NHK ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL + Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Award

[SYNOPSIS]
The film is set in a seashore village around 1960. Berlian lives with her daughter, Daya, in a simple house. Her husband, Agus, is an itinerant peddler, and sells medicine by using a puppet to lure customers. He has been away since Daya was small, so all she remembers is an image of her father working a puppet. Berlian helps a midwife with deliveries and abortions, and also sells medicines.
One day, Delima, Berlian's sister, visits them. She is a traveling dancer. Delima tries to persuade Berlian to leave the village, as the rebellious troops are advancing, and it is becoming dangerous to remain there, but Berlian insists on staying. However, as their house is set on fire, they escape from the village.
After wandering around in the sands, trying to make their way to Pasir Putih, Berlian and Daya finally arrive at a hovel. Berlian starts selling medicine in a sand-swept hut and Daya befriends Sukma, a physically handicapped girl with a beautiful voice. Sukma has no parents, and lives with her aging grandfather.
One day, Delima arrives there with her troupe, and gives Daya a lovely red traditional costume. Berlian will not allow her daughter to go and watch their dance, but Daya secretly goes out to enjoy the show all night long. When she returns home the following morning, she comes across her mother burning her red costume. Daya blames her mother hysterically of taking away everything she likes, including her father. However, Agus visits their hovel unexpectedly, and begs them to let him stay. Agus tells Daya about city life and its opportunities, and that he promises to buy her and her mother anything and everything they want when he becomes successful.
Daya is playing with Skuma. Then, the rebellious troops burst in. After the troops leave, Skuma is left dead. Daya presses her ear to the sand, and tries to listen to Skuma's voice, which has disappeared into the ground.
Agus asks his lamenting daughter out for a walk, and takes her to a moneylender and talks over something with him. Then one day, Agus takes Daya to the moneylender again. To her shock, the moneylender asks Daya to masturbate in front of him...
On seeing Daya collapse on the sand, suffering a sense of dejection, Berlian suspects everything. She then prepares special medicine, and her husband takes it. Agus collapses. Next morning, the hut is buried under the sand. Agus is buried alive. The moneylender's house is burnt down. Daya tries to listen to the voices from below ground, standing at a place which has turned into a mere sand mound.
_On the outskirts of the village. Berlian leaves Daya with Skuma's grandfather, and asks them to leave. A mother and a child cry, throwing themselves at each other, but Berlian is determined not to change her decision. After sending her daughter away, Berlian stands there alone, sorrow-stricken.

Teary Grains of Sand / Mayumi Kataoka (Writer, Editor)
The story is about Daya, an innocent girl who cannot even do her own hair, and her mother, who makes a living by selling medical herbs. They live in a sand-swept village in the shadows. The daughter yearns for her absent father and is curious about the world outside her village. The mother watches over her growing daughter with dignity despite their hard life. Although they are deeply bonded by love, they begin to drift apart little by little. As the mother realizes that not far in the future Daya has to leave home to live on her own, she struggles not to express her worries and insecurities to her naive daughter. Daya has no clue about what goes on in her mother's mind, and is impatient just to enjoy herself right now.
The film depicts women, who live gallantly in spite of their hardship. It also captures superb, but unconscious nature, like a scene from a myth that is full of stunningly beautiful images; the drifting sands, and the field in which Daya and Skuma, her friend, play about. The seaside that stages a dance procession. The starkly beautiful, but bleak land that is like a fleeting mirage.
On the other hand, men in this world wander about without intensions to settle down. When Daya and her mother leave their village behind just before it was set on fire, they encounter a man who kindly offers them some food. In contrast to their tension, he walks away carefree. A man who gives Daya a charm mask runs away, stealing their food without any disquieting or mixed emotions. Then, Daya's father visits them out of blue. He is also wandering about alone, without facing reality. He ends up betraying Daya and her mother mercilessly. For the mother who has experienced countless hardships, life is like a constant piercing pain caused by the sands that keep blowing against her. To protect her daughter from such harsh grains of sand, she wants her daughter to be educated, and to keep her away from becoming a 'mature woman'. Daya however wants her mother to call her by her name and to treat her as an individual, not just her 'daughter'.
