‘Asian Shorts’ REVIEW: Gorgeously Shot Socially Relevant Cinema from Asia
‘Asian Shorts’ REVIEW: Gorgeously Shot Socially Relevant Cinema from Asia
This year’s Asian Shorts film program for QCinema features a diverse selection of socially relevant films from filmmakers from China, Nepal, Indonesia, and the Philippines. In their own ways they each deal with issues that afflict their local communities and continue to exemplify the unbridled power of cinema as a tool for reflection on the state of human society today.
Dancing Colors
Dancing Colors is Jakarta-based filmmaker M. Reza Fahriyansyah’s first short film to debut at the highly prestigious Locarno Film Festival, nominated last year at its Leopards of Tomorrow Short Film Competition.
It opens up with neon pink hues casting light on the faces of teenage Dika (Dimas Juju) and his mother as they silently ponder into a bowl of fish dancing. Dika’s parents have him soon set to undergo a religious ritual to rid him of his homosexuality. Talking about the procedure to his parents, the practitioner boasts about their success rate and adds that Dika may even marry one day because of this. It’s spoken of in terms of exorcism— of the need to rid him of the evil djinn invading his body. As the ritual proceeds with readings from the Quran, Dika erupts into an expressive convulsive panic, before eventually recovering relieved from his condition. Everyone is left satisfied. But as the film closes we find out that for Dika it was all just a performance akin to a campy interpretative dance. He had them all fooled.
The film skewers Islamic traditionalism with a light-heartedness that reveals an optimism for the open-mindedness of a younger generation. It’s short, direct, straight to the point, and definitely worth seeing for its effective messaging. A suggestion for future direction for stories of this type, however, would be to dig deeper into the psyches of their protagonists. Without that extra step a film like this can easily feel more like a clever joke than a work of discourse-inducing fiction appropriate for the heavy themes engaged with.
Lili Alone
Lili Alone is the short film debut of Zou Jing, a Shanghai-based writer-director whose success with this film led her to win the Leitz Cine Discovery Prize at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival.
It follows the journey of the eponymous Lili (Lili Huang) as she tries to make money to pay for her father’s critical medical operations. She lives in the Sichuan countryside with a young son and a gambling-addicted husband who refuses to financially help with her father’s situation. And so she’s left with no choice but to find work on her own and leave her son behind. Although she told her family that she’d be off to work at a toy factory in Guangdong, she’s actually entered the underground industry for cheap surrogate mothers. In it many poor young women from the provinces are trapped in housing complexes where they rent out their wombs for busy families in the cities. Once they arrive they’re tricked into lesser wages and pressured to sign off on any health-related liabilities that may occur during their time there. The longer Lili stays in the facility the less sure she becomes about whether she’s made the right decision.
This is a visually striking film with a strong sense of unity between form and function, with each shot well accentuating Lili’s alienation without being too overbearing. The slow pace and lack of music also make the film feel more realistic and allow one to more seamlessly immerse into the mindsets of its protagonist and the many other real life women her story represents. This is one of many films in this series of shorts that engages with the socio-economic realities that underlie life around the world today. This is definitely worth a watch and hopefully indicative of a fruitful career for its director Zou Jing.
Four Nights
Four Nights is the latest short from one of Nepal’s most acclaimed filmmakers, Deepak Rauniyar, whose film White Sun premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2016 and was later selected as Nepal’s representative for the Oscars in 2017.
It’s a short about two Nepali filmmakers, Ram (Dayahang Rai) and Maya (Asha Magrati), who are struggling to finish a film at their apartment in Brooklyn. Day by day they’re overwhelmed by their budgetary constraints as they’re refused one grant after the other. In between sessions of editing their film they talk to each other about the struggles of finding funding and the difficulties of being artists of Nepali descent. They refer to various forms of discrimination and a general sense of apathy towards them as sometimes even being treated as less than human. They come into tension with one another when Maya brings up a new job opportunity for her as a nanny, in which she’d live-in with a family for four nights a week. Ram is against it as he mutters about the irony of defiantly leaving Nepal to find life together to only end up living apart in the States. It’s a conundrum without clear resolution.
Unfortunately this wasn’t as interesting as many of the other shorts in this line up. Although the realities of struggling filmmakers from minority backgrounds are worth being paid attention to, this film doesn’t explore the topic in a unique fashion neither narratively nor visually, with a lot of the images flat and without any obvious intentionality. In a narrative sense the thrust of the film lies in its protagonists’ frustrations about their current situation, but I found it difficult to seriously take in their grievances while seeing them appear to live in a sizeable and well-furnished Brooklyn flat in what appears to be an affluent and likely gentrified neighborhood. The issues in the film are definitely worth discussing but I don’t think this film successfully adds to this conversation.
