We take a look at the Asian films that will be screened at the Edinburgh International Film Festival which will take place from August 18 – 23, 2023 in Edinburgh, Scotland.

– Feature Films –

A pair of art-student anti-heroes, Kurt Cobain-lovin’ Xiaojun and his friend Rabbit, are set for revenge when their canvas is vandalised. But then again, maybe they’d rather philosophise than act… There is something thrilling about watching the students in Art College 1994 being so un-thrilled. Along with the bone-dry wit of art-school nihilism, this animated feature perfectly captures the ambivalence of being on the cusp of adulthood, while living within a scene – and a society – embarking on its own rapid metamorphosis. Behind the film’s grungy-yet-immaculately-detailed style, Liu Jian (Have a Nice Day) is a director with attitude, and in this partly autobiographical film – featuring cameos from fellow directors Jia Zhangke and Bi Gan – his acerbic humour and social critique are leavened by a deep affection for outcasts. – Kate Taylor, Programme Director

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Short, scrappy and quick-tempered, Ryota is not a typical fit for basketball greatness. Still – here we are at the big match of the season, Ryota’s team of underdogs at Shohoku High School facing off the established champions Sanno Industry, and Ryota must dig deep. In fact, each of his teammates must search inside themselves, as we follow the travails of their teen lives, and the challenges that come with grief and struggles of self-belief. That these reveries are captured in a series of flashbacks while the game thrillingly plays out in near real-time is the special sauce in Takehiko Inoue’s adaptation of his own iconic manga series. – Kate Taylor, Programme Director

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Following a violent incident, Dasru (Manoj Bajpayee) and his wife have left rural Jharkhand to struggle in the big city. But when they are recognised by someone from their past, Dasru must go on the run with their three-month-old baby, Joram. On their trail is a Mumbai police officer, increasingly out of his depth as he navigates the corrupt politics of land development, armed resistance, and an almost Wake In Fright level of lawless threat from local police themselves. Meanwhile, all is observed by ice-blooded Phulo Karma, self-styled voice of her community, and a chilling villain for our times. Director Devashish Makhija (Ajji, Bhonsle) delivers intense genre filmmaking with heart-stopping moments of peril, while bringing piercing intelligence and empathy to the globally resonant struggles of indigenous people facing displacement. – Kate Taylor, Programme Director

Nora (Greta Lee) emigrates to Canada from Seoul at age twelve, leaving behind her best friend and first love Hae Sung (Teo Yoo). Another 12 years go by before Hae Sung can track Nora down on social media, her Westernised moniker a nagging impediment to their virtual reunion. Because life rarely spares the well-meaning, many more obstacles stand between the two lovers who never were, caught in the rueful misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. A classic immigrant tale in the making, Celine Song’s directorial debut Past Lives is one of those rare films able to balance on its expertly crafted tightrope the woes of diaspora and the magical possibilities of reinvention. – Rafa Sales Ross, Film Programmer

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Joy (Max Eigenmann), an undocumented Filipina cleaner moving from house to house in London with her impetuous daughter Grace in tow, is saving up her meagre cash payments to get a visa and a more stable home for them both. Stuck in a roundabout of precarious employment, deportation fears and casual, constant put-downs by her employers, Joy cannot afford to stand still. A dreamy gig looking after a mansion and its bed-bound owner (David Hayman) turns out to be too-good-to-be-true when Joy starts suspecting the owner is being slowly poisoned… Writer-director Paris Zarcilla’s debut film (presented as a work in progress at EIFF 2022) elegantly balances gothic horror and social drama, producing an unholy child of a film that provokes as much as it spooks. – Anna Bogutskaya, Film and Talks Programmer

A cowboy, charged with delivering a suitcase to a mob boss, gets entangled with the boss’s lover. But that story is barely pretext for this fascinating trip through the alleyways and upper echelons of pre-handover Hong Kong. Probing the city’s anxieties via archetypes, larger-than-life characters and documentary footage, the film is a gutsy feast of visual pleasure and stylistic invention. In an oeuvre that spans The Joy Luck Club, Smoke and Last Holiday, pioneering Asian-American director Wayne Wang has never sat still creatively, and Life Is Cheap… But Toilet Paper Is Expensive stands up and stands out as a supremely anarchic, scatological flex of in-your-face sensory cinema. – Kate Taylor, Programme Director

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A nameless warrior (Jet Li) arrives at the gates of the King’s palace, having dispatched the three biggest threats to the monarch. As he tells the tales of his battles, we see a series of extraordinary martial-arts fights across jaw-dropping locales, including a calligraphy school, a vast courtyard, and the surface of a lake. But where do his loyalties truly lie? The film reunites Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, two years after In the Mood for Love, as the assassin lovers whose relationship gives a heart-breaking emotional core to this eye-popping wuxia feast. – Kate Taylor, Programme Director

Trailer:

The Kim family lives one day at a time, picking up odd jobs here and there to pay the bills and leaching off the neighbour’s Wi-Fi to connect to the world outside the confinements of their small basement apartment. When the eldest Kim gets a job working as a tutor for the rich Park family, the Kims find the perfect opportunity to change their challenging financial status and begin to infiltrate the opulent manor one by one. The first ever foreign language film to win the Oscar® for Best Picture and one of the most successful South Korean films of all time, Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a sharp commentary on class inequality neatly delivered as a skin-tingling thriller. – Rafa Sales Ross, Film Programmer

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– Short Films –

Excuse Me, Miss! looks at Los Angeles from the perspective of a recent immigrant, observing things that are quietly changing the face of the city. The film’s title refers to the creator with the camera, whose filming is itself both an expression of presence and intervention. The act of filming is entangled with the city landscape and interacts in the lives of those who pass by while recording.

Trailer:

When Roland Barthes visited China in 1973, he jotted down some notes that would become part of his Travels in China (Carnets du voyage en Chine), an underplot of desire in his imagination of the country. Barthes did not publish these writings during his lifetime, and his unsettling judgments about China are refracted in Peng Zuqiang’s work Sight Leak, as fragments of dialogues on class and looking, responding to the reflections on the same matters elicited alongside Barthes’ sense of eroticism. The local tourist in the film travels through different spaces and gatherings, seemingly never looking at anyone, yet silently looking at someone, turning towards a certain collectivity in spite of a foreign homoerotic gaze.

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More information: https://www.eif.co.uk/edinburgh-international-film-festival