These are ten Asian films you shouldn’t miss at the New York Film Festival which will take place from September 29 until October 15, 2023 in New York, USA.

– Feature Films –

Evil Does Not Exist by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi – Japan | 2023 – 105 minutes
Deep in the forest of the small rural village Harasawa, single parent Takumi lives with his young daughter, Hana, and takes care of odd jobs for locals, chopping wood and hauling pristine well water. The overpowering serenity of this untouched land of mountains and lakes, where deer peacefully roam free, is about to be disrupted by the imminent arrival of the Tokyo company Playmode, which is ready to start construction on a glamping site for city tourists—a plan, which Takumi and his neighbors discover, that will have dire consequences for the ecological health and cleanliness of their community. The potent and foreboding new film from Oscar-winning director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, both NYFF59) is a haunting, entirely unexpected cinematic experience that reconstitutes the boundaries of the ecopolitical thriller. Intensified by a rapturous, ominous score by Eiko Ishibashi, this mesmeric journey diverges from country-vs-city themes to straddle the line between the earthy and the metaphysical. (NYFF 2023)

Clip:

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell by Thien An Pham – Vietnam | 2023 – 177 minutes
Winner of the prestigious Camera d’Or for best first film at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the enthralling Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell from Vietnamese filmmaker Thien An Pham is a reverie on faith, loss, and nature expressed with uncommon invention and depth. It’s a simple tale told with visual complexity: after a car accident claims the life of his sister-in-law and leaves his 5-year-old nephew an orphan, a thirtysomething man named Thien (Le Phong Vu) leaves Saigon for a trip back to his rural hometown. During his meditative, wandering visit, Thien wrestles with his own agnosticism in the face of others’ religious beliefs, summons memories of his long-disappeared brother, and reconnects with a former girlfriend who now lives as a nun at a Christian church and school. With its drifting camera, evocative use of natural light, and gratifying perambulatory nature, this is a film with the power to readjust one’s perceptions of the world around us. (NYFF 2023)

Trailer:

Nowhere Near by Miko Revereza – Philippines | 2023 – 95 minutes
Both diaristic and delicately abstract, this long-gestating, ruminative work from Miko Revereza (No Data Plan, Art of the Real 2019) reflects the filmmaker’s attempts to understand his and his family’s experiences as undocumented Filipino immigrants in the U.S. As he untangles the threads of his personal history, the film weaves an ever-expanding tapestry, stretching from downtown Los Angeles, to the American Midwest, and back to his familial home of Pangasinan. Called a “psychogeographical journey” by its filmmaker, Nowhere Near presents a vast swath of experience, incorporating the bureaucratic realities of DACA, the nightmare of securing documents and work permits, the dystopian modernity of U.S. living, and the feeling of disenfranchisement from one’s ancestral land. This captivating, collage-like film speaks with eloquence to the fragmentary nature of living between worlds. (NYFF 2023)

Trailer:

Perfect Days by Wim Wenders – Japan, Germany | 2023 – 124 minutes
As in his finest movies, Wim Wenders (Paris, Texas, NYFF22) here locates the magnificence in the everyday, casting the incomparable Koji Yakusho as the taciturn, good-natured Hirayama, who goes about his solitary hours working as a public toilet cleaner in Tokyo. Interacting on his rounds with a variety of city denizens whose eccentricities put his gentle nature into even more delightful relief, the middle-aged Hirayama becomes the quiet hero of his own story, doing his menial work without complaint, bemused yet often enchanted at the younger folk orbiting him, and delighted by the natural wonders poking out from the corners of the always changing cityscape. Hirayama is a creature very much of the present, devoted to a daily routine that is nearly monastic—until it is disrupted by someone from his past. Working in concert with Wenders’s documentarian eye, Yakusho, who won the Best Actor award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, makes his character’s every movement magnetic. (NYFF 2023)

Trailer:

Ryuichi Sakamoto – Opus by Neo Sora – Japan | 2023 – 102 minutes
When Ryuichi Sakamoto died in March 2023 at age 71, the world lost one of its greatest musicians: a classical orchestral composer, a techno-pop artist, and a piano soloist who elevated every genre he worked in and inspired and influenced music-lovers across the globe. As a final gift to his legions of fans, filmmaker Neo Sora (Sakamoto’s son) has constructed a gorgeous elegy starring Sakamoto himself in one of his final performances. Recorded in late 2022 at NHK Studio in Tokyo, this filmed concert is an intimate, melancholy, and achingly beautiful one-man show, featuring just Sakamoto and a Yamaha grand, as the composer glides through a playlist of his most haunting, delicate melodies (including “Lack of Love, “The Wuthering Heights,” “Aqua,” “Opus,” and many more). Shot in pristine black-and-white by Bill Kirstein and edited by Takuya Kawakami, this stirring film brings us so close to a living, breathing artist that it feels like pure grace. (NYFF 2023)

