The Malaysian-Chinese actor is in town to receive the festival’s honorary Asian Filmmaker of the Year award. She is also promoting It’s My Time, the mainland Chinese comedy where she plays a pensioner who finds her life upended – for better or worse – by discovering late fame through her talent in solving the cube-shaped puzzle.

“I have spent many years abroad, working on American movies and television,” said Yeoh, who followed up her Best Actress win at the Academy Awards in 2022 for her radiant performance in Everything Everywhere All At Once with appearances in Kenneth Branagh’s A Haunting In Venice and the Wicked franchise.

“With the opportunity of working with [Chinese] producer Wen Muye and and also the [Hong Kong] producer Peter Lam who’s a good friend of mine, I had this good way to come back to the Asian market, which has always been very important to me.”

It’s My Time was released in China in June before making its international bow at Toronto.  Yeoh was doing double duty there, also gracing the world premiere of the Ireland-set The Surgeon, in which she plays a physician forced to battle gun-wielding gangsters with nothing but her scalpel and her knowledge of the frailty of the human body.

While the two films bear testament to her range – and she thrives in both, in very different ways – they also illustrate her reputation as an actor able to approach movies from diverse cultural milieus with ease. “I think I had spent quite a few years trying to build a bridge from the east to the west, and from the west to the east. So hopefully the bridge will stay there,” she said.

She believes things have progressed somewhat compared to the time when she made her Hollywood breakthrough in Tomorrow Never Dies. “I thought the doors would be flung open, but the roles that came to me were still very stereotypical.” Yeoh said more can still be done to broaden Asia’s presence abroad.

“I think there’s quite a few of us trying to step up to that challenge and we’re making headway – and the challenge is not behind us.” Yeoh was last in Busan for Luc Besson’s 2011 Aung San Suu Kyi biopic The Lady. “It’s not just in front of the camera but behind the camera. There are so many narratives, so many stories to be told, and DPs and writers could come forward with their work to showcase what we’re capable of.”

When asked whether she would entertain ideas of working with Korean filmmakers, Yeoh affirmed: “Of course, I would love to work with director Park [Chan-wook] and director Bong [Joon-ho].”

Yeoh said the Korean film she looked forward to watching the most is Possible Love by Lee Chang-dong. By happy coincidence, the director was sitting on her left at the Busan International Film Festival’s opening ceremony. On her right was director Ann Hui, who received the Camellia Award, the prize dedicated to filmmakers for their representation of women in their work.

The actor said she started reminiscing with Hong Kong filmmaker Hui about their collaboration in 1996, a time still years before her international breakthrough. “Last night we were walking down memory lane about The Stunt Woman, when Ann and I were trying to pay homage to the stunt people – you never get to see their faces but their work makes us actors look so good.

“In that film I almost broke my back – so those moments give you a big pause in your life, to think what you want out of it. There’s a moment when I thought about stepping away from all this.”

But she didn’t – which was all the more remarkable given how she was to suffer from yet another potentially career-ending injury three years later while shooting Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

While those gravity-defying days are seemingly over, Yeoh’s legacy as an action star remains. She made her own metatextual dig at her on-screen persona in Everything Everywhere All At Once. In her upcoming appearance in the TV mini-series Blade Runner 2099, she plays a Replicant commissioned to hunt down rogue elements of her cyborg kind.

Yeoh said the briefness of her stay in Busan was down to her commitment to promote Blade Runner 2099 at Comicon in New York. “It’s an amazing journey,” she said. “To work with a great cast, talents like Hunter Schafer, and Silka Luisa, who’s the showrunner, and Sir Ridley Scott who welcomed us into this world – it’s a great joy.”

Bowing in competition in Busan a fortnight onwards from its domestic release in Japan, Satoko Always will then land in Honolulu for the Hawaii International Film Festival. With its clever structure, charming performances and a winning narrative about women breaking free of gendered social norms through the small yet very imaginative gesture of putting pen to paper, Okita’s most mature and high-concept outing (and his first in four years) should secure more festival bookings and commercial distribution because of its tone and Arimura’s star power.

Unfolding roughly in three chapters, Satoko Always is thus named because Satoko is always on screen – albeit embodied by three individuals very different in age, temperament and circumstance. The 15-year-old Satoko Nakai (Himeno) is a rolling ball of zany energy, her youthful joie de vivre clashing with her markedly un-girly face and an obsession with shiokara, a pungent condiment favoured these days mostly by pensioners. Satoko Nishida (Arimura), 35, is a pedantic publicity executive stuck in a rut as she faces younger competition at work and a frustrating affair with a married man (Joe Odagiri). Finally, there’s Satoko Iijima (Ishida), a cheery homemaker pondering on her future as her youngest son prepares to leave home for university.

Each with their own mundane interests – the wide-eyed teen with baseball, the jaded millennial with Korean soap operas, the mild-mannered Gen X-er with a session jumping on trampolines – the trio find themselves jolted out of their humdrum existence through writing. Nakai discovers her fantastically creative inner self as she draws inspiration from the thought of her aloof literature teacher (Yoh Yoshida) and a boy (Tohara Ogawa) she has a mild crush on; Nishida ditches the idea of her script-doctoring job and her useless lover by channelling her feelings onto paper; Iijima, meanwhile, gets to restart a vocation she has put on hold for her family’s sake.

Satoko Always is an unfettered celebration of creativity, and Okita doesn’t disappoint with the way he and his team – specifically DP Akiko Ashizawa and editor Masaya Ozaki – frame the very different strands. Matching Himeno’s refreshingly unselfconscious performance – comical expressions, jangly limbs and more – the director unleashes his teenage protagonist’s transformation with sharp dialogue, quick cuts and a hilarious break-the-fourth-wall sequence – a screwball schtick resembling his more outlandish comedies of yore.

While comparatively more conventional, the other two sections tally with the slightly different mental state the two older Satokos are in, with the thirty-something moving about in her claustrophobic urban setting and the fifty-something wandering around a bright suburbia void of substance and meaning. With his latest film, Okita manages to inject warmth and inspiration into the lives of characters contending with solitude and anxiety, a celebration of craftmanship in the age of automation.

Director, screenwriter: Shuichi Okita
Producers: Ryohei Tsutsui, Miyuki Sato, Suguru Kubota, Yuya Tanaka
Cast: Kasumi Arimura, Hikari Ishida, Kashun Himeno
Cinematography: Akiko Ashizawa
Editing: Masaya Ozaki
Production design: Norifumi Ataka
Music: Satoko Shibata
Sound: Takaki Yamamoto
Production companies: Amuse Creative Studio
World sales: Hakuhodo DY Music & Pictures
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (Competition)
In Japanese
138 minutes

Long Long Night, which bowed in Toronto, is an outlier in this year’s Busan International Film Festival competition, whose line-up is almost entirely made up of world or international premieres. The film’s selection might be a statement about a burgeoning trend in the Korean film industry, or an attempt to secure the festival more attention from beyond its cinephile base – or even a wish to get a domestic A-lister on the red carpet (singer and actress Bae Suzy plays the narrator in the film).

