Through Fresh Eyes – New Asian Cinema at the 19th Five Flavours!

The Five Flavours Competition is the heart of the festival - a place of discoveries and bold experimentation. It is here that audiences encounter, often for the first time, filmmakers who break conventions, transform the language of cinema, and portray places we have not seen before. These films are a window into Asian realities usually overlooked by the mainstream. Intense, committed, and deeply rooted in their local contexts - these are stories waiting to be discovered. The winner of the New Asian Cinema competition will be selected by an international People’s Jury.

The programme features the Japanese dystopian drama “Happyend”, set in the near future and praised at the Venice Film Festival. “The Land of Morning Calm” takes viewers to the Korean countryside—a bitter parable about moral unease growing out of everyday life. Meanwhile, “An Errand” invites us on a journey through the Philippine landscape—a dreamlike road movie that reveals the class tensions present in the country. After years of absence, Bangladesh returns to the competition with the hypnotic, poetic “Sand City”.

New Asian Cinema is not just a selection of outstanding films. The section captures the pulse of contemporary times, and each title stands out for its originality, promising a new sensibility and a new quality. Remember the names of their creators - they are the ones who will soon be shaping the future of Asian cinema!

Happyend

Neo Sora, Japan 2024, 113’

An innocent prank involving the principal’s car at a prestigious Tokyo high school sets off a chain of suspicion. Two friends, already dreaming of escaping the school walls, and Japan itself, become the main targets of a new surveillance system: a network of cameras that turns students’ everyday lives into a dystopian spectacle under the watchful eye of authority.

The long-awaited feature debut by Neo Sora is a portrait of generational anxiety and a near-future vision of Tokyo’s metropolis. Its protagonists are young Japanese navigating a world where every move is recorded and where a harmless joke becomes an act of political rebellion. Pulsating with electronic music, filled with inventive formal solutions, and posing difficult questions about the future of the Land of the Rising Sun, “Happyend” is a breakthrough in Japanese independent cinema - a long-anticipated new voice and a striking example of creative defiance. Drawing on the legacy of Japanese protest movements, Sora crafts a nuanced manifesto for a generation refusing to remain indifferent. The film brims with the energy of youth - those searching for happy endings that contemporary Japan so desperately needs.

The Land of Morning Calm

Achim bada galmaegi-neun

Park Ri-woong, South Korea 2024, 114’

Every morning, veteran captain Young-guk sets out to sea with a young fisherman, Young-su. One day, when he returns to shore without him, he must face the boy’s family, who refuse to accept the possibility of his disappearance. The villagers soon abandon the search, yet facts begin to surface, revealing that this seemingly harmonious microcosm is far from peaceful.

“The Land of Morning Calm” uses the pretext of a mystery to tell the story of a rural community. The director brings to light issues often overlooked in cinema and marginalised in public discourse. The dark side of South Korea’s “multiculturalism” policy, promoted in rural areas to encourage population growth, is shown here from a broader perspective. The filmmaker neither romanticises the exotic nor condemns his characters, but instead boldly portrays the tensions present within the community. Carefully constructed narration reveals the villagers’ opinions and the relationships forming among them. The unsettling atmosphere, seemingly emanating from the depths of the ocean, spreads throughout the entire village.

The film is also screened in the Focus: Migration section.

An Errand

Dominic Bekaert, Philippines, 2024, 83’

Moroya, the driver of an influential yet capricious businessman, is woken in the middle of the night by a phone call. He gets an assignment - to travel from Baguio to Manila and bring back a T-shirt with the Mona Lisa on it and some potency pills for his boss. What seems at first to be a simple errand turns into a claustrophobic laboratory of dreams and memories. Moroya is haunted by recollections of past jobs, conversations with other drivers, fleeting visions in which the present blurs with fantasies of the future. As he approaches his destination, he drifts between class divisions, the weight of hierarchy, and the absurdity of his task.

Adapted from a short story by Angelo Lacuesta, “An Errand” is a neo-noir road movie steeped in a dreamlike atmosphere of creeping alienation. Confined within the interior of a car gliding down the highway, the film draws the viewer into an introspective reflection on masculinity - one that becomes as much a fantasy as it is a torment. The director draws on the reservoir of road movie conventions, turning an ordinary vehicle into a vessel for storytelling, a space filled with digressions, myths, and overheard tales, where abuses and inequalities come to the surface. This is a film that turns a trifle into a telling symbol, and a run for a T-shirt and a pill into a striking portrait of a country where every journey is a drive to nowhere.

Sand City

Mehde Hasan, Bangladesh 2025, 100’

Here are two seemingly distant life stories. In the heart of Dhaka lives Emma, a woman from an Aboriginal ethnic minority who steals sand from public spaces every day for her cat, and Hasan, a factory worker who smuggles sand out of his workplace, dreaming of one day opening his own workshop and making glass. When Emma finds a human finger among the grains of quartz and Hasan is caught red-handed, their worlds begin to intertwine.

In the history of cinema, sand has always played a special role - as a poetic carrier of meanings and metaphors. In “Sand City”, it becomes the building material of the Bangladeshi metropolis, Dhaka, seeping deep into the very fabric of the place and its everyday life. Sand here is not merely a backdrop, but the very core of existence in a city rising on unstable foundations. Overwhelming in its concrete density, Dhaka appears as a monumental sandcastle, fragile, wavering, full of contradictions, yet a magnificent setting for an urban symphony of striking visual form. Inspired by European film modernism, “Sand City” portrays the multicultural Dhaka and the tensions surrounding its identity, captured within a poetic frame.

Meet the People’s Jury of the 19th Five Flavours Film Festival!

The People’s Jury is a unique project in which it is not industry professionals, but passionate and energetic film enthusiasts who evaluate the competition titles and decide which of the festival’s films will receive the Grand Prix.

This year’s People’s Jury consists of:

• Chloe Sit [Hong Kong / United Kingdom]
• Emily Jisoo [United Kingdom]
• Runqi Luo [China / United Kingdom]
• Giovanni Stigliano Messuti [Italy]
• Rino Lu [China / United Kingdom]
• Gijs Suy [Netherlands]
• Karolina Zdunek [Poland]
• Katarzyna Zając [Poland]
• Maria Sukow [Poland]
• Paula Wasiluk [Poland]