It didn’t snow in Warsaw this past November. Well, perhaps it did, but just barely: as I walked down a city street partway through the 18th Five Flavours Asian Film Festival, I could feel the tiny half-raindrops, half-snowflakes falling. It was my second time at the Polish film gathering, and it didn’t feel right without a little bit of snow to temper the bitter cold that contrasted with the festival’s constantly emanating warmth. But if Warsaw feels to you like a surprising place to host an Asian film festival for the 18th time, consider that Five Flavours began as a Vietnamese film festival, owing to the city’s sizable diasporic population.
The festival has now grown to become one of the most well-respected film festivals dedicated to Asian cinema (East, Southeast, and South Asian cinema, to be precise) in continental Europe. Five Flavours is unique in its arthouse focus, as opposed to the Far East Film Festival in Udine, Italy, which boasts a similarly comprehensive programme, albeit with a very different focus: popular and commercial cinema. There is also something very deliberate about Five Flavours’ style of curation, which features a thoroughly contextualised introduction provided by a festival programmer that is less about the flashiness of the film and more about its relevance or interesting elements. (It should be disclosed that, over the last two years, I have grown to count several members of the festival’s programmers among my friends, which so frequently happens within the film community. However, I like to think about this decreased distance as an increased level of critical subjectivity, as it allows me a closer look at the event’s inner workings.)
This year’s festival ran in-person from the 13th through the 20th of November at Warsaw’s Kino Murańow and Kinoteka, as well as online through December 1, 2024. Last year, I attended the festival for the first time as a member of the International People’s Jury, composed of a group of young Asian cinema lovers selected to adjudicate the festival’s New Asian Cinema competition, usually composed of debut and sophomore films in an emerging director’s filmography. From the jury last year, I met several individuals who have also become good friends and others who became long-distance pals I had my heart set on seeing this year.
The Five Flavours selection is small enough to remain manageable while still encompassing a diverse range of films. The lineup typically consists of the now-annual strands of the New Asian Cinema section, the Asian Cinerama strand (for well-received films from the festival circuit of the past year), and several retrospective and specialty sidebars. Based on its diverse selection, the festival also repeatedly offers a very pertinent opportunity for someone like me, whose specialty does not lie exclusively in Asian cinema, to catch up on new and old films alike from across the continent.
Portrait: Stanley Kwan
Having, frankly, only seen a slim margin of Hong Kong classics and having been blown away the year prior with the Hong Kong cinema focus at the Far East Film Festival (now I count films like A Moment of Romance among my most beloved), my top priority at this edition was immersing myself in the “Portrait: Stanley Kwan” retrospective. Hong Kong director and producer Kwan is openly gay, with several of his films encompassing queer themes, with others are dedicated to romantic themes more generally and films about women, not unlike the cinematic gaze of Todd Haynes. Several of his films also still face censorship in mainland China.
I began with Rouge, which collected the award for Best Director at the Hong Kong Film Awards upon its release. The film is one of those retrospective classics that everyone seems to love, but it didn’t hit me as hard as it hit others with whom I spoke. In short, Rouge is a speculative ghost story that crosses between 1930s Hong Kong — where young courtesan Fleur (Cantopop singer and actress Anita Mui) falls for the son of a businessman (heartthrob Leslie Cheung) — and present-day Hong Kong (in this case, 1987), where the courtesan’s ghost goes in search of her lover, with both having made a suicide pact years ago. While Mui utterly enchants as Fleur, Cheung isn’t given as much screen time as one might expect, and his character feels somewhat one-dimensional. Perhaps my hesitation toward the film most heavily emerged in the present-day scenes, where I wasn’t particularly taken by the limited range of characters that the courtesan encounters.
Conversely, I was very impressed by Lan Yu, which again secured a Best Director gong for Kwan, this time at the Golden Horse Awards. As a relatively conventionally framed queer drama, it’s a story that’s easy to follow — but, of course, doesn’t end well for the couple, if not at least slightly bittersweet. Kwan’s ability to capture the precarious, pining hunger between the titular student and his older lover over the course of eight years renders unforgettable. The older character, in particular, is trapped between expectations of compulsory heterosexuality and fears of commitment (themes not unlike those one might see amongst queer communities worldwide through time, on-screen and off). Based on an anonymous novel published online, Lan Yu offers a fascinating case of adaptation that turns into a beautiful film, whereas I’d much rather avoid today’s adaptations of digital novellas (let the rebellious glory of fan fiction stay fan fiction, if you will).