Whatever the reasoning for its appearance in Busan’s top-tier competition, Long Long Night certainly delivers as a for-all-ages animation movie revolving around talking animals. While essentially a road movie spiced up by gratuitous doses of slapstick comedy and tragic melodrama, Youm has somehow toughened the milder tone of his more child-oriented source material. Adapting Ruri’s novel himself, he treads a fine line between pleasing the kids and the adults in the audience, without overbalancing with either demographic by exaggerating his characters’ cuteness or dialling up their street cred.

The film is funny when it needs to be, but also frank in its depiction of the harsh cycles of nature and the brief lifespans of animals in the brutal world they live in. Admittedly, some of the action scenes feel a bit too much like gaming sequences. Youm and his animation team, led by Park Chung-shik, used an animation tool very familiar from video games. It’s also true that the film’s denouement oozes a sentimentality at odds with what goes before. But these are small quibbles about an enjoyable and perhaps culturally significant film for Youm and his peers.

In what amounts to a prologue, a white rhino is shown idling his days away in a natural reserve somewhere in Africa, enjoying being “treated like a king” by his carers and thinking about the tumultuous life he has led. Thus begins a long flashback: orphaned as a baby, Norden (voiced by Park Ki-wook) grows up with a herd of elephants who take him in as one of their own. His longing for a mate and his real roots eventually lead him to set off on a journey to discover his own identity, his sense of heartbreak, and – perhaps more importantly for the audience – the foibles of human nature, both in our misguided attempts to “protect” wildlife and the more catastrophic effects of war and destruction.

Devastated by the loss of his home and his loved ones, Norden’s life eventually regains meaning as he is charged with the mission of caring for a small penguin (Kim Gyu-na) and guiding him to a new life with his own posse. Recalling the well-rehearsed screen trope of the grumbling old man and the quick-talking imp, Long Long Night picks up speed as this odd couple soldiers on through deserts, savannahs and rocky plains, their friendship growing ever closer and more endearing. Their on-screen bond remains ceaselessly convincing, with each of them going through their own very different rite of passage. As a film, Long Long Night’s trek might even be seen as a metaphor for the Korean film industry’s slow but steady move from its dark days into the light, diverted into another genre from another time.

Director: Youm Kyu-bock
Screenplay: Youm Kyu-bock, based on the book “Long Long Night” by Ruri
Producers: Jung Kyoung-hee, Kang Dae-il
Executive producers: Jung Kyoung-hee, Kim Sang-youn
Voice cast: Park Ki-wook, Kim Gyu-na, Bae Suzy
Cinematography: Cho Sung-in
Editing: Chu Sun-hee
Animator: Park Chung-shik
Music: Kim Hyun-joo
Sound: Lee Sung-june
Production companies: Googgoog Studio, Studio Eon, The Contents On
World sales: Finecut
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (Competition)
In Korean
99 minutes

THE FILM VERDICT:  Having established itself as a “competitive festival”, BIFF was named a few months ago as one of the six international festivals where the top prize winners would be accepted as a submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. Do you think your decision to gamble on an Asian-films-only competition has paid off?

Jung Hanseok:  It would be an exaggeration to say our Competition section made huge progress in just two years. But I think this little adventure has attained a couple of achievements, such as BIFF making it as a FIAPF A-List festival and the Busan Award [best film] winner qualifying as a submission for the Oscars. We believe our decision to establish the competition section partly contributed to this recognition, although it wasn’t our objective. The competition signifies BIFF’s long-term endeavor to continue supporting the progress of Asian cinema and discovering new talent. Still, I believe the pleasant news from abroad in its second year motivates the festival as well as the filmmakers and professionals who pay attention to BIFF.

TFV:  What did you and the programmers focus on most when selecting competition titles, and how did it turn out?

Jung Hanseok:  We care deeply about the section’s successful and continued progress. To that end, we needed artistically excellent titles more than anything, and that’s what we looked for. Compared to the first year, we have more titles featuring star actors from different Asian countries, which means the key industry professionals’ reactions have been more favorable. We also have titles from master filmmakers, like legendary Iranian director Majid Majidi, alongside several newcomers, which is what we have always imagined this section should look like.
For Korean cinema, the global notion that most noticeable South Korean works are always genre-focused is only half true. We have three Korean films in competition this year, all very different from each other. Beach Fictions clearly borrows from Hong Sang-soo in its sentiment, structure, and characters but aspires to be more crowd-pleasing and flexible. A rarity in the Korean film industry, animated Long Long Night displays universally identifiable sensibility and appeal. The suspense thriller Shaving maintains the excellent skills many Korean genre films have developed so far.

TFV: There are three Special Programs in Focus this year. Aside from the two actor-themed programmes, Japanese Animation Special stands out for both the number of titles and its range. What prompted the festival to prepare this section?

Jung Hanseok:  We all witnessed K-pop Demon Hunters rocking the whole world. Last year’s number-one box office films in Japan and China were both animations. In short, animation is making a major impact globally. Among other things, a film festival is obliged to showcase the frontiers of the world of cinema, and animation is one of them. Because we still needed a framework, we decided to do a case study by tracing the history of animation produced in Japan, a traditional animation powerhouse, along with new films coming out this year.
We had a few conditions when choosing the titles: firstly, the films must have provoked an artistic debate upon its release or it must possess a pioneering vision. Secondly, the film must be made with a theatrical release in mind. And thirdly, the film must have never been shown – or at least rarely – to Korean audiences. Finally, it’s not something by Hayao Miyazaki or Isao Takahata, whose greatness is too well-known. I believe the current sense of cinema is changing. Animation is playing and will play a major part in it, so I hope this program reflects that.

TFV: BIFF has a tendency to choose a Korean film to open the festival, although not always. Last year, No Other Choice was picked when it already enjoyed considerable international attention after its premiere at the Venice Film Festival. This year’s The Table: Day and Night is having a world premiere at BIFF. What is the festival’s view on choosing an opening film?

Jung Hanseok:  We maintain the same standard for choosing an opening film as last year: it should be enjoyed by all 5,000 people attending the ceremony. We do not want to have fixed criteria, nor do we artificially look for diversity. The only thing certain is our will to choose an audience-friendly film that could kick off our festival in a joyous way. This flexibility will continue next year.

TFV: BIFF has a very interesting list of guests coming to town for the festival’s masterclasses and special talks. The festival has just confirmed Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón’s first-ever visit to the festival – and South Korea in general – and the presence of French screen icon Charlotte Gainsbourg. This seems to suggest the festival is making a persistent and devoted effort to host high-profile guests. Is it because you believe the festival should provide audiences with other “experiences” rather than just great films?

Jung Hanseok:  In short, yes. Having major guests is important to provide better experiences to our visitors. When we let the audience cheer for the filmmakers and stars so they eventually feel closer to the film itself, I think we contribute to film culture in a very interesting, positive way.
I also want to highlight Cine Class, a program we launched last year to hear from filmmakers about the more intimate and personal side of their work. We started with four sessions last year and nearly doubled to seven this year. The audience seems to love it, as the seats are already all sold out.

TFV: What do you hope the filmmakers and the audience who come to visit the 31st BIFF will say when they leave?

Jung Hanseok:  I will always have the same answer to this question. For filmmakers and audience alike, I wish they would have fun and take away meaningful memories and nothing more.

Interview by Cho Hyo-jin

As for what I can’t say, at least until after the film has been in theaters for a while: Instead of giving away details, I will call these plot twists a “reveal.”

