight for the people living nearby; in the distant horizon are cityscapes of northern Manila, an urban world familiar to us and other Filipino audiences.

As in his scripts for Manoro and Tirador, the last thing Jover seems to want to do is judge these children. In the Q & A that followed, he notes that attempts were made to try put these children in school, and that in a matter of months they were back to what they were doing, diving in Manila Bay for scrap metal--for many of the youths, scrap metal diving was a way of putting food on the table; if they didn't dive, they didn't eat. Diving was what they knew, was in many cases all they knew. As for parents, Jover cited a case where the father was crippled; I don't know about the other children (are all the fathers similarly helpless?), but you do notice in the picture the almost complete lack of adults--these kids, like the kids in Bunuel's Los Olvidados, are left to their own resources, to fend for themselves as best they can.

And yet, and yet, and yet, and this was the most startling thing about the picture, it wasn't completely grim; it wasn't all despair. You come away with an impression of the extraordinary strength and resilience of these children, of their ability to survive the horrifying harshness of their lives (Jover notes that one or two of these boys drown or simply disappear every week) and still be children, laughing, playing, teasing, having the time of their lives. You see a world that continually neglects if not actively oppresses these boys, and they and their kin and friends respond with courtesy, kindness, even love. Amazing film.

We knew Jang Kun-Jae's Hwioribaram (Eighteen) was something special (which was why we gave it the Dragons and Tigers Award) from the very first shot: a gas station late at night, pumps lined up to the right, a white-lined rectangle just below the camera frame, dark city night beyond. It's a shot full of promise, as if anyone could drive in and take over the picture, and someone does--a motorcycle rolls in, and a station attendant buzzes around it, topping off its tank. The rider kick-starts his bike and the camera pulls back, following him through the streets. The protagonist Tae Hoon has just arrived, in effect, and it's his story we follow as the film proper begins.

I'd been quoted as saying it's an old story--boy meets girl, boy and girl have a short affair, boy breaks up with girl. Familiar--too familiar, it's true, but one advantage of familiar old stories is that we don't waste too much time and attention on the narrative, we've seen it all before; instead we concentrate on the details, on how the story is told, visually as well as dramatically. For a plain meat-and-potatoes narrative, this one is told extremely well: understated melodrama, nicely modulated acting, some smartly staged set-pieces. The look is distinctive, in a quietly old-fashioned way (few quick cuts, and only a few instances of the all-too-common handheld camera)--no small achievement on digital video.

Perhaps the first time the story really hooks its audience is the scene in the living room when the parents of Tae-Hoon's girlfriend Park Mi-Jeong confront him and his family (the two had gone off on a seaside winter break without telling anyone), and Mi-Jeong's father loses it--he's pulled a knife from an ankle holster and is stabbing the coffee table. Handheld shots (one of the few instances in the picture and one of the few times it's perfectly justified, I think) convey the chaos; jump cuts keep us startled, off-balance--suddenly he's slapping his daughter; suddenly he's smashing glass with a golf club. Suddenly--the most effective shot in the sequence, I think--Jang cuts to a television set turned up full volume, and the roar of the set suggests the panic inspired by violence better than any onscreen act (and people's reaction to the act) possibly could. It's as if everyone's mind were tuned to the same station and someone accidentally sat on the remote, sending the tuner skittering across several channels.

Yet another example--Jang cuts to a sudden shot of the girl's younger sister, face puffy for some reason; the camera pulls back and we realize that she's being strangled, the hands tight around her neck belonging to Mi-Jeong. The two sisters fight, and their kicking and spitting and shrieking--with the mother desperately trying to pull them apart--seems more authentic than any family interaction I've seen on recent mainstream movies.

While we're at it, I might as well point out that the adults here, from Mi-Jeong's parents to Tae-Hoon's patient, put-upon boss, seem more authentically sketched-in and performed than most other adults in recent teen pictures (a rare virtue for the genre, where adults are usually abusive or ineffectual cartoons rarely given their due, much less a point of view).

Towards the end, we see how the incident (their impromptu seaside vacation) and their subsequent enforced separation has shaped both Tae-Hoon and Mi-Jeong's lives. Tae Hoon can't seem to accept the death of their relationship; he goofs around, tries to follow Mi-Jeong, tries to see her outside of school, or outside her home; Mi-Jeong for her part seems to have made her decision and moved on. But our final glimpses of their respective lives seem to suggest that matters are more complicated--Tae Hoon after struggling so long has (as suggested by the serenity with which he rides away) apparently come to terms with his loss. Mi Jeong puts on an equally brave face, but as she sits on her gym bench we hear the soft sigh of surf, and we see her hair ruffled, as if by an ocean breeze. Jang seems to suggest that Mi-Jeong was every bit as affected as Tae-Hoon was by the experience, only she's done a better job of repressing it; the memory, however, may haunt her for some time, perhaps all her life. Sad, lovely little film.

Finally, after googling around for articles and pictures and videos concerning the award, I found this. Recorded during the Jeonju International Film Festival, in 2006.

Jang Kun-Jae's "Eighteen" wins the Dragons and Tiger's Award

Jang Kun-Jae's Eighteen wins the Dragons and Tigers Award

Ralston Jover's Bakal Boys (roughly translated: Scrap Metal Scavengers) won special mention.