The final two Kwan films I caught were Love Unto Waste, starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai, and Centre Stage, starring a radiant Maggie Cheung — together, two of Hong Kong cinema’s greatest stars. As Kwan’s sophomore feature, Love Unto Waste presents a tonally bizarre film that begins as a fun young-adult romp, with Leung playing a mischievous, booze-happy heir to a rice-selling business amidst a group of friends. A switch flips when one of the group turns up dead — purportedly due to a burglary — and the love triangle between the surviving three…intensifies? It’s hard to place where Kwan was trying to go with the film, but the director indulges in the more melodramatic side of the film both visually and narratively, making for an entertaining watch.
Centre Stage can best be described as a moving docu-hybrid work tracing the life of Ruan Lingyu, a silent film actress who rose to stardom at 16 and tragically died at 24, portrayed fictionally by Maggie Cheung. Kwan turns Centre Stage into a special film by inserting clips of Ruan’s on-screen performances as well as documentary segments of the film crew, including Cheung herself, drawing parallels between the two actresses’ stardom. Globally, she may be best known for In the Mood for Love, but Centre Stage sees Cheung at her career-best (she fittingly won the Berlinale’s Best Actress prize for the role) — this film sold me on why the world finds her so compelling.
Tokyo Stories
One of the festival’s themed strands this year was “Tokyo Stories,” whose title betrays the crux of the idea but not the breadth of films included. A highlight of the section was the attendance of Hiroshi Ishikawa, the director of cult film tokyo.sora (meaning “Tokyo sky”), one of only three films by the Japanese director. The festival presented the film to non-Japanese audiences for the first time since its premiere in 2002, and the director stayed afterward to chat with attendees for hours. (Later, he spoke with one of the festival programmers and a volunteer over several bottles of soju: a lovely, but never unexpected, outcome at Five Flavours.) I also finally saw Toshio Matsumoto’s boundary-shattering Funeral Parade of Roses, an allegory for a very well-known tale that reveals itself in the film’s final moments. It feels so ahead of its time for its depictions of Tokyo’s underground LGBTQ+ scene in the 1960s, and its radicality makes it deserving of its masterpiece status.
I was also drawn to the punkier selections, including Tokyo Pop by filmmaker Fran Rubel Kuzui, best known for directing the original Buffy, the Vampire Slayer movie. In Tokyo Pop, a white American woman who goes to Japan to join her girlfriend, only to stay to pursue a career as a singer (capitalising on her newfound gaijin identity) while meeting and falling in love with a young Japanese rocker, Hiro. The flick is, frankly, just a joy — a charming work that doesn’t require a significant amount of thinking but already exists with a far less exoticising gaze than Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (with all due respect to Coppola, whose other works I love).
Perhaps my most singular watch of the festival belongs to Love and Pop by Hideaki Anno (best known for the series Neon Genesis Evangelion), a semi-experimental film disorienting and brilliant in its own way. In the film, a group of teen girls who partake in the culture of enkō — acting as escorts for older men — often salarymen — who desire company, similar to sugar dating. Facilitated through mobile phones where men post their ads and interests, the practice offers an interesting case study of a phenomenon created by a new technology. However, Love and Pop remains best known for its wild visual style. On Letterboxd, I had preempted my watch by reading descriptions of the cinematography as being in virtual reality on a flat screen and a variant of the frenzy of Uncut Gems. In spite of these warnings, I was still not prepared: changing aspect ratios, multiple types of lens distortions, handheld camera work, and extremely irregular angles and movement, with cuts made at lightspeed for almost two hours. From its first moments, the director completely unsettles the viewer — you never experience a moment of rest. However, the film accomplishes this so deliberately that I can’t help but be impressed by Anno’s dedication to the style, even if I needed to stand up and get some fresh air after the film’s end.