The film opens with a heavily prosthetics-laden Tom Cruise as Digger Rockwell, a grotesque Texas oil billionaire who is seemingly incapable of processing any bad news, whether it’s the sad state of his beloved cat, who is clearly on its tenth life by now, or a massive fire breaking out at one of his company’s oil rigs off the coast of Greenland. That disaster leads to the coast itself breaking off and floating toward Europe, where tsunamis and other catastrophes threaten to follow.

There’s little encouragement to be found from the American president (John Goodman) and his cabinet of lackeys, who either offer ridiculous solutions (nuke it!) or scramble to exploit the pending disaster for U.S. interests. None of these powerful men are any more apt than Digger to listen to the one sane man in the room: Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), the chief scientist at Rockwell Energy. And as environmental apocalypse looms, a reveal. And then another reveal.

The twists won’t necessarily come as a surprise to longtime viewers of Iñárritu, whose recent films Birdman and Bardo both play around with concepts of reality and the parameters of artificiality in conveying reality. But where legendary film director Ernst Lubitsch was famous for his “touch,” Iñárritu’s aesthetic style is more akin to a Godzilla-sized stomp. His characters scream and bluster and carry on, his dialogue (the director shares screen credit with a total of four other collaborators) makes its point and makes it again with a thudding lack of nuance, and what we’re left with is less pointed satire than it is despair-riddled doomscrolling.

The performances can’t generally be evaluated as successful or unsuccessful, mainly because of the reveals, but Ahmed manages to find some grace notes of comedy when all around him is bombast. As for Cruise’s much-discussed turn, the actor unquestionably puts in the work, playing a character well outside his wheelhouse. The problem is that it’s work — Cruise is a performer capable of understatement, of steely intensity, even of wit in the right project, but what mostly emerges in Digger is the grunting and the groaning of someone who wants to let you know how much labor they’re expending.

The MVPs here, without question, are production designers Dennis Gassner (1917) and Richard Johnson (The Underground Railroad), whose eye for detail in Digger’s world — his over-the-top mansion, the oil rig he turns into his personal disaster headquarters — tells us more about the character than any line of dialogue, and as Iñárritu piles on the reveals, they’re right there with him. Working in concert with costumer Jacqueline West (Killers of the Flower Moon) and regular Iñárritu cinematographer Emanuel Lubezki, they craft one of the film’s most visually audacious sequences, in which Digger must defend himself before an angry European Council, the members of which are wearing clothes that match the color of the chamber walls, rendering them anonymous and nearly invisible before Digger’s swagger.

What’s perhaps most off-putting about the mounting twists is that, clearly, Iñárritu thinks he’s making a hilarious movie and can’t imagine that the audience would disagree; compare this to Pedro Almodóvar placing pointed criticism of his own work in the mouth of a sympathetic character in Bitter Christmas. Iñárritu seems to think he’s made another Dr. Strangelove, but if anything, Digger comes off as an even more heavy-handed and dire Don’t Look Up.

Director: Alejandro G. Iñárritu
Screenwriters: Alejandro G. Iñárritu & Alexander Dinelaris & Nicolás Giacobone and Sabina Berman; story by Sabina Berman & Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Jez Butterworth
Cast: Tom Cruise, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons
Executive producer: Joshua Grode
Producers: Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Mary Parent, Tom Cruise
Director of photography: Emmanuel Lubezki
Production design: Dennis Gassner, Richard Johnson
Editing: Conor O’Neill, Stephen Mirione
Music: Cosmo Sheldrake
Sound design: Johnnie Burn, re-recording mixer/supervising sound editor (UK); Richard King, supervising sound editor
Production companies: Warner Bros. Pictures, Legendary Pictures
In English
128 minutes

And it has stiff competition abroad to take into account. Coming close on the heels of Venice and overlapping the end of Toronto, the Basque event (known locally as Donostia Zinemaldia) has had to carve out a distinctive identity to keep itself relevant for press, industry and audiences awash in new films. A haven for Spanish films and filmmakers, it has never over-obsessed with the red carpet, although Hollywood knows it well. Brad Pitt was in town to support Heart of the Beast alongside Orlando Bloom, who gave Werner Herzog a Donostia Award, which Naomi Watts also received.

Most of the attention, however, is directed at the films, screened all around town to sold-out houses. Fortunately San Sebastian, like Venice, uses the most modern online booking system that allow press and industry to upload their tickets directly to their badges, resulting in a huge saving in time and anxiety at the theater door. And despite some inevitable crossovers of titles with Toronto and Venice, the selection held its head up. Notably, the return of English master Mike Leigh (after the love showered on Hard Truths two years ago) was rewarded by the jury with multiple prizes. He competed with what may possibly be his last film, Tender Loving Care, taking home not only the top Golden Shell Award but best screenplay for Leigh and best leading performance for Kate O’Flynn, in the role of a frustrated social worker whose loving family undergoes a major crisis.

The rich program confirmed this has been a banner year both for home-grown Spanish films and gay-themed stories. A big noise in both categories was La Bola Negra, making its domestic debut to packed houses ahead of theatrical release, which won the festival’s Audience Award. Co-directed by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, Spain’s official Oscar submission weaves an operatic blend of fact and fiction around the legacy of literary icon and LGBT martyr Federico Garcia Lorca, who was murdered by Francoist fascists 90 years ago. Other stand-out queer stories in the program included Club Kid, New York comedian Jordan Firstman’s hilarious portrait of a gay party promoter adjusting to unexpected fatherhood, and Jane Schoenbrun’s stylish meta-horror trans allegory Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which won the Zabaltegi-Tabakalera prize. All three titles arrived in San Sebastian propelled by buzzy momentum on the festival circuit.

The Nordic selection was, as usual, very strong, and the jury acknowledged this with three prizes: Amanda Kernell won Best Director for her Sámi coming-of-age story Brace Your Heart, cementing her status as one of the pre-eminent filmmakers dealing with the northernmost communities of the region; and Hans Petter Moland’s Growth of the Soil, already chosen to represent Norway in the International Feature Film category at the Oscars, gained additional kudos with the awards for Best Cinematography to Oskar Dahlsbakken and for Asta Kamma August’s powerful leading performance. Denmark also made a strong show for itself in New Directors with the blisteringly great pedophile drama Cute.

The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer won the Horizontes Latinos prize for its director, the photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti, who playfully followed two rural Argentinean women over the course of 30 years. With its specialized content and distinctive Latin American personality, Horizontes Latinos is nowadays much more than a festival sidebar. A well-curated selection, not focused on world or even European premieres, its films often earned 15-minute ovations not heard in other sections. Diego Luna, presenting his migration drama Ashes, said Horizontes Latinos is a way to show the world not just the cinema but the unity of Latin America. Market synergy is found in The Coproduction Forum, a pioneer of its kind, providing production or distribution support to some of the films of this section.

After Venice opened with Ink (also screened here as the customary Surprise Film), San Sebastián picked the Belgian period piece Le Faux Soir as its closing event. It falls into the current festival trend of programming movies that highlight the role of the press in shaping society, be it with the rise of increasingly salacious news items in Danny Boyle’s film or the opposition to Nazi occupation in Michaël R. Roskam’s fact-based account of how the Belgian resistance movement created a bootleg version of the leading national daily paper, to share their own side of things with the public.

