The masters return to the 19th Five Flavours! Cinema and online passes are now on sale

Every year, Asian Cinerama presents the current state of commercial cinema in Asia. This section is filled with box office hits and works by renowned filmmakers – films that surprise with their narrative style, impress with their scale, and at the same time strike sensitive emotional chords.

Recent years have brought enormous changes to world cinema. The pandemic, the growing role of streaming, and the rapidly shifting architecture of the global order have all affected the state of film art. Meanwhile, cinema in Asia is thriving, and the cinema hall remains a unique space in which one can experience emotions and gain valuable insights into the world we live in. This year’s Asian Cinerama selection keeps its promise, combining commercial hits with ambitious social films. 

Passes for the 19th Five Flavours Asian Film Festival are now available!

The 19th Five Flavours Asian Film Festival will take place in a hybrid form:

• Online, available across Poland: 12 – 30 November 2025
• In cinemas: 12 – 19 November 2025, Warsaw (festival cinemas: Kino Muranów, Kinoteka, Kinomuzeum)

Two types of passes are available:

• Five Flavours Pass Onsite+Online for 400 PLN – grants admission to all film screenings (except for the opening ceremony) in festival cinemas, as well as access to all films on the festival’s VOD platform. The programme will include at least 42 feature films. The number of passes is limited.
• Five Flavours Online Pass for 230 PLN – grants access to all films on the festival's video platform. At least 30 films from the festival programme will be available online. The number of online passes is unlimited, and they will also be available for purchase during the festival.

Buy the pass

The Last Dance / Dei juk 

dir. Anselm Chan

Hong Kong 2024, 126’

[theatre screenings+online]

Dominic turns to the funeral industry when the pandemic makes wedding planning unprofitable and leaves him heavily in debt. For him, the new job is simply a way to make a living – especially as he has an idea for modernising funerals. However, his innovative solutions are blocked by the company’s co–owner, Man, a Taoist monk who performs the rituals accompanying the final journey of the deceased. Man’s conservative outlook and his views on the role of women in society become a source of tension, both between him and Dominic, and within his own family, particularly with his daughter Yuet. The film poses the question of how to preserve tradition in a world that is changing too quickly. And can it be done wisely?

After years of severe crisis, Hong Kong cinema is finding its voice again, drawing on local themes and the conventions of social drama. Featuring an all–star cast and shot on authentic locations, “The Last Dance” tells the story of a society struggling to preserve its identity, caught between tradition and modernisation. Chan delivers a universal and moving tale that won the hearts of Hong Kong audiences, making the film the biggest box office success in the history of cinema in the Fragrant Harbour.

Cloud / Kuraudo

dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Japan 2024, 124’

[only in theatres]

Yoshii makes his living through retail flipping. He builds his life on risk; whatever catches his eye at online auctions, he buys cheaply and then sells at a profit, embellishing the deal with a false narrative about the uniqueness of the items. Completely absorbed in his ambitions, he builds a small empire of success – but the circle of those he has deceived along the way, now seeking revenge, begins to close in on him.

“Cloud” marks Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s return to genre filmmaking. Filled with the familiar devices of a seasoned master, his latest thriller hovers between the techno–horror of “Pulse” and the cool dissection of social fears found in “Cure”. In “Cloud”, the Japanese director combines a critical perspective on a modern economy entangled in the trade of illusion with an ambiguous exploration of the condition of masculinity – simmering with resentment, prone to panic, trapped within the fragile structure of its own ego. Kurosawa is unrivalled in his ability to expose the horror of everyday life – he holds the camera in silence, turning the slightest shadow into a harbinger of disaster. His art of building tension lies in whispers of dread: slowly saturating the frame with unease until banal gestures and ordinary spaces crack under the weight of hidden phobias.

Human Resource 

dir. Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit

Thailand 2025, 122’

[only in theatres]

Fren works in the HR department of a large Thai corporation whose management – invisible yet omnipresent – routinely abuses employees’ rights, subjecting them to aggression in a fashionable setting and within a seemingly dynamic team. She is given a morally ambiguous task: to hire someone who will accept mistreatment without protest. At the same time, she discovers she is pregnant – something unknown even to her partner, with whom her relationship is slowly dying.

In his most sombre film to date, Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit, a favourite of the Five Flavours audience, paints a picture of the corporate labyrinth with austere elegance, where human lives are treated as resources to be shifted and exploited. In the film’s constructed reality, whose title itself sounds like a painfully grating oxymoron, the director masterfully employs silence, repetitive gestures and minimalist narration to create an atmosphere of anxiety, as stifling and sterile as an open–plan office. It is both a satire on work culture and a poignant study of loneliness: subtle and sophisticated, resonating with Thailand’s fertility crisis and the oppression of everyday life. “Human Resource” leaves behind a sense of unease that lingers long after the screening.