Five Flavours in Wrocław
As the tradition goes, simultaneously with the Warsaw event, on 15-17 November, Kino Nowe Horyzonty in Wrocław hosted the replica of the festival during which audience took an exciting film journey around East, Southeast and South Asia.
The audience in Wrocław had an opportunity to see 5 films.
The programme included new award-winning films from Japan, South Korea or Bhutan and an absolute classic from Hong Kong:
Made in Hong Kong / Heung Gong jai jo, dir. Fruit Chan, Hong Kong 1997, 109’
Rebellious Moon wanders among the Hong Kong skyscrapers taking odd jobs from shady characters of the local underworld. He has a seriously ill girlfriend and a friend whose life is also not a bed of roses… Strong images, desperate atmosphere and dynamic editing create an expressive urban poem, painful yet hypnotic.
The Red Phallus, dir. Tashi Ghyeltshen, Bhutan, Germany, Nepal 2019, 82’
A quiet village in a misty mountain valley appears to be a paradise – not for 16-year-old Sanay who keeps painful experiences behind a curtain of silence. An unsettlingly symbolic and visually charming story about growing up and discovering female power.
Born Bone Born / Senkotsu, dir. Toshiyuki Teruya (Gori), Japan 2018, 111’
A startling comedy-drama with a funeral in the background. The traditions of Okinawa and complicated family relations in a film devoid of pathos, sunny and salty as an ocean breeze, shot on a remote island of Aguni.
Maggie / Me-gi, dir. Yi Okseop, South Korea 2018, 88’
In an X-ray lab, a couple play doctor, a nurse Yoon-young's boyfriend can't find a job, and craters appear in the streets of Seoul, which seems to have something to do with a certain talking catfish. The colour seductive debut of the Korean director is a bittersweet essay about trust and misunderstandings, sparkling with absurd humour, though lined with melancholy.
One Cut of the Dead / Kamera o tomeru na!, dir. Shinichiro Ueda, Japan 2017, 96’
One more film about the walking dead epidemy? Nothing new, but the grumpy director somehow vanished from the set and the crew… is beginning to bite each other. A low-budget production, about the plot of which the less you know the better, unexpectedly became a huge box office success in Japan attracting 2 millions of viewers.