Finally, the José Giovanni retrospective was a triumph, with multiple sold-out screenings for a program shining a light on a controversial but key figure in French post-war cinema, a writer-director whose past life as a convicted criminal shaped his worldview and vision of cinema. (Not surprisingly, most of his oeuvre paints gangsters and thieves in a sympathetic light). Ironically, for someone whose work frequently dealt with second chances, it’s unlikely such a retrospective will happen in France anytime soon, due to Giovanni’s status as a Nazi collaborator.

Though the harrowing world political situation seemed less in the spotlight than it has been at other fests this year, a significant number of award winners made urgent statements on stage demanding freedom for Gaza, which received applause  from the audience.  Showing that sentiments ran high, Naza, the searing documentary by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor in which anonymous Israeli soldiers describe the military killing machine in Gaza, won the Audience Award for Best European Film.

GOLDEN SHELL
Tender Loving Care
Directed by Mike Leigh

SPECIAL JURY PRIZE
Border (Bian jing)
directed by Ah Biao

SILVER SHELL FOR BEST DIRECTOR
Amanda Kernell
for Brace Your Heart

SILVER SHELL FOR BEST LEADING PERFORMANCE
Kate O’Flynn
for Tender Loving Care

ex-aequo

Asta Kamma August
for Growth of the Soil

SILVER SHELL FOR BEST SUPPORTING PERFORMANCE
Javier Camara
for 5 More Minutes

JURY PRIZE FOR BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Oskar Dahlsbakken
for Growth of the Soil

JURY PRIZE FOR BEST SCREENPLAY
Mike Leigh
for Tender Loving Care

JURY PRIZE FOR BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
Amine Bouhafa
for Milo

NEW DIRECTORS AWARD
Naemi Ada
for Body of Glass

HORIZONTES LATINOS AWARD
The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer
directed by Alessandra Sanguinetti

ZABALTEGI-TABAKALERA AWARD
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
by Jane Schoenbrun

AUDIENCE AWARD FOR BEST FILM
La Bola Negra
Javier Calvo, Javier Ambrossi

AUDIENCE AWARD FOR BEST EUROPEAN FILM
Naza
Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor

Best known for his self-aware comic skits, impressions and semi-autobiographical character roles, Firstman is a regular cast member on Rachel Sennott’s HBO TV hit I Love LA. But he is working on a broader emotional canvas in this beautifully observed, frequently hilarious celebration of love, family values and queerness in all its forms. Launched to warm reviews in Cannes, Club Kid is currently on a wide promotional tour of film festivals, making its Spanish debut in San Sebastián this week. A24 are planning theatrical roll-out starting in November.

Club Kid plunges us straight in at the deep end with Euphoria cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra’s bravura extended opening shot, a whirling 360-degree panorama which takes place inside a moving cab packed with loud party animals. Firstman is there as Peter, a New York nightclub promoter at the heart of a very druggy, boozy, sexually promiscuous scene. Cara Delevigne is also on board as Peter’s business partner Sophie, alongside the pair’s riotous entourage of transgender DJs, drag queens, scene-makers and groupies.

The debauchery steps up several gears when they reach the club, with copious amounts of ketamine, cocaine and other substances passed around as bass-heavy house music shakes the walls. Firstman captures the sensory overload of clubbing with an authentic eye here: it all looks like fantastic fun, and slightly out of control. At one point, the emphatically gay Peter proudly tells a flirtatious British woman that he has “never touched a vagina in my life”, but the night ends with both of them sharing a blurry three-way sexual encounter.

Firstman then jumps forward a decade, to present-day New York. Thirtysomething Peter is still in the party business, but those endless wild nights are starting to take their toll. He is also falling out with Sophie, who is working to make their club brand more mainstream. In the midst of their friction, Peter receives a surprise visitor from London: Arlo (charming British big-screen novice Reggie Absolom), the cute mop-headed son he never knew he had, conceived during that long-forgotten threesome. Recently orphaned, the boy has suddenly become Peter’s responsibility, much to his horror.

Initially, Peter fights hard to send Arlo back to London. But inevitably, the boy starts to awaken unexpectedly tender feelings in his biological father, and this odd couple gradually form a close bond. Caring for a child also means Peter must finally take responsibility for himself, facing up to the self-esteem and addiction issues behind much of his reckless behaviour. Instead of killer hangovers and casual hook-ups, his schedule is suddenly filled with school admission interviews and social workers. Even as he launches a new club venture, he brings in Arlo as a trainee DJ, warmly encouraged by his new father’s colourful LGBTQ entourage.

Club Kid eventually proves to be a (no pun intended) straighter film than it first appears, its latter half flirting with familiar movie tropes about abnormally wise children helping immature parents to grow up, not to mention corny life lessons about learning to love yourself, finding a soulmate and settling down in domestic bliss. To his credit, Firstman does not swing too far into glib Hollywood sentimentality, resisting the urge to caricature or punish even his most selfish characters, or make value judgments between chosen family and biological family.

Remarkably assured for a debutant director, Firstman barely hits a wrong note in Club Kid, from zingy one-liners to hilarious minor characters, richly eclectic music choices to bittersweet reflections on queer parenting. Taking place in London, the film’s final act also avoids easy happy endings, instead preaching a more messy, inclusive gospel which quietly demands respect for all ages, lifestyles, genders and sexual tastes. It would take a heart of stone, or perhaps a sour MAGA-style worldview, not to warm to this big-hearted comedy gem.

Director, screenwriter: Jordan Firstman
Cast: Jordan Firstman, Reggie Absolom, Cara Delevigne, Diego Calva, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Colleen Camp, Vicki Pepperdine, Nigil Whyte, Eldar Isgandarov, Saturn Risin9, Miss Benny, Alaska Riley
Cinematography: Adam Newport-Berra
Editing: Taylor Levy, Sofia Subercaseaux
Music: Cristobal Tapia De Veer
Producers: Alex Coco, Galen Core, Ben Hannon Hubley, Michael Bloom
Production companies: Topic Studios (US), Stay Golden Features (US)
World sales: A24
Venue: San Sebastián International Film Festival (Perlak)
In English
122 minutes

The end credits specify the film was made “in collaboration with London’s mental health community”, and there is a clear sense of wishing to adhere to reality and its everyday struggles as closely as possible, while within the boundaries of a fiction that still needs to be dramatically interesting. To that end, Lumby has come up with the story of Jamal (Jonathan Jules, an up-and-coming local talent previously seen in Steve McQueen’s miniseries Small Axe), whose living conditions are complicated due to his inner turmoil.

Living in a supported housing situation, he spends his days taking medication, smoking weed (though he’s supposed to cut down) and meeting with his health advisors, while trying to maintain a semblance of a normal life, such as when he strikes up a friendship with a new resident, Kyla (Saskia Chana). But as his pharmacologically dictated routine starts taking a toll via side effects that alter his manual skills, he decides ditching the meds might be the better solution. And that’s when the voices come back with a vengeance, forcing him to face a reality he’s been too keen to avoid.

Lumby’s approach is a subtle one, illustrating Jamal’s everyday life in a seemingly banal way in the opening minutes of the picture: as he enters his room, we hear faint voices in the vicinity. Having read the synopsis, the foregone conclusion is those are inside the protagonist’s head, but in that initial instance it might as well be neighbors or passersby. That ambiguity, expertly set up by sound designers Tom Harburt and Dario Swade, paints a vivid picture of what it means to live like Jamal does, each pained close-up of Jules’ face capturing the contradictions of an existence dominated by an affliction he is simultaneously aware of and deeply in denial about.