Clip:

The Boy and the Heron by Hayao Miyazaki – Japan | 2023 – 124 minutes
The first film in a decade from Hayao Miyazaki is a ravishing, endlessly inventive fantasy that is destined to be ranked with the legendary animator’s finest, boldest works. While the Second World War rages, the teenage Mahito, haunted by his mother’s tragic death, is relocated from Tokyo to the serene rural home of his new stepmother Natsuko, a woman who bears a striking resemblance to the boy’s mother. As he tries to adjust, this strange new world grows even stranger following the appearance of a persistent gray heron, who perplexes and bedevils Mahito, dubbing him the “long-awaited one.” Indeed, an extraordinary and grand fate is in store for our young hero, who must journey to a subterranean alternate reality in the hopes of saving Natsuko—and perhaps himself. Uniting the countryside surreality of My Neighbor Totoro with the Alice in Wonderland–like dream logic of Spirited Away and the personal historical backdrop of The Wind Rises (NYFF51), yet fabricating something ingeniously original, The Boy and the Heron is a deeply felt work of eccentric beauty brimming with inspired images that lodge in the mind, from the adorable to the grotesque. Moving from earthbound serenity to a universe of boundless imagination, Miyazaki’s long-anticipated film seeks, once and for all, a world without malice. (NYFF 2023)

Trailer:

Youth (Spring) by Wang Bing – France, Luxembourg, Netherlands | 2023 – 215 minutes
The latest epic work of observational nonfiction from Wang Bing furthers the filmmaker’s ongoing chronicle of the economic, social, and personal upheavals happening across a transforming China. Deepening the intimacy with which he captures communities of people living amidst financial struggle and toiling for little money in exploitative conditions, Youth (Spring) is a remarkable account of rural migrant workers employed in textile factories in Zhili, a town outside Shanghai. Over the course of five years, Wang follows various groups of people, most of them in their twenties, as they labor over their clothes-making, interact in the cramped dormitories where they live after hours, bargain (often fruitlessly) for better wages, and create emotional bonds and relationships with one another. As the title suggests, this film is specifically about the lives of the young, forcefully and humanely depicting—with its director’s customary patience and unassuming formal rigor—the consequences of the country’s rapid growth on the minds and bodies of a new generation of workers. (NYFF 2023)

Clip:

– Short Films –

Bold Eagle by Whammy Alcazaren – Philippines | 2022 – 16 minutes
Whammy Alcazaren’s ribald Bold Eagle composites personal and national histories with the onanistic imaginariness of the internet. In a dark Navotas City apartment cluttered with encyclopedias, family albums, and wrestling posters, a man and his feline friend look at gay porn and cat videos, ignore the doorbell, and embark on a fantastical Hawaiian vacation via an acid tab in the butthole. (NYFF 2023)

Trailer:

Mangosteen by Tulapop Saenjaroen – Thailand | 2022 – 40 minutes
Lensed with the fuzzy-edged resolution and smeary vibrancy of early-2000s standard-definition video, Tulapop Saenjaroen’s film blends family drama, process documentary, and narratological meditation through the story of a man named Earth, his sister Ink, and their family business, a mangosteen-processing factory. Disagreeing with Ink on the nature of the future, Earth embarks on a project of his own: to investigate the nature of fabulation and the transmutation of the material world into new stories and new images. (NYFF 2023)

Trailer:

Nameless Syndrome by Jeamin Cha – Korea | 2022 – 24 minutes
Young women are subjected to a series of medical procedures: diagnostic tests, rehabilitation exercises, and fittings for prosthetic devices, demonstrating the medical industrial complex’s dehumanizing reliancce on empirical evidence to validate people’s subjective bodily experiences of pain. Accompanied by key critical texts on the phenomenology of illness—from Anne Boyer to Carlo Ginzburg—Jeamin Cha’s deconstructed medical procedural problematizes the alienated choreography between patient, technician, and machine.

Trailer:

More information: https://www.filmlinc.org/nyff2023