OTHER FILMS TO WATCH
The Great Buddha
Writer/director Huang Hsin-yao’s outstanding film discusses class tensions and the ills of Taiwanese society, packaged in offbeat humour and luminous black-and-white photography. The film stars a collection of oddballs — a trash scavenger, a security guard, a mute who lives in a lighthouse — and the story revolves around a Buddhamaking factory run by a Mercedesdriving sleazebag millionaire. The ghost of Chiang Kai-shek is evoked, faith is questioned, and the tragedy of the marginalised becomes the tragicomedy of being Taiwanese. The film won Netpac Critics’ Prize in Toronto and looks set to be an acclaimed Chinesespeaking film of this year.
The Third Murder
Hirokazu Koreeda has taken a new turn. Known as a master of subtle family drama, the Japanese filmmaker is now giving us a courtroom drama and murder mystery in The Third
Murder, in which a defence lawyer believes his client is a victim of a conspiracy. Koreeda’s films are popular among Thai viewers, and the new film will open here in a few months.
Sweet Country
Warwick Thornton’s Outback Western is a story of colonial injustice in a land — Australia’s Northern Territory — where even God hasn’t yet graced. In a frontier town basked in dust and heat, Sam Kelly (Hamilton Morris) is an indigenous ranch hand who shoots and kills a violent cowboy to defend himself. Pursued by the sheriff, Sam and his wife flee into the desert. Not many Western movies tell the story from the point of view of the native, the persecuted, or the underdog exposed to racism and oppression, and Sweet Country is a film about the law of God and men in a lawless region. The film won the top prize in the Platform competition at Toronto.
Dragonfly Eyes
This Chinese experimental film hinges on a simple and yet sophisticated concept: the whole film is strung together from images downloaded from CCTV and dashboard cameras available on cloud services in China. A voice-over then imposes a narrative on those images — a love story between a man and a woman who come to find work in the city. But because the images are sourced from different origins, the “woman” you see in one scene looks different from the one in the next scene, though in the story she’s supposed to be the same person. This is a study of visual archaeology — how the ubiquity of digital images outlines the structure of society — and of the poignant interchangeability of lives because in the millions of cameras in the world (each of them constructing a larger, wholesome picture, like how a dragonfly’s eyes work), you’re just one tiny part of the entire system.