New Asian Cinema
I saw fewer films from the festival’s competitive New Asian Cinema section, whose lineup this year lacked in stylistic diversity, in contrast to last year’s selection. However, it still contained interesting films, including more avant-garde works such as the winning film Monisme by Indonesian director Riar Rizaldi, who fittingly recorded his thank-you speech from a busy restaurant in Seoul. Also playing was the gritty Cannes Semaine de la Critique pick Mongrel, which, very soon after Five Flavours ended, picked up the Best New Director prize at Taiwan’s Golden Horse Awards.
Qu Youjia’s beguiling She Sat There Like All Ordinary Ones was my festival wildcard, even though I had been initially scared off by the mixed reviews it received (despite its win from the Berlinale’s youth jury). Let this be your reminder never to blindly trust the opinions of others online: eager Letterboxd users were quick to call this film too confusing to digest. However, Qu’s emphasis on visually portraying adolescent restlessness and quiet resistance against the system through visual symbols is extremely memorable, even if the film’s script feels somewhat haphazard.
Festival Favourites
My second-favorite festival watch emerged from the Asian Cinerama section: the first Nepalese film to play in Berlinale’s competition section, Min Bahadur Bham’s Shambhala. The film follows a newlywed woman who eventually goes in search of her husband who disappears because of a rumour around the woman’s alleged infidelity. Admittedly, I found Shambhala’s two-and-a-half-hour runtime initially intimidating (though, truth be told, anything closer to the 150-minute mark than 120, or even 90, makes me nervous to watch). Despite my urge to stand up and walk around at points because I was sitting in the front row, the story moved surprisingly quickly given its length, and most scenes contain some sort of plot element, avoiding a snail’s pace trap.
Shambhala also became the centre of longer informal discussions I had about liking slow cinema and back to the very basis around the definition of slow cinema. To me, the second half of the film — dedicated to the woman’s search for her husband — feels more like slow cinema, also because of the deliberate intercut landscape shots. But questions emerged: are all plotless films, or films that are paced slowly, slow cinema? Do slow cinema films always place an emphasis on visuals over narrative? I would consider Chia Chee Sum’s Oasis of Now, which played in the New Asian Cinema section and secured the festival jury’s Special Mention, a piece of slow cinema in light of the combination of a very distinct and compelling visual style, coupled with a near-plotless narrative that focused more on the dynamics between characters. This, however, does not designate particular criteria. (Perhaps slow cinema really is dependent on vibes!)
My favourite film of the festival, though, was unexpected: Toshiharu Ikeda’s 1984 film Mermaid Legend, which played in the festival’s “Focus: The Environment” section and follows a woman’s quest for anti-corporate revenge after her husband is killed by a ruthless company seeking to build a nuclear power plant. The film’s scenes of sexual assault are shockingly graphic — and quite gruesome — but their disturbing nature also makes the ensuing bloodbath feel even more triumphant. It’s an uneasy choice that the filmmaker makes, but by that point, viewers should practically be shaking with rage. On the flip side, the early-film underwater scenes are languorous and beautiful, creating tonally different halves to the film, although the lead-in to its bloody finale never feels jarring.
Late night after each final screening, I and others gathered at Amondo, a café-cum-cinema-cum-bar in Warsaw that has now played host to the festival’s extracurriculars for the second year. Unlike many other festivals, this casual space is made available to all festival-goers and a place where filmmakers also come to enjoy conversation: dialogue over a cold IPA or hot ginger tea is greatly encouraged.
For good reason, Five Flavours remains a very locally engaged festival, which also means that many of the post-screening Q&As and special talks are held only in Polish, making it harder for non-Polish speaking attendees to partake in the debates and discussions. Its in-person international viewership skews considerably smaller, resulting in the festival being extremely local audience-oriented rather than guest-oriented.
Nonetheless, Amondo provides an informal space to have these kinds of interactions, which are sometimes few and far between at big international festivals. The genuine emotional warmth cultivated in this space is something I am glad to experience firsthand from this festival, where I turned from stranger to friend and others did for me as well, for the second year in a row.
