Black Gate

“Aquatic Bird” is an 18-minute short film from Chinese writer-director Zhang Nan. It weaves together the stories of three interrelated characters — a prostitute (Bird), a man who admires her from a distance (Aqua), and one of her regular clients. The first two are brought together by the light of a green laser pointer; there is a lot of surrealism in this film. It looks very nice, and the script’s very taut — but given the weirdness of the film, I wonder if maybe a bit too taut. To the extent I was able to follow it, the structure worked and built to a solid conclusion. But there’s a lot I did not understand, notably the use of a dream scene, and a peculiar egg of surprising plot significance.

Bundled with it was Midnight In A Perfect World, from the Philippines. Directed by Dodo Dayao, who co-wrote the script with Carljoe Javier, the feature takes place in a near-future Manila where infrastructure’s been upgraded to near-utopian levels. But there are strange blackouts that hit parts of the city after midnight, and you must not be caught out in those places at those times. People disappear, leaving behind only wild rumours about what’s happened to them. Luckily there are safehouses, in which one can take shelter. But there are stories about the dangers of those safehouses, too. The movie follows a group of young friends caught in one blackout, and follow them as they take refuge in a safehouse — then find out one of the group didn’t make it inside.

The first thing to say about this movie is that it captures a striking note of cosmic terror, with a strong inflection of the New Weird (there’s an interesting interview where Dayao mentions being influenced by China Miéville). There are science fiction influences here, certainly, but not in the form of clearly-defined technologies operating in an easily knowable world. Dayao’s said that he worked out the reasons beyond all the unreal elements in the story, but chose not to include them in expository lumps at the expense of breaking up the flow of a scene. In part because of that, the film creates a world which we believe is operating according to rules, however alien, but rules which may be beyond understanding. It’s a little like Lovecraft by way of Laird Barron.

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Hand Rolled Cigarette (手捲煙), from Hong Kong, had its Canadian premiere at the 2021 Fantasia Film Festival. It’s the first film from director Kin Long Chan, who co-wrote the movie with Ryan Ling, and stars Ka Tung Lam (also known as Gordon Lam, a veteran actor and the screenwriter of Time, also at Fantasia 2021) as Kwan, a former member of the British armed forces in Hong Kong. After the British turn Hong Kong over to China, Kwan retires and falls in with organised crime. In 2019, he’s scheming with a turtle smuggler named Pickle (Ying-gor To) to convince his boss Tai (Ben Yuen) to take a deal for black-market turtles — and then a South Asian immigrant thief named Mani (Bipin Karma), who ripped off Tai, stumbles into Kwan’s home desperate for sanctuary. Mani pays well to get a temporary hiding place from Tai’s goons in Kwan’s home. But Tai’s after Mani’s accomplice, his cousin Kapil (Bitto Singh Hartihan), and then there are those turtles to worry about. Violence escalates throughout the movie, and it’s clear that at any moment the bloodthirsty Tai could turn on Kwan.

A story of crime and brutality, the drama and conflict of Hand Rolled Cigarette emerge not just from character but from the society the characters struggle with and against. Most obviously, Mani faces blunt hostility because of his race. The movie’s sharp enough to show some of that coming from Kwan, our protagonist and the closest thing to a sympathetic figure in the film. Kwan’s past in the military, meanwhile, comes into play in a number of ways — to start with, as an instance of a broken promise, as he and his men were not granted citizenship by the country they served.

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“School Radio to Major Tom” (“こちら放送室よりトム少佐へ”, “Kochira Housoushitsu yori Tom Shosa e”) is a bittersweet story that becomes a tearjerker by the end. A 10-minute short written and directed by Chisaka Takuya and set in 1989, it follows Eisuke (Tokuma Kudo), a teen who broadcasts and records his own science-fictional radio drama about a certain Major Tom every morning at his school; one day he comes in to find a girl (Chika Arakawa) who attends night classes has added a part of her own to his story. He responds, incorporating what she’s done, and then she responds to that, and the story takes flight without them ever meeting except by voice. Graduation looms, when Eisuke assumes they’ll finally see one another, but viewers who remember the song that gives the film its title may well expect things to go differently. The movie captures the atmosphere and technology of its era very well (shot on actual analog 16mm film), but more importantly it captures character. And it finds effective parallels between the story the two characters tell and their own lives. It’s a tremendously effective piece of work.