However, what her father tells Daya to do to show her love for him leaves Daya completely emotionally devastated. Though she perhaps does not totally comprehend what the action means, at least she immediately suspects that she is perceived as a 'woman', an object of men's desire. That is what her mother has been afraid of. The mother must have wanted to keep her daughter beside her forever. Daya is her only cherished treasure. She would not want to leave her. On the other hand, she is aware that there is no future for her daughter as long as Daya stays with her. She thus leaves Daya with an old man to begin a journey for her daughter's sake, biting back her bitter anguish of being alone.
Sands sweep and carry away her tears, as if it were nothing.
Women are at the mercy of their environments, like a flux of sands perpetually transfigured by constant wind. Drifty sands listen and respond to the sense of suffering expressed by the women, but at the same time wipe it out. Such reality is not limited to women living in a specific environment in Indonesia alone, but overlaps with the voice of a great many women and the universality of deep motherly love and sufferings.

[SYNOPSIS]
Bahman, a Kamanche player, comes across his old friend, Esfandiar, near a theatre in Teheran, and they leave for their hometown, taking along another old friend, Javed, a drummer, who lives in an old people's home. Esfandiar is an expert puppeteer, and gets permission to be away and some money from the theatre manager.
Esfandiar takes his old car for repairs, and the car mechanic rigs up an old battery to the car. The three old men then head off to Birjand, and drive through the busy city center, ignoring young people blaming them for further congesting the already crowded street. Photos of three women adorn the inside of the car. The old men are absorbed in their recollections as they talk about their lost love.
They encounter a number of individuals along the way. They come across an old man talking to his father's grave. He tells them that his book is not selling well at all, and ends up travelling with them for some while, trying to sell his book. At the edge of a village there is a small school built of straw and earth at the side of the road. They perform a puppet show for children there, as they stop along the way to take a rest. The children follow them for a while, as the old men leave the village behind. They encounter a street musician. The old men pick him up and attempt to make some money by putting on some performances with him. They play music for a wedding at a town they stop by. They stop by at their old friend, Gasem's house. Gasem tells the tale of his lost love and his lonely life to Esfandiar, who is scared of returning to his hometown and the memories that this brings back. They give an Afghani refugee a ride, and he talks about his miserable wanderings with nowhere to settle.
However, they ended up being taken away with him as he is found trying to smuggle glass marbles.
After a number of happenings, they finally arrive at Birjand. Their puppet show opens. Esfandiar sees Bahman's sister, Rabe'eh, in the audience. She is a woman he used to care for but had given up, though she has always been in his thoughts. Esfandiar changes the happy ending of lovers being united in marriage to the tragic ending of their separation in the course of the show. He sneaks out of the theatre afterwards and wanders around the town alone.
Then, their journey comes to a sudden end. Javed, a heavy smoker, suddenly passes away. Bahman advises Esfandiar to remarry his widowed sister Rabe'eh. However, Esfandiar goes back on the road, saying "I want to keep the love for her only in my heart".

"Journey of the Gray Men" - An Audacious Hymn to Elderly Men
Kan Nozaki (Associate Professor, University of Tokyo/Scholar of French Literature)
Old characters who are at the final phase in their lives travel for the last time, to reflect on their past - we have seen films depicting such set-ups. "Wild Strawberries", "Harry and Tonto" and "The Straight Story" spring to mind. Yet, I cannot think of any road movie about a trio of old men travelling together such a long way. "Journey of the Gray Men" is an attempt at composing an audacious hymn to the elderly by Director Razavian, who has produced a short film, "The Songs of the Grey Man", which superbly depicts unexpected emotions that encounter aging men.
