Leaving November 1

Directed by Erica Sheu | 3 mins | 2017
Taking inspiration from Jonas Mekas’s "The Diary Film," Los Angeles-based Taiwanese experimental filmmaker Erica Sheu deploys hand-processed 16mm film and in-camera editing to evoke the perspective of gazing through a window and onto the ...

Directed by Shunji Iwai | 146 mins | 2001
Incredibly prescient in its understanding of how a still-young internet would fundamentally alter youth culture, Shunji’s film introduces Yuichi (Hayato Ichihara) in an ice field, the landscape gradually obscured by accreting chat room messages. Alienated...

Directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi | 119 mins | 2018
Between the international breakthrough of 2015’s "Happy Hour" and the sensation that was 2021’s "Drive My Car," Hamaguchi produced this beguiling romance, concerning a young woman and her affairs with, first, a self-dramatizing young drifter, Baku, ...

Leaving November 1

Directed by Suneil Sanzgiri | 11 mins | 2019
Combining excerpts from India’s Parallel Cinema movement, 16mm drone footage, and family Skype interviews, Sanzgiri’s film recounts an unorthodox history of various interlocked anti-colonial liberation movements as seen at a mediate...

Directed by Xuan Liang and Chun Zhang | 105 mins | 2016
“Spirited Away” meets “The Little Mermaid” in this gorgeously crafted fantasy blockbuster—a tale of shapeshifting, interspecies love and sacrifice sprung from ancient Chinese fables. The teenaged Chun—one of a mythical race of beings residin...

Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul | 122 mins | 2015
Weaving together Thailand’s rich fundament of supernatural mythology and its often troubled national history, Apichatpong crafts a bewitching and seductive cinematic idyll, in which comatose soldiers suffering from a mysterious sleeping sick...

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.

Leaving November 1

Directed by Miko Revereza | 5 mins | 2017
As timely now as it was upon first release, this intimate essay film—a patchwork of self-portraiture and home-movie footage overlaid with the filmmaker’s voice-over—finds Revereza reflecting upon his childhood relocation from the Phili...

Leaving November 1

Directed by Miko Revereza | 8 mins | 2014
The debut work of Manila-born filmmaker Miko Revereza, whose features "No Data Plan" (2019) and "Nowhere Near" (2023) reflect on his experience as an undocumented resident in the United States, this 8mm short—comprising a repeated shot...

Directed by Toshio Matsumoto | 105 mins | 1969
Part of the storied output of Japan’s radical Art Theatre Guild, Matsumoto’s dazzling voyage through Tokyo’s Shinjuku neighborhood centers on two gender-nonconforming divas at “Bar Genet” but also doubles as a record of Japan’s avant-garde and subcul...

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 dr...

Leaving November 1

Directed by Rea Tajiri | 32 mins | 1991
A groundbreaking, highly influential work by the Chicago-born visual artist and filmmaker Rea Tajiri, this poetic tapestry of the personal and the political reckons with the internment of some 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans duri...

Directed by Park Chan Wook | 115 mins | 2005
The capper of Park’s “Revenge Trilogy” follows a woman wrongfully imprisoned for kidnapping and killing a six-year-old boy, as she meticulously lays the groundwork for an elaborate plan of retribution, then sets it into merciless motion on her release....

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 resul...

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 mov...

Leaving November 1

Directed by Simon Liu | 14 mins | 2019
A hypnotic portrait of contemporary Hong Kong, Chinese-English filmmaker Simon Liu’s 16mm short is a city symphony that captures the urban infrastructure of his hometown in all of its enigmatic discord, as quotidian images of daily life a...

Directed by Park Chan Wook | 116 mins | 2002
Fired from his factory job, the deaf, gentle Ryu finds work in the underworld—and begins on a path that will end in an explosion of visceral violence. A brutal, claustrophobic film of escalating desperation, illustrating with grim logic how an ordinary...

Directed by Tsai Ming-liang | 89 mins | 1999
It’s the close of the millennium and Taipei has emptied out with the onset of a mysterious virus, but Lee Kang-sheng and Yang Kuei-mei lag behind among the ruins, where maybe a last chance at communication lies through a breach between their apartments...

Directed by Alan Zhang | 91 mins | 2023
Feminist activist and multihyphenate artist Zhang’s directorial debut is a raw, often revelatory docufiction experiment that follows Beibei (Li Hehe), a recently unemployed 35-year-old woman who, in the early months of the pandemic, finds solace from an unf...

Leaving November 1

Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul | 113 mins | 2010
Winner of the 2010 Palme d’Or at Cannes, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s film follows its fatally ill title character (Thanapat Saisaymar) on a final pilgrimage of sorts, traveling the countryside of Thailand’s rural northeas...

Leaving November 1

Directed by Shuli Huang | 20 mins | 2022
Winner of the Queer Palm at Cannes 2022, Shuli Huang’s evocative Super 8 confessional tracks the queer filmmaker’s return to his hometown of Beijing and the ensuing conversation with his mother, long disapproving of her son’s sexuality ...

Directed by Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbó | 93 mins | 2024
How do you measure joy? For Bhutan—a nation that conceptualized a “gross national happiness" in 1972 and has collected data on its citizens’ satisfaction for almost two decades—the answer might just be mathematical. But the truth is h...

Directed by Kōji Fukada | 111 mins | 2019
As the carer for the elderly Toko, home nurse Ichiko is practically a member of the family, favored especially by the bedridden woman’s granddaughters. But Ichiko’s life—and identity—come unspooled after the abduction of Saki, the younger of the two girls...