These are our ten recommended films from the Summer International Film Festival, which is taking place from August 14 – 26, 2024 in Hong Kong and is organized by the Hong Kong International Film Festival Society (HKIFFS).

After the Snowmelt by Lo Yi-Shan – Taiwan, Japan | 2024 – 110 minutes

A delicate inquiry into grief and friendship, Lo Yi-Shan’s debut documentary grapples openly with the story of Chun and Yueh, two of the director’s friends, who were trapped in a Nepal cave for 47 days in 2017, where Chun passed away. Now, together with Lo, Yueh reflects on their friends’ disappearance and, more obliquely, on their queerness and marginalised relationship. This becomes a way to process through art: to grieve as a filmmaker and subject retrace steps with new and archival footage, poems, witness testimonies and confessions alike, culminating in a bold filmic diary of therapeutic intensity. (SummerIFF 2024)

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Desert of Namibia by Yamanaka Yoko – Japan | 2024 – 137 minutes

21-year-old Kana works a disaffected job at a beauty salon, where the expectations placed on women her age are plain to see. In her personal life, her mood oscillates wildly between soaring highs and deep lows. Bored with her slavish boyfriend, she begins another relationship whose novel excitement soon evolves into an increasingly volatile disposition. Trapped with little promise of escape, Kana moves towards the inner desert of her emotions. Alternating between claustrophobic blocking and ample, expressive zooms and whip-pans, Yamanaka Yoko’s sophomore feature after Amiko (42nd) is a frank and dynamic examination of womanhood and mental health. (SummerIFF 2024)

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Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron by Arakawa Kaku– Japan | 2024 – 121 minutes

After the release of The Wind Rises, animation icon Miyazaki Hayao announced his retirement (again) from filmmaking. What drove him to come out of retirement once more at the age of 76 to make The Boy and the Heron? This illuminating documentary chronicles Miyazaki’s sevenyear journey to produce the film, in spite of personal tragedies, his own mortality and his insecurities. The film may not decode all the abstract symbolisms in the Heron , but it’s an essential companion piece that explains why it is by far Miyazaki’s most personal film and why the filmmaker may never properly retire. (SummerIFF 2024)

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Moving by Somai Shinji – Japan | 1993 – 124 minutes

Caught up in her parents’ wreck of a divorce, the young and sensitive Renko refuses to accept the burst of her happy family illusion, and tries hard to bring about a reconciliation through a trip to Lake Biwa where they once vacationed. The dysfunctional family drama morphs into a dreamlike revelation, as she emerges from the loneliness of a dark forest and the memory of the lake to realise that she has to say farewell to her past self. Evoking the magic spirit of Kyoto summer festivals, Somai’s long, fluid takes transform an awakening to adulthood to a mystic rebirth, portraying a poignant and lyrical rendering of the toll and promise of moving on. (SummerIFF 2024)

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My Favourite Cake by Maryam Moghaddam, Behtash Sanaeeha – Iran, France, Sweden, Germany | 2024 – 97 minutes

70-year-old Mahin lives alone in Tehran. Her husband has passed and her daughter lives abroad. Encouraged by her friends to get out of her shell and meet someone new, she soon sets her eyes on Faramarz, an unmarried taxi driver. Sweet and a little bitter, perhaps like its titular cake, Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha’s poignant slice-oflife offers a portrait of middle-class women in post-revolution Iran. Sprinkled with canny observations about life under the heel of the morality police, it is an ode to the everyday fight – including the directors’ own wrestling with the authority – to preserving the small pleasures of life despite it all. (SummerIFF 2024)

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No Other Land by Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor – Palestine, Norway | 2024 – 96 minutes

Raised in a family of Palestinian activists, Basel Adra has dedicated his young life to documenting the plight of his village, Masafer Yatta, which has been deemed an illegal settlement on land newly reassigned as a military training ground by the Israeli authorities. Joining forces with Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, this unlikely pair risk their lives to chronicle the escalating hostilities against a community of simple farming families, who want nothing more than to live in peace. What emerges is a candid and vulnerable portrait of daily life on the frontlines of a conflict that has raged for generations. (SummerIFF 2024)

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Sailor Suit and Machine Gun by Somai Shinji – Japan | 1981 – 112 minutes

Combining a surreal coming-of-age tale and a gangster feud into one, this genre-defying and inherently absurd story of a schoolgirl-turned-yakuza boss became a smash-hit legend, emerging as a cultural phenomenon that captured the zeitgeist of ’80s Japan. Adopting a popular novel by Akagawa Jiro, Somai’s liberal yet precise camera casts on Izumi, sneaking into her teenage naivety and unwitting adult sexuality beneath her sailor suit, while exposing the youthful recklessness and revolt as she finally picks up the machine gun to avenge the violent drug cartel threatening her clan. A deserved cult classic, it created a star vehicle for Yakushimaru Hiroko, and a monumental success for Somai. (SummerIFF 2024)

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Suffocating Love by Liao Ming-Yi – Taiwan | 2024 – 102 minutes

Liao Ming-Yi’s long-awaited follow-up to I WeirDO continues to reveal contemporary people’s eccentricities and abnormalities in various forms. A man believes he has found the love of his life when he meets a girl who seems to be the right kind of quirky. However, when her terrifyingly controlling personality eventually surfaces, he makes a desperate choice. Once again shooting entirely on iPhone, Liao boldly takes digital filmmaking to a new frontier with this visually and thematically captivating drama about the futility of obsessing over perfection in modern love. (SummerIFF 2024)

Typhoon Club by Somai Shinji – Japan | 1985 – 115 minutes

As strikingly beautiful as it is perplexing, Somai’s anti-coming-of-age drama that embodies the existential intrigues of youth erupted under the allegorical conceit of a typhoon is hailed as the director’s seminal feature, and one of the best Japanese films of the 80s. Unfolded in a series of short and sometimes enigmatic scenes, it immerses in the newfound freedom and tensions of a group of junior high students stranded in the schoolhouse, exposing their hidden desires, budding sexuality and insecurities as the tempest arrives. Facing the anxieties on the cusp of adulthood, there are no simplistic epiphanies; they have to weather the storm to survive. (SummerIFF 2024)

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Worlds Apart by Seta Natsuki – Japan | 2024 – 140 minutes

After her parents died in a car crash, Asa is taken in by Makio, a reclusive novelist and the estranged sister of Asa’s mother. The two gradually warm up to each other as unlikely roommates, but Asa struggles with growing pains and finding the true reason behind Makio’s hatred of her mother. Emphasising character growth and relationship dynamics rather than melodrama over trauma, this story of female camaraderie is told with a delicate touch and humorous charm, helped greatly by the screen chemistry between Aragaki Yui and newcomer Hayase Ikoi. (SummerIFF 2024)

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For more information, please visit: https://cinefan.hkiff.org.hk/period/2024/summeriff-2024