What makes a young director in his thirties become attached to capturing elderly men with his camera? The images in "Journey of the Gray Men" eloquently give us a clue. We can tell that the director is attracted by the gracefulness of bodily movements and solemnly deep and tender facial expressions that can only be brought about with aging. In fact, when the old men stand at a deserted beach, or in a deserted village ruined by an earthquake, a highly expressive beauty emerges unexpectedly in the scenes. At this moment, the director's camera begins to pan slowly as if to imitate the slow pace of the old men, and seems to synchronize with the grandeur of being old.
The old singer, smoking fifty cigarettes a day all his life, has a croak singing voice, but his voice is full of beat and emotion that outshines rock singers voices. The rhythm tapped by drums and strings is passionate, but also heartrending. Fires of passions are still in their heart, as they talk about their past love affairs, regardless of their age. You cannot help but be astonished by this film if you make light of this work to be a small piece of work that just depicts sentimental old men. The blighted love of youth that one of them in the trio has kept deep in his heart is implied by a skilfully created montage in the opening scene. This will turn out to be a surprise towards the end. They momentarily wander out of their way into the loving, but sad fantasy world that they create in their puppet theatre.
By any measure, the master touch by the young director who can bring out such natural and free expressions from awkward 'amateur' old actors is astonishing. There must have been a ready-made storyline. Who are these 'amateurs' who absorb and make the story their own? The dichotomy between 'amateur' and 'professional', or 'reality' and 'fiction' becomes confusing and invalid in places throughout the film. The old men point to the camera sometimes, and the director himself breaks in on the image as the unexpected happens, sometimes together with the staff working on the sound and so on. Such happenings are scattered in many places, and as a result, the near side and far side of the worlds divided by the camera are consistently linked.
The director must have learnt the strange complicity film has with reality that is often captured in Abbas Kiarostami's films. Razavian shows the sequence of the filmmaking with the old trio itself as a touching play. The film ends, paying homage to his parents. I want to remember the director Razavian as an admirable devoted son who emerged in the Iranian film world in recent years.

[SYNOPSIS]
It all started with a love letter. A letter addressed by Anara Kobessov to her husband and filmmaker, Amir Kobessov...
One day, he receives a telegram that informs him of his mother's illness. Amir leaves his wife and child behind in Almaty, and sets off to see his sick mother. On his long and monotonous way, he recalls... A young woman who edited his film. Cat's cradle with her. His desire for her, and the memory of her skin. His wife's eyes, silently blaming him.
The editor and Amir are watching his film from the editing table. A young naked girl appears on the monitor. The amateur girl who acted the role is dissatisfied, as she heard nothing about the scene beforehand. Whose bottom is it we see on the screen then? Her double's. It is the job of 'editing' and the director has the authority over it. The inspector tells him that the scene is 'unedited' if left as it is. Yet, Amir refuses to cut the scene, not caring about the girl's helpless feelings of dishonoring her family to the scandal in their village.
Amir conceives the next scene in his mind. A young man shoots a middle-aged man reading a newspaper. Amir repeats this murder scene over and over until he is satisfied.
On the road. There is a program on the radio about Mongolian conquests. Amir stops beside a river, eats a melon, and falls asleep dreaming of the fierce Mongolians.
Amir stops by at a deserted restaurant where he is served by a lovely waitress. They promise to have a date, but she never shows up. He remembers watching the live broadcast covering the moment humankind was about to set foot on moon. A young Amir calls his mother who is engaged with milking. But, she is too busy with her work. Amir stares at her tenderly, but she does not even stir an eyelid.
_Too late. His mother has gasped her last just upon Amir's arrival. After the funeral, Amir visits his childhood home and village with his friend.
He spends a night alone there. At dawn the following day, Amir locks up the house. He reads a love letter from his wife on the front steps, smoking, and is deeply moved. Amir then drives towards Almaty.

Journey, Dream and Film / Takashi Kitakoji(Critic)
Film is like a journey. Encounters with the unknown - places and people, and with unexpected tales... A journey offers us an uplifting and marvelous experience we do not come across in our everyday life. Yet, like a film, a journey ends, bringing us back to our daily routine.