As his coping mechanisms break down and the picture heads in an increasingly bleaker direction, what keeps it from reaching a tonal point of no return is Lumby’s empathetic relationship with the subject matter: it’s hard to sympathize with Jamal at times, but everyone around him, on screen and off, wants him to do better, and that sense of solidarity gives Florid a grounded quality whereby everything is emotionally sincere without slipping into facile narrative shortcuts. Even the more predictable moments tied to the protagonist’s traumas have a thematic and visual vibrancy that adds to the resonance of a film aiming to get to the heart of the matter without getting too sentimental or too bleak. And in doing so, while the prospects for Jamal are yet to be determined, those for his creator show intriguing artistic promise.

Director, Screenwriter: Billy Lumby
Cast: Jonathan Jules, Saskia Chana, Unknown T
Producer: Rupert Lloyd, Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor, Sean Wheelan
Cinematography: Adric Watson
Production design: Beck Rainford
Costume design: Camille Adomakoh
Music: CJ Mirra
Sound: Tom Harburt, Dario Swade
Production companies: Atar Studios, Joi Productions, Filmgate Films
Venue: San Sebastián International Film Festival (New Directors)
In English
84 minutes

Paula (Rocío Guzmán), dedicada y responsable, y La Maestra (Danara Álvarez), ingenuamente divertida, forman una pareja inseparable de adolescentes en Coapa, un barrio popular de la Ciudad de México. Nadadoras a nivel competitivo y bailarinas aficionadas, coquetean, estudian un poco, se toman *selfies* y conversan mucho; llevan una vida adolescente activa y cotidiana. Durante una fiesta de Año Nuevo, la situación se torna oscura y toda su vida —incluso su amistad— corre peligro. De repente, las chicas se sumen en la tristeza, debatiéndose entre la posibilidad de buscar justicia o venganza.

La directora debutante Fernanda Tovar quiere ser una observadora aguda y sin juzgar. En el guion no aparecen frases como “denuncia para salvar a otras” ni el lamento culposo de un padre “no te protegí”. El foco se centra en la víctima —y, esperamos, en su sobreviviente— del delito, quien desea, por encima de todo, no quedar marcada por la agresión. Paula y La Maestra cuentan con una red de apoyo: un hermano místico afecto a las drogas recreativas, una instructora de baile trans y un padre empático; con ellos no hace falta hablar, comprenden esa tristeza repentina.

El agresor simplemente sigue con su vida, queriendo incluso salir con la chica; su rostro nunca aparece en primer plano, permanece en la periferia de la inteligente fotografía de Rosa Hadid Hernández. Es una forma sutil pero eficaz de mostrar desprecio hacia él. El agua —elemento que en sus vidas representa la competición más que la diversión— se muestra también como un medio relajante y tranquilizador.

La principal productora, el colectivo mexicano Colectivo Colmena, opera bajo un modelo de trabajo colaborativo —más que empresarial— que ha demostrado ser exitoso. Tanto sus cortometrajes como sus largometrajes se basan en la colaboración —un cambio loable en una industria dominada por el ego—, combinando intereses personales con problemáticas sociales. Evitan los efectos especiales o las puestas en escena artificiosas, pero cuentan con una gran calidad de producción. Sus largometrajes —Todos los incendios, Lumbrensueño y Mostro, entre otros— han sido galardonados en varios festivales importantes. Chicas tristes ya ha emprendido un camino que, espero fervientemente, incluya su estreno en salas de cine en México para encontrar a su público ideal: los jóvenes latinoamericanos.

El desenlace es, como suele ocurrir en la vida, un punto intermedio; pero uno que permite a las chicas seguir adelante con sus vidas. Quizás la mejor venganza sea ser feliz.

Dirección y guion: Fernanda Tovar
Producción: Daniel Loustaunau, Carlo D’Ursi, Samuel Chauvin
Elenco: Rocío Guzmán, Darana Álvarez, Tatsumi Milori, Tomás García Agraz,
Mónica del Carmen
Fotografía: Rosa Hadit Hernández
Música: Wissam Hojeij, Carolina Torres,
Sebastián Cárdenas Vesga
Edición: José Pablo Escamilla
Sonido: Alejandro Castillo, Eva Valiño
Diseño artístico: Selva Tulián
Compañías productoras: Colectivo Colmena (Mexico), Potenza Producciones (Spain)
Promenade Films (France)
Exhibición: San Sebastian Film Festival (Horizontes Latinos)
En español
Duración: 90 min

Dedicated, responsible Paula (Rocío Guzmán) and goofily naïve “La Maestra” (Danara Álvarez) are an inseparable teenage duo in Coapa, a lower-class Mexico City suburb. Competition level  swimmers and amateur dancers, they flirt, study a little, take selfies and talk a lot in a busy, ordinary teen life. At a New Year Eve’s party, things get ugly and their whole life, even their friendship, is in danger. Suddenly the girls turn sad. Both are doubtful they can get justice or revenge.

Newcomer Fernanda Tovar, who directed the film, wants to be  a keen, not-judgmental observer. Common phrases like “report it to save others”  or  the father´s guilty “I didn´t protect you” are not in the script. The spotlight is on the victim — and hopefully survivor — of the crime, who wants, more than anything, not to be marked by the attack. Paula and La Maestra have a support network that includes a mystical junkie brother, a trans dance instructor, an empathetic father. With them it’s not neccesary to say things, just to understand the sudden sadness.

The perpetrator just goes on with his life, even wanting to hang out with the girl. His face is never shown in close-up; he remains on the periphery of Rosa Hadid Hernández’s intelligent cinematography. It is a subtle but effective way to show contempt for him. Water, not a fun element here but a competitive one in their lives, is shown also as a relaxing, calming element.

The main production company is Mexico’s Colectivo Colmena, which has a work model (not a business one) that has proved successful. Both its shorts and features are based on collaborative work — a commendable change in an ego-driven industry — mixing personal interest with social issues. The collective avoids special effects and artificial settings, but can boast great production values. Its features Todos los incendios, Lumbrensueño and Mostro, among others, have won awards in several important festivals. Sad Girlz has already began a path that hopefully will include a theatrical release in Mexico, where it can find its perfect audience in young Latin Americans.

The end is, like much in life, a compromise, but one that allows the girls to go on with their lives. Maybe the best revenge is to be happy.

Direction, screenplay: Fernanda Tovar
Producers: Daniel Loustaunau, Carlo D’Ursi, Samuel Chauvin
Cast: Rocío Guzmán, Darana Álvarez, Tatsumi Milori, Tomás García Agraz,
Mónica del Carmen
Cinematography: Rosa Hadit Hernández
Music: Wissam Hojeij, Carolina Torres, Sebastián Cárdenas Vesga
Editing: José Pablo Escamilla
Sound: Alejandro Castillo, Eva Valiño
Production design: Selva Tulián
Production companies: Colectivo Colmena (Mexico), Potenza Producciones (Spain), Promenade Films (France)
Venue: San Sebastian Film Festival (Horizontes Latinos)
In Spanish
Running time: 90 min

In Spain, most recent films set in the aftermath of political violence have centered around the Basque independence struggle, and works like Maixabel (2021) and Near Winter (2023) have made waves at San Sebastian when they came out. Milo, making its premiere in the festival competition, instead largely relegates politics to the past, with only a mild ripple effect visible in its distaste for today’s loutish and dishonest bourgeoisie. But it is still enough for Marion Cotillard to create a poignantly convincing back story in the lead role of Alice.

