We take a look at the Asian films that will be screened at the Nuremberg International Human Rights Film Festival which will take place from September 27 – October 4, 2023 in Nuremberg, Germany.

Lotus Sports Club by Tommaso Colognese, Vanna Hem – Netherlands, Cambodia | 2022 – 72 minutes | Documentary
Filmed in Cambodia over the course of 5 years, Lotus Sports Club, is an inspiring coming-of-age story that centres around Leak, a teenage trans man who plays football in the under-21s women’s team of Kampong Chhnang, and Pa Vann, the coach and father-figure to Leak and other LGBTQ+ players on the team.

61-year-old Pa Vann established the football team in 2009 to encourage solidarity among straight, lesbian and gender-diverse players. He also opened his home to the more vulnerable often homeless teenagers, including Leak, thus providing these LGBTQ+ players a safe place to be themselves. After living with Pa Vann for many years, Leak, driven by the pressure to make more money for his family and forced off the football team because of his age, takes the heart-breaking decision to move to Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, leaving behind the one person he loves the most. (NIHRFF 2023)

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Monster by Hirokazu Kore-eda – Japan | 2023 – 126 minutes | Fiction
When her young son Minato starts to behave strangely, his mother feels that there is something wrong.

Discovering that a teacher is responsible, she storms into the school demanding to know what’s going on. But as the story unfolds through the eyes of mother, teacher and child, the truth gradually emerges. (NIHRFF 2023)

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Myanmar Diaries by Myanmar Film Collective – Netherlands, Myanmar, Norway | 2022 – 70 minutes | Documentary
MYANMAR DIARIES is built up of short films by ten young anonymous Burmese filmmakers, combined with emotionally harrowing citizen journalism documenting the junta’s brutality, as well as courageous resistance to it. The film shows how Myanmar goes from the military coup to nation-wide protests and civil disobedience, to barbaric repression where thousands of peaceful protesters are imprisoned and murdered, to a growing popular armed revolt against this monstrous military junta.

Moving organically back and forth between documentary and fiction, the film offers a seamless flow in which the filmmakers find innovative creative ways to keep their protagonists anonymous. An extremely urgent film in a time when Myanmar has almost disappeared from the news headlines around the world. (NIHRFF 2023)

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Sand by Visakesa Chandrasekaram – Sri Lanka | 2023 – 100 minutes | Fiction
Rudran, on trial as a former Tamil Tiger militant, is released on bail. He returns to his village in Sri Lanka’s Northern Province with his mother, an aging fortune teller. While she spends her days in the spiritual world trying to locate the whereabouts of the disappeared for a deeply grieving village community, Rudran begins his own tireless search for his childhood sweetheart, Vaani. With a cast and crew of local Tamils who all directly experienced the civil war, SAND is a deeply authentic reflection on the post-war consciousness of Sri Lanka’s ethnic minority. Visakesa Chandrasekaram explores this perspective with masterful subtlety and precise, quiet pacing. Rudran’s journey consists of moments of silence, tenderness and contemplation, encapsulating the cost of the civil war and the weight of his failure to fight for Tamil identity in the quiet melancholy of the lead actor’s multi-layered performance. (NIHRFF 2023)

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Tortoise Under The Earth by Shishir Jha – India | 2022 – 97 minutes | Fiction
In a uranium mining area of Jharkhand, India, a tribal couple copes with the loss of their daughter. For them, the land and forest bear witness to their daughter’s memory.

With great sensitivity and beauty, the film explores the deeply intertwined connections between tribal communities and the forest that is their traditional home.

Deftly interweaving the vivid colors of their festivals, folk songs, and the sense of community that binds them together, TORTOISE UNDER THE EARTH is a poetic elegy to a world that is rapidly disappearing, subsumed by unchecked development and displacement. (NIHRFF 2023)

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Total Trust by Jialing Zhang – Germany, Netherlands | 2023 – 97 minutes | Documentary
Knowledge is power, and in China the state now knows more about the population than people know about themselves. Surveillance never has just one face, but is a fine-meshed mix of facial recognition, big data analysis and a points system where you can gain and lose points based on your behaviour – a system almost worthy of a dystopian parody, if it wasn’t already a reality. Amidst this spider web of monitoring, the protagonists each fight a battle for justice.

Chen’s husband is a human rights activist lawyer who has been imprisoned since 2020 for his legal work. Ever since, her life has been monitored around the clock. We also meet one of the only independent journalists who has had the courage to investigate the shocking developments in the world’s largest country. ‘Total Trust’ is the first major film that intimately portrays couragous people living in China’s increasingly monitored society. An eye-opening and deeply disturbing tale of technology, abuse of power and (self-)censorship, which the Covid pandemic only caused to accelerate at rocket speed. (CPH Dox)

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When the Waves Are Gone by Lav Diaz – Philippines, France, Portugal, Denmark | 2022 – 187 minutes
How do the best police officers fare in a country where authorities turn them against their own people? Badly, if you look at Hermes Papauran. The police academy instructor is lost in violent outbursts as an aggressive rash eats away at his body. When he leaves Manila for a cure in his coastal home village, his former teacher is released from prison. And he has a score to settle with him.

Exceptional director Lav Diaz (Nuremberg Human Rights Film Award 2015 for NORTE) unfolds the full range of his incomparable style: a unique combination of genre love and narrative experimentation, clear political edge and absolute artistic freedom. All in expressive black-and-white visual compositions whose calm contrasts with the seething temperaments of his characters. (NIHRFF 2023)

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For more information, please visit: https://www.nihrff.de/