Lily Franky

Harbin

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Ahn on horseback

The national myths of one country don’t necessarily click with a foreign audience. Harbin, about Korean freedom fighters battling to throw off the Japanese yoke, makes the point abundantly. If you’re Korean it’ll almost certainly mean more to you than it did to me, a Brit, who without the added zing of patriotic feeling and background knowledge had to rely solely on old-fashioned stuff like drama, characters and world-building to get his scant cinematic jollies. Director Woo Min-ho puts up a brief written explanation of the situation at the beginning of the film. The 1905 Treaty of Eulsa effectively turned Korea into a colony of Japan, it says, but also had the effect … Read more

Cottontail

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Akiko standing in shallow water in a lake

Whoosh, Patrick Dickinson’s film Cottontail rushes into the territory generally occupied by Hirokazu Kore-eda. That is, the deceptively simple, beautifully crafted, sensitively acted, tender human drama. He’s even given it a Japanese top coat, since it’s the story of an emotionally inert Tokyo dad whose wife has just died heading to Lake Windermere in the the UK’s Lake District to scatter his wife’s ashes, as per her dying wish. Along for the journey is the son Kenzaburo can barely communicate with, plus son Toshi’s wife and daughter. Kenzaburo didn’t want any of them to come, but those were Toshi’s mother’s dying wishes. Toshi is there for her sake not dad’s. It’s clearly a … Read more