When Alice steps off a bus in a desolate provincial town, her mysterious past proves no obstacle to getting a job as a waitress in a roadside café. But her claim to come from Quebec is a convenient lie. The café owner (Artus) tries to get close to her, but she only has eyes for a dashing young garage mechanic, Milo (Théodore Pellerin). Though their age difference is not disturbingly apparent, the viewer will soon catch on that her interest is maternal: it’s her grown son she’s staring at so intently.

Pellerin, the Canadian actor who has won multiple awards for his performances in Nino and Genesis, is a luminous presence in the film and able to gracefully make his way through some very dicey scenes. But the four screenwriters did not devote a lot of creativity into inventing an obstacle in his life, in the form of his naïve attempt at drug smuggling for unsavory gun-waving gangs. He has fallen into this trap thanks to his friend Joseph, a poor cousin living with his rich relatives in their chateau, which is itself an overly obvious symbol of the money and status that Milo’s mother rejected.

Cotillard is thrillingly in control of every scene, watching and waiting for her chance to reveal herself, holding her responses carefully in check till the right moment. While her dialogue is judiciously limited, it increases the aura of mystery and coolness about her. When she makes a trip to Paris to visit “a sick friend”, it turns out to be a dying fellow revolutionary, Juliette (Anne Brochet). She is living out her last days in a luxurious apartment, and her funeral takes place oddly enough in a church, where someone sings the partisan song “Bella Ciao”, underlining the ideological breakdown that has taken place in the intervening years since her militant days.

This theme is starker still in the reappearance of a “bad professor” who taught Alice and other students to consider political violence normal and desirable. It led them to rob banks and kill policemen, and ultimately to prison. Unlike Juliette, who remembers “we wanted to change the world”, he reneges his past, and his hypocritical hand-washing puts all the blame on the students he influenced so disastrously (“The violence was inside you.”) But in the final scene, between ALice and Milo, a triumph of unspoken emotion, politics is nowhere to be found.

The technical work is pleasant and unobtrusive French arthouse. D.P. Yves Cape’s relaxed lighting lends atmosphere to the dingiest sets, which are most often ordinary cafes, cheap hotel rooms and dark garages, while Amina Bouhafa’s score creates real tension when it’s needed.

Director: Nicole Garcia
Screenplay: Nicole Garcia, Jacques Fieschi, Olivier Demangel, Laurette Polmanss
Cast:  Marion Cotillard, Théodore Pellerin, Artus, Laure Calamy, Alexis Manenti, Anne Brochet, Eric Elmosnino, Charles Berling
Producer: Alain Attal
Cinematography: Yves Cape
Editing: Francois Gédigier
Production design:
Costume design: Caroline Spieth
Music: Amine Bouhafa
Sound: Jean-Pierre Duret, Nicolas Moreau, Jean-Pierre Laforce, Roman Dymny
Production companies: Trésor Film (France) in coproduction with Studiocanal, France 3 Cinéma, Artemis Productions (Belgium)
World Sales: Studiocanal
Venue:  San Sebastian Film Festival (Competition)
In French
114 minutes

Composed of long, often wordless takes populated by catatonically reserved characters, Border has already drawn comparison to the work of feted auteurs like Jia Zhangke and Aki Kaurismäki. Ah Baio himself cites Dostoevsky as a key influence on his spartan quasi-thriller plot, which was partly inspired by two real-life crime cases. The film’s uncompromising aesthetic, plus a handful of graphic sex scenes, will limit its audience to niche art-house circles. Even so, this artfully lo-fi production is a bracingly enjoyable cinematic experience, with a quietly haunting intensity that lingers long after its slender runtime.

Purposely vague in time and location, the story takes place in an unnamed mining town on the Chinese-Mongolian border. This forlorn post-industrial purgatory feels drained of colour and virtually deserted, its empty streets resembling De Chirico paintings at times. Ah Biao uses the city almost as a character, as desolate and hopeless as his human protagonists. Acting as his own cinematographer and editor, the director shoots these snowy boulevards, stained concrete walkways and prison-like subterranean tunnels as a series of precisely composed still-life tableaux. This strong visual dimension is one of the film’s main selling points.

Like the town itself, the mine is a hellish place, dingy and depressing and scheduled for closure. One lugubrious young mine worker, Luo Jia (Zheyan Li), shares an apartment with an older security guard (Sanming Han). The two men may be related, or simply co-workers, but their murky relationship has a queasy sexual undercurrent which appears bleakly joyless at best, grimly abusive at worst. Since both participants are so impassive and inarticulate, it is impossible to gauge.

But Luo Jia is shaken from his deep-frozen state when he meets a young Mongolian woman on the street, Su Qing (Feng Qi). She is a sex worker, glumly servicing the menfolk of the town to pay off some opaquely implied debts to a man who may be her pimp (Gang Zheng). Nevertheless, Luo Jia is enchanted and begins a tentative relationship with this brittle, secretive, possibly dangerous femme fatale. “Don’t get attached, women can’t be trusted,” the older man warns, with a pathetic hint of jealousy. “She’s only after your money…”

But the love-starved Luo Jia is hooked, and soon proposes marriage to Su Qing, imploring her to stop selling sex to other men. “Can you afford to keep me?” she replies coldly. A moot point because, fatefully, the mine has suddenly closed down at short notice, the workers removed by heavy-handed police enforcers. Luo Jia is newly unemployed, and his search for other work in the town only meets with harsh rejection. Adding insult to injury, his meagre savings are missing after a suspicious-looking apartment robbery.

Desperate times call for desperate remedies, driving Luo Jia to commit a violent crime which is shot so sparingly, we can only guess at the details. The aftermath of his actions signal a shift of tone and location, with Ah Biao finally displaying the film’s title credit an hour into the story, allowing various possible meanings to hang in the air. This late coda is the closest thing to a plot twist in a story that largely avoids plot, and prides itself on giving almost nothing away.

There is certainly something impressive about how Border sustains its hypnotic, painterly, ultra-austere aesthetic across an entire film. But it is also maddeningly opaque, and will leave some viewers craving more emotional pay-off from all this glacially handled tension. Ah Biao is clearly a talented all-rounder with a sharp eye, but hopefully his next film will counterbalance all this stylistic rigour with a little more dramatic substance.