Film is like dream. Mysterious sights and tales we witness while we lie still in the dark. Likewise, the dream ends and returns us to 'reality'. However, the boundary between dream and 'reality' is not as clear as we believe it to be.
Darejan Omirbaev's "The Road" reminds us of such similarities between film, journey and dream. It also reminds us of the different and original ways of narration that only film can mesh.
A film director, the protagonist in the film, heads for his distant home town in his car upon receiving a telegram that informs him of his mother's illness. We follow him through a sequence of images from busy cityscapes to an idyllic countryside through the windscreen. The presence of the driver/director is hardly felt, as we are absorbed into the scene, and begin to feel that there is another film within the film. Is it the beginning of an exciting adventure? Well, the journey is abruptly cut off at times, and our fascination with the shifting spectacle is daringly disrupted. It feels like being a sleepwalker who wanders around, as the protagonist's dream or vision appears and disappears intermittently, making it impossible to fall into deep sleep... Omirbaev would probably argue that a sequence of disconnected fragmented scenes gives the film a peculiar 'law', or a faithful 'montage', as an artist would probably call it.
The image of water keeps coming up in the protagonist's dreams: A river bank where he relaxes, eating some fruit under sun; a water tower where he waits for a waitress; and repeated murder scenes near the water's edge. Water symbolizes Eros and death. The protagonist has an affair with the voluptuous waitress in his dream in a marshy place where roads are flooded, and when he wakes up, he finds his car being pulled out of a muddy water pool by a tow car... Water as depicted in this film eats away at the boundary between reality and dream, between awakening and sleep, and between present and past, and aggressively blurs these differences.
I wonder how many films we will encounter in "The Road". A film within a film, and another film within another: It tricks us like a dazzling experience of awakening, only to dream again to awake... Such daydreams prevent the protagonist from reaching his home, and his mother is gone by the time he gets there as he has anticipated at the beginning of the film. The absent-minded director hears a monologue from either TV or radio "Yearnings for the past, and insecurities for the future. The past and the future, as they erode the present, suffocate us... such is the cause of nervous breakdowns". Yet, he will perhaps try to escape the symptoms of a nervous breakdown, an illness characteristic of our time. In time, his enthusiastic attempts to gather recollections of his mother (feminine and erotic) - the past - will be transformed into respect and love for his supportive wife who symbolizes the present.
Omirbaev plays a little trick at the beginning of the film. A woman asks the audience what makes a masterpiece: "A film is a masterpiece when it can broaden our mind, remind us of ourselves, and make us think about where we should belong...", she replies. Once again, Omirbaev has produced a masterpiece, fulfilling all these conditions, and delivered it to us.

[SYNOPSIS]
Xiao Uei has a beautiful face. He is a hoodlum but always cares about Ming. Ming is his twin sister, and is terminally ill with cancer. She is told that her days are numbered, so returns home from a hospice to stay with her family and await her death. She is Xiao Uei's dearest relative. In front of an aquarium, Ming recalls the time when she dived into the sea with her former lover, Ah Che, and handled tropical fish. She broke up with him half a year ago when she found out about her illness.
Ah Chien spends days, either dealing with tradesmen, or welcoming and sending off deities at a temple fair for a small religious group his relative organizes, because he has nothing else to do. Playful Xiao Uei is popular among his buddies, but often runs into troubles and fights.
Xiao Uei and Ah Chien live in the same housing complex, and get along well with each other despite their different home environments. One day, a hoodlum convinces Xiao Uei to join a mafia organization, and they decide to join. Xiao Uei and Ah Chien gain the mafia boss's favor, and they are given guns, which encourages them to start breaking out of bounds. However, they happen to shoot the boss from another mafia group in the course of exacting debts, and have no choice, but to run away.
Xiao Uei visits Ah Che, his sister's ex lover, who runs a cheap hotel. Inside the aquarium at the hotel swim the same tropical fish, exactly the same type as those at his place. The two boys head off to the sea with Ah Che during the night, but Xiao Uei starts vomiting, and gives a sharp cry. Around the time Xiao Uei visits a clinic, Ming passes away. The following morning, Xiao Uei is sitting numbly on a bed in a hotel room. His family's voice is heard through the handset, telling him that Ming has died... The two remain wordless on a train.