Happy for these two films, but I really enjoyed all eight; each had its own look, its own point of view, its own urgent message to flash out to the world, and if I could I'd give 'em all an award and prize money. But this is the real world.

Of the other films--mind you, these are strictly my opinion, and not of my fellow jurors; they had their own favorites and reasons, and it's up to them to reveal it if they wish. But I've rarely been one to keep my thoughts to myself.

Bui Thac Chuyen's Adrift looked the most striking, with gorgeous shadowy cinematography edged by a lovely silvered light. The story, about four men and women whose lives inextricably entangle, tended to remind me of a French erotic drama, only done better (maybe the problem with French erotic dramas nowadays is that everyone's done it all, seen it all; what you need is a few virgins thrown in, male or female, the way this film does, and through their eyes appreciate the tremendous force and fear sex can inspire).

I'm afraid Kim Ji-Hyun's Cats was the one I appreciated the least, at first; it took a second viewing to see the film's circular structure (a deejay whose voice is heard in the film's opening puts in a personal appearance in the end), and to realize that the film's occasionally awkward acting style is a small price to pay for the mostly naturalistic, mostly spontaneous look and feel of the film overall (I'm thinking of, among many others, Mario O'Hara's Babae sa Bubungang Lata (Woman on a Tin Roof, 1998)). I think Kim is less about the look of the picture and more about her characters--the lovemaking has a gentle erotic charge, nothing glossy and slick about it, the couples quarrel like real couples, and the editing among the three storylines (a gay couple; a dentist seeking a sperm donor; a young sculptor and the mother who wants to marry her off) is unfussy and unapologetic (the film cuts from one storyline to another with no-nonsense briskness, and it's up to you to keep apace).

Wu Haohao's Kun 1: Action mixes classical music, interviews, punk rock, personal diary and political rant to create a Godardian essay on the director's society and personal life. Perhaps the most sensational moment onscreen is an onscreen fellatio ("Is that you?" I asked; "yes," he replied without a trace of embarrassment), but the truly striking element in all this is the nostalgia Wu feels for the olden days of Mao, which he expresses in song, Johnny Rotten-style, as opposed to the materialistic spiritual corruption he sees eating away at the insides of his contemporaries. The film's not professionally done--some of the editing and sound mix is gnarly--but it's up close, and boy is it personal.

Extraordinary thing happened during the screening of Sasaki Omoi's Left Out: the director had a crisis of confidence and apologized for his film. I suppose all directors have moments they regret shooting in their films (some, Michael Bay comes to mind, have an entire career to repent), but I didn't see anything that needed urgent recanting, not right before the film's world premiere.

Like many initial outings this is a personal document--the characters are cartoonish, the yakuza figures manga versions of the real thing, but I see this as being basically Sasaki's story, the main character his fictional surrogate. All others are extensions of his persona (the yakuza are who he'd like to be; the girl is who he'd like to lay, and the boss is a freeze-frame portrait of who he will be, years from now), and he's in the process of working out just how much he'll take from the world at large before he snaps, what exactly will he do when that moment comes, and just how effective that moment will be in the general scheme of things. Bleakly honest and funny.

Mariko Tetsuya's Yellow Kid isn't so much a manga come to life as it is a lively manga about life--about unhappy people with complicatedly circular lives (Tamura takes up boxing to relieve his hostility; Hattori asks Tamura to model for his manga remake of the cartoon classic The Yellow Kid; Tamura accepts because the original model for the manga was WBA lightweight champion Mikuni Tokio, who inspired him to box; Tokio's girlfriend is Mana who once had a relationship with Hattori). Japanese passivity collides with Japanese aggression, and beautifully splashy unmanga-like art provides visual commentary. Fascinating film with fascinating ideas, and the meaning of the last shot (found after the credits) is fun to talk about afterward.

As mentioned at the ceremony and in the above article, Chris Chong's Karaoke was put aside during consideration, but it's really an impressive film. Almost nothing happens--a young man comes home, takes a modeling job, assures his mother he can take care of her and that everything will be fine, eventually contemplates leaving again, this time permanently. This "you can't go home again" microdrama is surrounded by the larger movement of a town transformed, said theme especially laid out in an extraordinary sequence where the main character Betik takes a walk. He wanders through a cathedral of tree trunks, basically towering palm trees that stand in silent attendance--an impressive shot, but as the sequence goes on and we see Betik's tiny figure walking slowly through the grove of giants, we realize that the trees aren't arranged randomly, but in a row. What we thought was a wild forest was actually a domesticated grove, and what looked like a ravishing example of proud, untouched nature was actually established by plantation owners. Cut to monumental piles of rotting palm fruit, haloed by flies, and the huge machines lifting the fruit on conveyor belts high up into the sky. This isn't nature but a parody of nature--agribusiness run amok, its plantations replacing local growth, its workers displacing local workers, its pesticide pollution contaminating local watershed, its very presence slowly corrupting the heart of this town.

Karaoke is basically about false fronts--Betik assuming a control over his life he doesn't really have, karaoke videos evoking emotions no one really feels, the silent palm giants representing a nature that doesn't really exist anymore. Wonderful film.