Papaya
Papaya is an experimental short film shot on 16mm by Manila-based visual artist Timmy Harn. It was originally conceived as a music video for San Diego-born musician Lecx Stacy’s song Papaya from his 2021 album Bundok.
The screening for this film (1 PM at Trinoma Mall) in the festival was a travesty due to it being zoomed in and terribly cropped. Given that its avant-garde visuals were already abstract and distorted, seeing the short zoomed in made it near-impossible to make out any of what was going on. And because the sound is further back into the mix, the vital narration through the short’s first half was lost as the subtitles for them could not be seen during the screening. The audience response was telling. After the film’s cropped out credits rolled the theater’s many senior citizens (who have free entrance on Mondays) started heckling the short and anyone who may have enjoyed it.
I later rewatched it online and found it to be a visually satisfying exploration on the lingering effects of colonialism in the Philippines, the main metaphor being the popular use of papaya soap to make one’s skin lighter in tone. This premise is expanded to a tale of intergenerational family trauma that comes to a frenetic head when Stacy’s track comes on and ends with an explosive finish. It’s wonderful to see this type of Mowelfund-era-esque filmmaking alive today. Overall though I don’t feel comfortable rating this alongside the others here because I had to experience it twice, with the latter watch being on a less gratifying medium. Nevertheless I still look forward to the future works of both Stacy and Harn.
The Headhunter’s Daughter
The Headhunter’s Daughter is the latest short from Quezon City-born and raised Don Josephus Raphael Eblahan. It was the winner of this year’s Short Film Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
This is the unlikely story of Lynn (Ammin Acha-ur), an aspiring country singer from the Igorot tribe, who decides to cross the Cordilleran highlands on horseback into the city in order to audition for a televised singing show. She says she’s not interested in becoming rich, but only to make her father proud. Unlike many of the other films here this one is more of a mood piece with only subtle hints of its deeper implications. What immediately stands out is the protagonist’s strong interest in country music of all genres, which in popular culture comes off as the most American of musical genres. She loves it so much she looks straight out of an old American Western. The film doesn’t spell out whether this is meant to be a reclaiming of colonial culture or an expression of its still lingering influence in the Philippine mountain ranges. Or perhaps it’s none of the above and simply an innocent love for the music itself.
Another standout element of the film is its gorgeous cinematography, with each shot coaxing out of the sky a misty golden green hue. I don’t remember the last time I’ve seen Philippine landscapes drawn out so tenderly before. It was mesmerizing seeing this on the big screen. One could maybe quibble about the film’s narrative choices, but I at least found this wholly enjoyable. I’m so glad to see a new Filipino film showcasing a part of the country rarely captured on film and made in a different regional language, let alone with great performances and production value. This was really impressive and I look forward to seeing more films from Eblahan in the future.
The Water Murmurs
The Water Murmurs is the latest film of New York-based Chinese filmmaker Story Chen. It was the winner of this year’s Short Film Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
In the film an asteroid has just crashed into the earth and news reports warn of cataclysmic volcanic eruptions raising global water levels. The story then follows Nian (Annabel Yao) as she bids a final farewell to her riverside hometown before evacuation. Although there’s a sense of impending destruction hovering over the characters of the town, it’s also accompanied with a strange peaceful calm with its characters perhaps even having a nonchalant resignation to their fate. Comforting blue hues dominate the frames and ocean waves appear inviting, as if in search for unity with the inhabitants of the town. We all come from water and return to water as is said. But at the same time the unsteady camerawork balances these out with a sense of underlying tension, as it eerily floats across and around its characters like a haunting spectre. The film is an appropriate end to these series of short films as it brings us back to the present precariousness of the state of the world around us, and into thinking about how we must take our next steps into the future.
However, I must mention here that the screening I attended was also marred in technical difficulties, both with mistaken cropping so egregious that the film’s own title card was cut in half, as well as distracting subtitles that would arbitrarily switch between fonts mid sentence without any reason. There is a small chance that the latter issue is inherent to the copy of the film, but the cropping mistake couldn’t have been. Due to this the film appeared unnecessarily zoomed in, which ruined several otherwise beautifully framed scenes. Regardless, I still feel like I can rate this one more than I can for Papaya because I was still able to follow what was going on despite these technical issues. I expect great things from Story Chen moving forward and I hope she can translate her short film success into one for features as well.
The Asian Shorts program of QCinema 2022 debuted on November 21 at Trinoma Mall. You can catch them again at the newly-relocated Cinema 76 on November 24 at 5:30 PM.
