Leaving September 1

Directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong | 3 mins | 2008
A haunting guitar track by Koichi Shimizu and Zai Kuning underscores this multi-textured, kaleidoscopic series of glimpses of modern-day Thailand, which was produced under the auspices of Electric Eel Films, the production ho...

Leaving September 1

Directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong | 106 mins | 2016
Suwichakornpong’s second feature presents itself as a straightforward arthouse film about a young director, Ann (Visra Vichit-Vadakan), preparing a project about the 1976 massacre of student activists at Thammasat Universit...

Leaving September 1

Directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong | 68 mins | 2021
The construction of the so-called “Death Railway” connecting Thailand and Myanmar, a Japanese initiative during World War II, was marked by perilous, inhumane conditions and an extraordinary casualty rate. Following four you...

Directed by Tsai Ming-liang | 127 mins | 2020
The parallel narratives of a middle-aged man seeking treatment for a chronic illness in Hong Kong (Lee Kang-sheng) and a Laotian immigrant in Bangkok (Anong Houngheuangsy) eventually, finally, meet in a moment of ecstatic release.

Directed by Tsai Ming-liang | 82 mins | 2003
Like the Royal Theater in The Last Picture Show and the title movie house in Cinema Paradiso, the Fu-Ho is shutting down for good. A palace with seemingly mile-wide rows of red velvet seats, the likes of which you’ve seen only in your most nostalgic d...

Leaving September 1

Directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong | 14 mins | 2007
Anticipating the questions around the limits of representation posed in "By the Time It Gets Dark" (2016), in "Jai", documentary elements bleed into the making of a fiction film about the landmark 1975 seizure and occupation...

Leaving September 1

Directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong and Ben Rivers | 93 mins | 2019
Thai history and pre-history bubble to the surface and get packaged up for sale in this playful, surrealism-tinged venture from Suwichakornpong and Ben Rivers. An unnamed woman arrives in the popular tourist d...

Directed by Fruit Chan | 109 mins | 1997
The first independent film released in post-Handover Hong Kong, Chan’s atmospheric shoestring-budget character study is a rough-and-ready piece of work shot on grainy leftover 35mm short ends in the city’s overcrowded subsidized housing projects. The resu...

Directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien | 107 mins | 2001
A seductive submersion into the techno-scored neon nightlife of Taipei, Hou’s much-misunderstood marvel follows an aimless bar hostess drifting away from her blowhard boyfriend and towards a suave, sensitive gangster. A transfixing trance-out of a mo...

Leaving September 1

Directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong | 82 mins | 2009
Suwichakornpong’s transfixing, Rotterdam-awarded feature debut begins as a chamber drama, with Pun (Arkaney Cherkam), a male nurse from Thailand’s rural northeast, starting a new job as the caretaker of the paraplegic son of...

Leaving September 1

Directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong | 15 mins | 2016
An unnamed Thai woman, both flâneur and researcher, discovers traces of her native country inscribed on Singapore’s urban landscape in this mellow essay film, conceived as a light-touch fictionalization of Suwichakornpong’s ...

Directed by Wei Shujun | 102 mins | 2023
After a woman’s body is discovered on a river bank in rural southern China, police investigator Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong) finds that it’s only the first layer of a deepening mystery, bound up in the hidden life of the nearby community. Based on Yu Hua’s short n...

Leaving September 1

Directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong and Wichanon Somunjarn | 16 mins | 2012
A little west of Bangkok lies Mahachai, home to a dense population of workers from Myanmar who eke out a meager living in the port town’s seafood processing factories. In unadorned fashion, "Overseas" ...

Directed by Ang Lee | 105 mins | 1991
Tensions brew and language becomes a barrier when widowed tai chi master Mr. Chu (Lung Sihung) swaps Beijing for a new life in New York City, where he joins the household of his Americanized son and white daughter-in-law. Ang Lee’s directorial debut evidence...

Leaving September 1

Directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong | 9 mins | 2018
Dotted with striking statues of prehistoric creatures, a popular tourist destination in Thailand provides the setting for a gently surreal meeting of Thai and British history, and of two of contemporary experimental cinema’s ...

Leaving September 1

Directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong | 17 mins | 2020
An artist and gallery staff prepare for the launch of a show that uses the winding vessel of the Mekong to play with concepts of spacetime and animism—much as this short does itself. It’s one of five shorts featured in the a...

Directed by Lee Chang-dong | 130 mins | 1999
Opening on a shocking scene of implied suicide, Lee’s sophomore feature proceeds to move backward in time, its reverse chronology following its protagonist’s unhappiness to its source, following him from the end of the ’70s to the close of the ’90s—yea...

Directed by Lee Chang-dong | 133 mins | 2002
Jong-du (Sul Kyung-gu), just out of prison, very little reformed, and shunned by his family, finds an unlikely soulmate in the person of Gong-ju (Moon So-ri), a woman with severe cerebral palsy—and the daughter of the victim of the hit-and-run for whic...

Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 115 mins | 2010
Two friends in a bar trade stories about their romantic exploits at a beach, which we come to realize involve the same people (including a restaurant owner played by Oscar-winner Youn Yuh-jung). Through adroit layering, Hong brings a wry sympathy to the ...

Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 66 mins | 2014
The progress through a hopelessly shuffled stack of love letters inspires the a-chronological structure of Hong’s Hill of Freedom, which describes the terse long-distance relationship between a Korean woman and the Japanese man who has built an ardent rom...

Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 127 mins | 2006
Deploying another of Hong’s beguiling twice-told narratives, Woman on the Beach begins with the tale of a creatively blocked filmmaker and his affair with the girlfriend of his friend and sometime collaborator at a coastal resort, then follows the filmm...

Directed by Tsui Hark | 103 mins | 1984
This kinetic, ultra-stylish screwball comedy/historical romance/backstage musical by the inimitable Tsui—beautifully restored for its 40th anniversary—is one of the most zestily entertaining works of 1980s Hong Kong cinema. Kenny Bee’s nightclub clown and w...

Directed by Patrick Tam | 90 mins | 1989
One of the unheralded masterworks of the Hong Kong New Wave, Tam’s high-style “heroic bloodshed” melodrama stars Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Kenny Bee, and Joey Wong as friends bound by ties both criminal and romantic. With shamelessly pulpy plotting, luxuriously...

Directed by Bi Gan | 113 mins | 2015
Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan’s audacious directorial debut announced a major new talent. Shot in the mining village Kaili, the director’s birthplace, the film follows a country doctor who enters a dreamlike world where the boundaries between past, present, and fu...