Director, screenwriter, cinematography: Ah Biao
Cast: Zheyan Li, Feng Qi, Sanming Han, Gang Zheng, Tao Guo
Editing: Ah Biao, Hao Zhou, Xiaokai Ding
Music: Min Bai, Wenqi Qiao
Producers: Jenny Man Wu, Tyler Hill, Hao Zhou, Jing Yang, Xue Ma, Yaohua Li
Production companies: Borderless Films Ltd (Hong Kong), Mala Productions (US), Yangtze Visual Culture Co Ltd (Japan), Yilu Partners Co Ltd (South Korea), Time-In-Portrait Entertainment Ltd (China)
World sales: Reel Suspects, France
Venue: San Sebastián International Film Festival (Official Selection)
78 minutes
In Mandarin Chinese, Mongolian

Set in Berlin, whose train stations and subway stops show up in shots establishing the everyday routine in the German capital, the film follows Iman (Pooyesh Frozandeh), a young man who left Iran a bases his life around a somewhat anonymous existence. He’s disconnected from his home country and his family, works as a caregiver for an elderly man and at a truck wash, and doesn’t have that many meaningful connections in the city, aside from a man he meets at night for sexual encounters in the park (as the title suggests, they keep it quite casual). Then, when a cousin he barely knows comes from Tehran for a visit, what he left behind starts bubbling back to the surface…

As Iman wanders through the streets of Berlin, Parsaei and cinematographer Jakob Reinhardt follow his drifting existence with an aloof closeness, standing next to him but allowing the character to keep his guard up as he embraces a solitude that is at odds with such a large, cosmopolitan city (five languages are spoken on screen, including those of all three countries tied to the director’s personal and artistic growth). Frozandeh skillfully journeys through the layers of a carefully constructed anti-personality that slowly starts exposing what was hidden underneath. A couple of supporting performers have worked with Angela Schanelec, but this is not the heightened reality we’re used to seeing in her films: as the story evolves, so does the emotional vulnerability and availability the protagonist has tried to shove aside.

Alongside Iman’s daily tribulations, Berlin behaves like a character in its own right, opting for a less scenic version of itself to convey an image that matches the characters’ less than romanticized relationship with the city (here, the stereotypically spellbinding shots of Alexanderplatz are replaced by views of Kottbusser Tor). There’s a grayness to it that goes hand in hand with Iman’s commitment to absence, albeit with room for something to start blooming again visually when the status quo is challenged.

And as the characters come out of their shells, so does Parsaei with a confident debut that, while certainly not aiming to reinvent the wheel (as mentioned earlier, the bare bones of the premise have become a bit of a trope among emerging filmmakers with a migrant background), has more than enough personality to signal the arrival of an intriguing voice on the younger European filmmaking scene, assisted by a team of collaborators that ultimately underlines the importance of kinship in these uncertain terms.

Director: Massih Parsaei
Screenwriters: Massih Parsaei, Hanna Thomschke
Cast: Pooyesh Frozandeh, Ava Darvishi, Marcel Kohler, Wolfgang Wobéto
Producers: Carla Buchal, Florian Schewe
Cinematography: Jakob Reinhardt
Production design: Fanny Welz
Costume design: Alma Sinai
Music: Mona Matbou Riahi
Sound: Jonas Schüler
Production company: Film Five GmbH
World sales: Film Five GmbH
Venue: San Sebastián International Film Festival (New Directors)
In Arabic, German, Hungarian, Persian, Polish
87 minutes

Still, this DreamWorks Animation takes some big chances, almost guaranteeing that it will find some cult audiences along the way, from lovers of cinematic excess to fans of legendary Filipino monsters and demons to women who can relate to the close bond (and butch-femme dynamic) of its wonderfully eccentric protagonists.

When Jo (voiced by Kailey Crawford) and Raissa (Kayla Teruel) first meet in grammar school in their unnamed beach town in the Philippines, they couldn’t be more different: Jo loves to scare classmates with the stories her grandmother Lola (Dolly De Leon) tells her about folklore creatures like the shape-shifting Aswang and the vampiric Dreaded Manananggalm, while Raissa is a soft-spoken, straight-A student. Opposites attract, and when the two get sent to the principal’s office after one of Jo’s class projects goes awry, they immediately bond and share friendship bracelets. Each adventure together brings a new charm to their wrists, and as the years go by, they push each other out of their respective comfort zones with an encouraging “Tayo na!” (“Let’s go” in Tagalog).

Cut to the summer after high school: Jo (H.E.R.), completely on her own after Lola’s death, flounders through job after job with no real ambition to leave their small town, while Raissa (Liza Soberano, Lisa Frankenstein) is heading off to college in California with the blessing of her doting, ambitious parents. As the two pals spend one awkward final evening together — with much unsaid and unexpressed between them — their friendship reaches such a crisis point that it opens up a portal to Nakali (short for Nakalimutan), a mythical island that’s host to all the magical creatures Lola once told them about.

Jo and Raissa wake up on a beach with no memory of what was apparently a wild night — half of Raissa’s head is shaved, Jo has a tattoo — and try to get information from Raww (James Franco), a weredog with more than a passing resemblance to Poochie from The Simpsons. To make their way back home, and to mend the fences between them, Jo and Raissa will need help from a memory-stealing Batibat (Jenny Slate), a three-eyed demon baby named Bungi Tiyanak (Manny Jacinto), tree giant Datu (Jo Koy), and a vain merman with starfish pasties (Kevin McCann as Prince Mermahn, accent on the second syllable). Standing in their way are the adorable but deadly duwende, led by King Truffle Wuffle (Ronny Chieng) and, of course, that monstrous Manananggal (Lea Salonga).

As someone whose entire experience with Filipino folklore is a single Lynda Barry comic strip about the Aswang, I did find the cavalcade of lore and mythical creatures a lot to take in, even as the monsters take their turns acting as metaphors for Jo and Raissa’s friendship crisis. (Batibat all but drools over taking their charm bracelets and making the girls forget each other.) To their credit, writers-directors Joel Crawford and Januel P. Mercado (the team behind Puss in Boots: The Last Wish) aren’t just throwing in all this folklore willy-nilly, but there comes a point when metaphor can step aside and just let the main characters speak for themselves.

While this magical world is portrayed with dazzling color and broadly imaginative strokes, I found myself wanting less of the lycanthropes and vampires and more of Jo and Raissa, who are so wonderfully fresh and funny and quirky and not the usual female leads of mainstream animation. In addition to the many bizarre beings the two friends encounter along the way, the script throws way too many video-game style “go the place and get the thing and give it to the other person” subplots that feel distracting and eventually exhausting.

Still, Forgotten Island makes some great choices along the way, from not giving the leads romantic interests (or, worse, one boy for them to fight over) to not making the film a musical, although this ’80s-set comedy heavily indulges the thematic connections to “Don’t Stop Believin’” and “Never Tear Us Apart.” The directors never go overboard on the MTV-era setting, but little inclusions like mixtapes and neon-colored accessories (including Raissa’s Sally Jessy Raphael eyeglasses) provide little grace notes of who these girls are and the world they live in.

Visually, the film is a non-stop treat, with the animation team capturing the Filipino seaside community with as much detail and delight as the island of Nakali. And when the side characters make room for Jo and Raissa, Forgotten Island is a lovely celebration of outsiders and magic and lifelong bonds.

Directors: Joel Crawford & Januel P. Mercado
Screenwriters: Joel Crawford & Januel P. Mercado
Cast: H.E.R., Liza Soberano, Dave Franco, Jenny Slate, Manny Jacinto, Dolly De Leon, Jo Koy, Ronny Chieng, Kevin McCann, Lea Salonga
Producer: Mark Swift
Head of Character Animation: Sean Sexton
Head of Story: Steven MacLeod
Head of Cinematography, Layout: Scott Cullen
Production design: Ryan Carlson
Editing: James Ryan
Music: Nathan Matthew David
Sound design: Leff Lefferts, re-recording mixer/supervising sound editor; Randy Thom, sound designer
Production companies: DreamWorks Animation
In English
101 minutes

A typically magnetic Julianne Moore stars as a repressed New Jersey housewife who dreams of escaping her drab, loveless life. She is matched in screen presence by Paul Giamatti as the hot-headed director aiming to transform Moore’s shy wallflower into a confident diva. Eisenberg has some personal points to make here about the liberating power of art, and the steep emotional cost that can entail. But mostly he just wants to keep us entertained, aided by world-class lead performers and some very funny lines. Launched in Telluride and Toronto, The Debut has just had its European premiere in competition in San Sebastián, with more festival slots lined up ahead of theatrical release in December and January.

