Udine Far East Film Festival Dispatches

Another international film festival recently ended its online edition this month: Udine, Italy's Far East Film Festival. Boasting a lineup from the giants of Asian Cinema (including a few entries from the Philippines!) the festival has made available some films from their selection available for worldwide audiences. 

Here are some films that I watched during the festival period:

Andrew Lau's 2019 film The Captain is based on a true story - a routine flight to Tibet that took an alarming turn when the forward cockpit shattered. Like many big Chinese productions, The Captain tries to mimic the tropes and structure of Hollywood blockbusters, but something ultimately feels missing from the final product. Don't get me wrong, there are thrills to be had in this movie, but they only exist in the middle of the film. It starts out introducing several passengers whose personal lives are inconsequential to the larger plot, and it doesn't know when to stop, continuing a good 20 minutes after the movie should've ended.

Certain promotion materials for The Captain compare it to Clint Eastwood's Sully (2016), but that film was more a character study than a mere hagiography - in Lau's film. with all its hand-holdy, patriotic corniness, the hagiographic qualities are more than evident.

I still cannot fully wrap my head around Johnny To's 2019 film Chasing Dream - a strange, gaudy mishmash of martial arts film, rom (com?) and musical. The genre mixing doesn't feel right - it reminds me of Joven Tan's 2019 film Damaso in that it has a lot of great ideas that don't quite gel.

That said, I also have the nagging suspicion that this is a deconstruction of the love-conquers-all crowdpleaser, by making both its lead characters unlikeable (props to Jacky Heung for making me root for his opponent at times), by introducing several problematic elements and by ramping up the cheese factor to eleven. The world of Chasing Dream isn't even pretending to hide its falseness, it's all out in the open. Whether that deconstructive approach was intentional or not, only To can say for sure, and I don't exactly have his number on speed-dial.

Layla Ji's debut film Victim(s) feels like an apt companion piece to contemporaries such as Derek Tsang's Better Days (2019) and Arden Rod Condez's John Denver Trending (2019) in that all three films explore different aspects of bullying, with Better Days framing the bullying in the context of a brutal school system, and JDT framing its depiction of bullying in the context of the social media age.

The film begins with misdirection - the aftermath of a seemingly senseless killing is shown, and it seems like an open and shut case. But things are hardly as they seem, and the entire second half of the film makes things a lot more complicated. Innocuous scenes from the first part of the film feel like an alternate reality once the entirety of the film is seen - but the difference between the same characters in the film's first and second halves depends more on perception, highlighting a generation gap and the disconnection that sort of gap inevitably brings with it.

While at times technically shaky and hard to watch because of sensitive content, the film ends with an absolutely astonishing ending, which to me ranks among one of the best movie endings of the year. No one comes out on top within a culture of violence - the system makes victims of us all.