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| The 2023 QCinema International Film Festival's Asian Next Wave lineup of directorial debuts (Image Source: DZRH News/QCinema International Film Festival) |
For its 11th edition, the QCinema International Film Festival announces the titles competing in its premiere launching pad for Asia’s most promising filmmakers. This year’s Asian Next Wave competition showcases eight exciting feature film directorial debuts competing for the Pylon Award. QCinema also introduces its official documentary program QCDox. Though the festival has exhibited documentaries before in previous editions, QCDox is a stronger commitment to bringing more attention to the possibilities of the form. In line with this, QCinema has put together a lineup of three very different documentaries, each one taking its own approach to documenting some facet of our reality.
Here are the official entries of QCinema 2023's Asian Next Wave competition:
• Abang Adik by Jin Ong (Malaysia)
Abang Adik is about deaf-mute Abang and younger brother Adi who live in poverty as undocumented denizens in Kuala Lumpur. All Abang wants is to live a decent life and find a way to legally obtain an ID. But the more temperamental Adi will take any shortcut to climb out of poverty, even if it means harming other people. Jin Ong, a veteran producer, dives into the dark corners of Malaysian urban life, tracking the lives of people invisible to an indifferent society. The film swept the top prizes at Udine’s Far East Film Festival, winning the Golden Mulberry audience award, the Black Dragon Critics’ prize, and award for best first feature.
• Gitling by Jopy Arnaldo (Philippines)
The film, which stars Gabby Padilla and Ken Yamamura, is about a translator who was hired by a filmmaker for a film festival in Bacolod. The two became friends, bonding over stories of heartbreak, and a language that Jamie made up. Jopy Arnaldo parses the way people communicate with each other, and the things that people don’t say. The film uses subtitles in novel ways, expressing what is unsaid between characters that cannot express what they are really feeling. Gitling is the Best Screenplay winner in the recent Cinemalaya Film Festival.
• Inside The Yellow Cocoon Shell by Thien An Pham (Vietnam)
Inside The Yellow Cocoon Shell follows Thien who travels to the jungles of rural Vietnam in search of a long-lost brother following the sudden death of his sister-in-law. What follows is a journey of spiritual discovery through the mystical landscape of his nation. Thien Am Pham creates in this film a meditative, at times hallucinatory space that examines our relationship with death and the afterlife. It had its world premiere in the Directors’ Fortnight section at the 76th Cannes Film Festival on May 24, 2023 and won the Caméra d’Or which is awarded for the best first feature film.
• Last Shadow At First Light by Nicole Midori Woodford (Singapore)
The film is about Ami, who believes that her father has been lying to her about her mother’s death. She travels to Japan and finds herself on a road trip with her uncle, chasing ghosts and apparitions on the way to discovering painful truths about love and loss. Writer and director Nicole Midori Woodford’s film seamlessly integrates supernatural elements in this quiet, dreamy, coming-of-age story that displays a profound understanding of a distinctly Asian relationship with the afterlife.
• Love Is A Gun by Lee Hong-chi (Taiwan)
Love Is A Gun is about Sweet Potato, who spent some years in prison for working for a syndicate. He’s trying to go straight, but his past keeps catching up with him, trying to draw him back into a violent life. Lee Hong-chi, known for his work in acting, makes his feature film writing and directing debut with a sensitive portrait of directionless youth in Taiwan, exploring the life of a young man who wants to find a better life for himself, but is unable to find the opportunities to do so. Love Is A Gun is the first Taiwanese film to win the best first feature at the Venice International Film Festival.
• Mimang by Kim Tae-yang (South Korea)
Kim Tae-yang’s film follows a man and a woman as they walk the streets of Seoul, a city that seems to keep changing as time goes by. TIFF’s Giovanni Fulvi calls Mimang “a condensed Korean indie counterpart to Richard Linklater’s Before series”. Kim Tae-yang and cinematographer Kim Jin-hyeong turns Seoul’s streets into a magical, amorphous landscape, changing in the way that memories can change, even between people with deep connections to a place, a time, and each other.
• Solids By The Seashore by Patiparn Boontarig (Thailand)
The film is set in a Southern Thai town of Songkhla, which is under threat from coastal erosion. It is in this place that Muslim poet Shati meets artist Fon, who has traveled from Bangkok for an exhibit bringing awareness to the impending environmental disaster. Shati is torn between her religious upbringing and a burgeoning affection for Fon and faces an inner turmoil reflected in the chaos brought on by the monsoons. Casually melding folklore with modern concerns, director Patiparn Boontarig employs a magical realist approach to sort through the eternal conflict between faith and identity.
• Tiger Stripes by Amanda Nell Eu (Malaysia)
The film is about 12-year old Zaffan who is going through the challenges of puberty. But there’s something unusual about the changes her body is experiencing. When the community around her discovers what’s happening, Zaffan is shunned and attacked, leaving her no choice but to accept what she is becoming. Amanda Nell Eu‘s film makes literal the horrors of adolescence, making potent body horror out of the often horrifying developments of a pubescent transformation. Tiger Stripes had its world premiere at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival on May 17, 2023 where it won the Critics’ Week Grand Prize.
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| The QCDox lineup of documentary films to be screened during the 2023 QCinema International Film Festival (Image Source: Wazzup.PH/QCinema International Film Festival) |
On the other hand, the three documentaries to be featured in QCinema 2023's QCDox section are the following:
• Divine Factory, directed by Joseph Mangat, looks and feels like what most people probably think of when they think of documentaries. The director takes his camera into a factory on the outskirts of Manila that produces religious figurines. He talks to the workers there, a lot of whom just happen to be part of the LGBTQIA+ community. Through these interviews, we get to know these people, who work on these items of faith that paradoxically serve as symbols of their own oppression.
• Miko Revereza, on the other hand, has always taken a more personal approach to the documentary, using film as a means of sorting through his own complicated feelings about who he is and who he wants to be. In Nowhere Near, the film diarist flies from the US back to his hometown in Pangasinan where he interrogates the very notion of home as he investigates a family curse and tangles with the colonial history of the coastal province.
• And then, there’s the National Anarchist: Lino Brocka in which the maverick director Khavn gathers footage from the National Artist’s vast body of film work from various sources and reassembles them into a raucous collage that makes clear the connections between various films and the sentiments expressed by Brocka while he was alive. Set to music by the Brockas and Max Jocson, Khavn produces a wild, unusual biography of an artist that practically lets the work speak for itself.
These three documentary films, using dramatically different methods, aim to uncover some sort of truth. Cinema is harnessed as a medium to explore the conditions of workers at a factory, to traverse the personal psychogeography of one’s hometown, and to capture the anarchic spirit of a great artist whose work is more diverse than most people know. Moving forward, QCDox as a section will be guided by the principle that there are many ways to get to the truth of something.
The 2023 QCinema International Film Festival is slated to be held on November 17-26, 2023 with featured films to be screened at various cinemas in Quezon City including Gateway Cineplex 10, Robinsons Movieworld Magnolia, Ayala Malls Cinemas’ UP Town Center, Power Plant Cinema, and Shangri-La’s Red Carpet Cinemas. For more updates and announcements, follow @qcinemaph on social media.