Eisenberg’s previous feature, A Real Pain (2024), earned healthy profits, rapturous reviews and multiple prizes, including an Oscar for co-star Kieran Culkin. Backed by the same key production companies, including Emma Stone’s Fruit Tree, The Debut is less of a heart-tugging, cry-laughing, all-round knockout than that film. But it is also more ambitious in terms of tone and mood, with a lightly stylised, gently retro, pre-cellphone setting which Eisenberg has pinned at around 1990. He has also described the film as disguised autobiography, using Moore’s character to channel his own childhood terror of performing on stage.

Moore plays Mona, a timid wife and mother trapped in a stale suburban marriage. After years of becoming increasingly invisible to her indifferent husband Howard (Patrick Fabian) and grown-up children, she is driven by quiet desperation to try out for a role in her local community theatre production of Nosy Neighbors, a creaky vintage Broadway musical. Brittle and nervous, Mona fails the audition, but eventually secures the part anyway following a fateful last-minute drop-out. Surrounded by new theatrical friends and cheerleading fellow cast members, she begins to enjoy the positive validation long denied to her at home.

When Mona struggles with her small but crucial role as a New York apartment building supervisor, director Jerry (Giamatti) has no choice but to apply his time-tested psychological techniques, breaking her down so he can “put Humpty Dumpty together again.” Eisenberg’s insider satire on acting-world pretensions is pretty broad here, but it leads to some of the film’s strongest comic highlights, most notably an explosive shouting match between Jerry and Mona. Later, as Mona fully embraces Method-style immersion in her character, this self-mocking absurdism is pushed to implausible but sporadically hilarious extremes, almost destroying the musical in the process.

The Debut is rooted in the kind of whimsical, extended, steadily more absurd conceit that Woody Allen might have built one of his charming mid-career comic trifles around – indeed, Eisenberg has worked with Allen and cited him in promotional interviews for this film. Moore and Giamatti are reliably great, though both have played variations on these character types before. Especially Giamatti, who specialises in pompous, tetchy, but ultimately sympathetic, self-loathing thwarted-artist figures. Moore’s Mona travels a wider psychological distance, starting out like Nora in Ibsen’s The Doll’s House before veering closer to some deranged diva from a John Waters movie. In a good way.

Eisenberg paints an agreeably busy canvas here, but leaves a few corners blank. Mona’s unsympathetic husband and their shallow chorus of dinner-party friends are one-dimensional sitcom villains at best. Similarly, even Mona’s supportive fellow players in the musical, notably young leads Stef and Zachary (real-life Broadway veterans Halle Bailey and Colton Ryan), are very thinly sketched. A little more emotional hinterland could have given more bite to the film’s core message about emancipation through artistic self-expression.

Even so, The Debut delivers enough warm-hearted humour, heavyweight star power and sharp one-liners overall to excuse a few blind spots. Having co-starred in both his previous features, Eisenberg mostly stays behind the camera this time but his song-and-dance cameo role is an enjoyably goofy, ego-free flourish. His self-composed songs for the fictional stage musical are fun too, plausibly peppered with sub-Sondheim wordplay, falling just the right side of affectionate parody.

Director, screenwriter: Jesse Eisenberg
Cast: Julianne Moore, Paul Giamatti, Halle Bailey, Colton Ryan, Cara Buono, Craig Bierko, Eldar Isgandarov, Jesse Eisenberg, Patrick Fabian, Bernadette Peters
Cinematography: Drew Daniels
Editor: Robert Nassau
Music: Emile Mosseri, Jesse Eisenberg
Production designer: Anne Ross
Producers: Emma Stone, Dave McCary, Ali Herting, Jesse Eisenberg
Production companies: Fruit Tree (US), Topic Studios (US)
World sales: A24
Venue: San Sebastián International Film Festival (Official Selection)
In English
105 minutes

This is the first film directed by best-selling Japanese novelist Maha Harada, based on her short story “An Unnecessary Man”. Her art-inspired novels like Canvas of Paradise and Guernica Cover-Up and her personal experience in museum curation lend an air of authenticity to the setting and the main character, who sees her job as a great blessing rather than the monotonous drudgery it looks like from the outside.

Played with self-effacing modesty by the well-known TV actress Yu Aoi, Satomi is a shy young woman without friends, suitors or professional prospects. She hides her attractiveness in oversize clothes and uniforms, a source of criticism from her flamboyantly dressed mother, who is into renting designer clothes for any occasion. Their lunch to celebrate Satomi’s 40^th birthday is a delightful riff on mother-daughter contrasts. Yet we feel an easy current of love running between the two, despite their dissimilarities.

Satomi’s parents divorced after 50 years of marriage and her father, after living a few years on his own, has recently died. Not coincidentally, she receives a package in the mail containing a single key and an address. Its narrative function is to trigger her to find out more about her Dad, a loner poet whose extremely delicate aesthetic sensibility she has inherited.

The film shifts gears when he appears on the scene as an absent-minded, white-haired man (Issey Ogata) who has no more social ties, but dedicates himself to the beauty of words. His secret life is revealed to Satomi by a young antique dealer (Eita Nagayama) who became his friend at the end of his life. A 400-year-old bowl, his prize objet d’art, inspired the elderly man to enact an imaginary tea ceremony that is quite impressive to watch. And when Satomi discovers a rare volume of her father’s collected poems, we listen to him read several of them offscreen. (These exquisite, moving poems reference 20^th century haiku poet Yamaguchi Seishi.)

Maha Harada rightly saves the mysterious key reveal for the end, but it is already apparent that Satomi has emerged from her cocoon as a mousy wallflower when she appears for the first time in a white dress that is the height of femininity (the film’s costumes, which play such a central role, were designed by the director’s own company École de Curiosités cofounded by Hans Ito.)

As befits the subject, the stunning visual images are painstakingly composed by D.P. Yoshio Kitagawa, who worked with Ryusuke Hamaguchi on Evil Does Not Exist, as did editor Azusa Yamazaki. Mamiko Hirai’s music contribution includes many of his delicate piano solos, reinforcing the mood.

Director, screenplay: Maha Harada based on her short story
Cast:  Yu Aoi, Issey Ogata, Eita Nagayama, Eri Watanabe
Producers: Kumi Kobata, Shuichi Komuro, Mikiya Sato, Erika Murayama
Cinematography: Yoshio Kitagawa
Editing: Azusa Yamazaki
Music: Mamiko Hirai
Costumes: École de Curiosités
Sound: Gen Komiya
Production companies: Suhuichi Komuro Office, Potaufeu Inc., C&I Entertainment Inc.
World Sales: Bitters End
Venue:  San Sebastian Film Festival (Competition)
In Japanese
109 minutes