Clarence Tsui: 5 Asian Favorites from 2025

THE WORLD OF LOVE (Yoon Ga-eun)
Can a victim of rape laugh, be good at sports, go on dates or – heaven forbid!– speak freely about her past? From the title of her third film onwards, Korean filmmaker Yoon Ga-eun subverts the clichés of rape-victim drama by having her protagonist do all that and more. Driven by a nuanced screenplay and a complex performance from first-time actor Seo Su-bin as a teenager who refuses to be told about how to live her life, The World of Love is erudite, empowering and emotionally charged throughout.

KOKUHO (Lee Sang-il)
Never mind all that noise about Japanese box-office records being broken. What matters here is Lee Sang-il’s brilliance in offering at once an epic, decades-spanning chronicle of a part-brotherly, part-bitter and always all-consuming relationship between two kabuki artists, and a delicate representation of a very traditional Japanese art form which has always appeared in the global imagination as merely cultural exotica. Zeroing in on an outsider’s struggle in a world of long-standing hierarchies, Kokuho adds yet another chapter to the Korean-Japanese director’s reflections about the struggles of suppressed minorities in Japan.

THE RIVER THAT HOLDS OUR HANDS (Chen Jianhang)
Here’s a film that ebbed as quickly as it appeared in an out-of-competition slot flowing through the Busan sprawl. Which is a shame: Chen Jianhang’s Hong Kong-Vietnamese-Korean first feature, revolving around a string of characters’ transnational pursuit of a past marked by war, political turmoil and the simple passing of time, is a visually mesmerizing ode about the chaos underlining contemporary Chinese history and the banishment and forgetting of vernaculars in the country.

SONGS OF FORGOTTEN TREES (Anuparna Roy)
A moving yet unsentimental piece about the blooming bond between two marginalised migrant workers struggling to stay afloat amidst the bright yet brutal lights of Mumbai, Anuparna Roy’s first feature picks up the baton from last year’s All We Imagine As Light and signals the rise of emancipating female-
solidarity films in Indian cinema, with powerful performances from Naaz Shaikh and Sumi Baghel as two young traumatized women seeking control of their bodies and emotions in the hustle and bustle of urban India.

ANOTHER BIRTH (Isabelle Kalandar)
Driven by Forugh Farrokhzad’s evocative poetry and images which matched  those verses stanza by stanza, Isabelle Kalandar’s self-produced debut is a melancholic yet captivating ode to grief and loneliness in the rugged  landscape of rural Tajikistan – as seen through the eyes of a young, curious yet
headstrong eight-year-old girl brought vividly to life by debutant Shukrona Navruzbekova.