With it was bundled It’s A Summer Film! (サマーフィルムにのって), the debut directorial effort from Sôshi Masumoto, who also wrote the script with Naoyuki Miura. It’s a movie about a film club at a Japanese high school, which is divided in two. Which is to say, club president Karin (Coda Mahiru) is revered by almost all the club as a genius auteur, who loves the romance genre — but the outsider named Barefoot (Marika Itô, who had a supporting role as a punky outsider in the first Kakegurui movie) loves her samurai cinema, and has a script ready to go to make her own samurai film even though the rest of the club’s ready to pitch in to make Karin’s newest crowd-pleasing epic. This is the story of Barefoot’s journey to realising her dream, along with her friends and fellow outsiders, science-fiction fan Kickboard (Yumi Kawai) and aspiring swordswoman Blue Hawaii (Kirara Inori).

Before Barefoot can make her film, she needs a star, somebody just right for the role. She’s mentally rejected everyone she knows — but then a new boy named Rintaro (Daichi Kaneko) turns up, and it clicks for her. She pursues him for the role (literally, in an engaging chase scene), and then gathers a supporting cast and crew to help her make the film she dreams of. There are complications: Rintaro has a secret. And there’s the one-sided rivalry between Barefoot and Karin — Barefoot’s aggrieved by Karin’s success, while Karin hardly notices the existence of Barefoot. Will Barefoot’s movie come together in the end?

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The strangest title of any film at Fantasia 2021 was the Korean short “Digital Video Editing with Adobe Premiere Pro: The Real-World Guide to Set Up and Workflow.” (“그녀를 지우는 시간”) A 40-minute piece written and directed by Hong Seong-yoon, it opens with a scene from a romance movie as a young woman meets a handsome businessman — and then there’s a ghost. And the image freezes. And in a voice-over we hear the director, Seo, explain that his movie’s haunted, with a ghost showing up in crucial shots, and is there any way to edit around those shots? He’s talking to a freelance film editor, Ms. Park, and the movie mostly takes the form of a dialogue between the two of them as they try to work out how to cut the undead while still creating an artistically satisfying film. We see scenes from the film played over again as the editor tries out a variety of tricks, hear the debates between editor and director, and see clever ideas that eliminate the mysterious haunting.

Seo’s work is generic romance, but “Digital Video Editing” is a funny and engaging film, with good performances and an excellent script. It’s a bit of a look backstage at how a movie gets put together, and presents a dialogue that echoes a lot of artistic collaboration. Park, the outsider, has ideas about what to do with the film. Seo, who’s worked on it much longer, has specific things he feels need to come across. But do those things work? One way to look at the ghost is as a kind of spirit of the film, forcing the movie to take a certain form regardless of the intent of anyone working on it. But more importantly, it’s spooky. Add to that the dialogue’s sharp, and the sense of how film works is very strong; this is a very good short.

Bundled with it was Not Quite Dead Yet (一度死んでみた, Ichido Shindemitai). It’s a comedy from Japan, in which Mr. Nobata (Shinichi Tsutsumi), the head of a mid-sized pharma company, tries an unorthodox maneuver to try to find out the identity of a mole in his company: he takes a new drug his scientists have developed, the ‘Juliet pill,’ which will leave him apparently dead for 48 hours. Things don’t go as planned, and Nobata’s enemies strike — but he can still appear as a ghost to his daughter Nanase (Suzu Hirose, Fireworks and Laplace’s Witch), a struggling death metal singer, and with her help might survive to turn the tables. But she’s become estranged from him following her mother’s death, while he’s assigned one of his more self-effacing employees, Taku (Ryo Yoshizawa, of the live-action Bleach and Gintama films), to keep an eye on her. And the mole in the company is still there, now out to make sure Tanabe never revives.

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