They stand silent in an old alley. Many members of the mafia group whose boss they shot are there to confront them. They run fast and hard, but the sound of beating up is heard as we hear a scream. Ah Chien falls down, stabbed. Xiao Uei stands helplessly, with a pathetic look.
The following day, Xiao Uei heads off to seek revenge, but soon returns home, wounded. To his surprise, he sees Ah Chien sitting on the long alley he always passes. Xiao Uei calls out Ah Chien, and they run along the alley again. They look back, breathless in an open space, and find that their enemies are after them again. They run fast, and dive into a black ditch. Xiao Uei is vomiting bitterly with his eyes closed. He suddenly hears Ah Chien's voice. "What's this! Where are we, Xiao Uei?!" As Xiao Uei opens his eyes, he sees colorful tropical fish in the water. It is the familiar scene he remembers from the aquarium at his home. They look at each other, and smile. They breathe. It is a beautiful moment of juvenescence, unforgettable for both Xiao Uei and Ah Chien...

Beautiful Times Beyond Darkness and Light / Sozo Teruoka(Film Critic)
Judging by the main characters' professional set-up, the film could strike us as a story about hoodlums. Xiao Uei and Ah Chien are cousins. They lead hopeless and helpless lives like sewer rats living in the underworld. Moreover, Xiao Uei's twin sister lives on borrowed time. However, once they set foot in the underworld, they are soon viewed with awe, and this fact encourages them to let out their pent-up frustrations. They gradually end up being deeply involved with the mafia.
However, what we see on the screen is unlike any other hoodlum films. Director Chang Tso-Chi never fails to imply there is always a tender thread of light from another world, the ray of hope that shines on the harsh and hopeless formal society. Such 'light' does not however originate in the mafia society. The light comes, for instance, from, the aquarium with tropical fish that appears at the beginning of the film.
The sweet recognition that a dark and harsh worldly life always has its brighter side in which places and people are blessed with shining light is notably observed in Chang Tso-Chi's works, which characteristically depict people living underground, particularly in his last film, "Darkness and Light". The paradoxical juxtaposition of 'light' in 'darkness' directly represents his recent worldview.
The most 'beautiful time' in "Darkness and Light" is the final scene-the moment when fireworks fill the sky in the background as we see the grief-stricken heroine, who has lost her beloved father and boyfriend. The director skillfully constructed the scene by capturing the fireworks seen through the windows of the heroine's home, not just the fireworks alone in the sky. This scene strikes me as even more interesting after I have seen "Beautiful Times". It is because the origin of the splendid and happy light depicted as belonging to the world beyond the darkness that covers the front half of the scene divided by the window frame. The light inside the aquarium and tropical fish, symbolic of light, depicted in this film, is also implied as light that only shines beyond the 'frame', just like the fireworks seen beyond the window frames. The aquarium is not the only thing symbolic of light. In fact, there are hardly any 'beautiful' scenes in "Beautiful Times". On the contrary, ordinary, narrow, dim and shabby locations are perhaps intentionally selected for the film. Nonetheless, something divine and a sense of liberation that implies brightness of the outside unlike cooped-up feelings fill many scenes throughout the film. The tropical fish reflecting the light beyond the aquarium, like the fireworks beyond the window frames point to such an atmosphere. This kind of composition is frequently adopted in the film. Windows and doors are left open, and there is always a shiny bright world across such 'frames'. The alley, which has a specific meaning for the neighborhood, lies between the rows of houses, and also seems to function as a 'frame' dividing the reality and the world beyond (and the alley is shown as darker in the front, and gets lighter as it goes further in the scene). Chang Tso-Chi is perhaps telling us that there is always a brighter side of the world, full of beautiful light, which everyone can share, no matter if you have lived a hopeless life like a sewer rat, as long as you have the will to look beyond.