This is a Tibetan film that I first read about in The Economist but I would have heard of it nevertheless due to how it has been making waves in film festivals all over the world. It was made by Chinese director Zhang Yang but judging from its credits and title cards which are in English, this seemed to have been made mostly for an international audience.
This one I’m pretty sure I heard about on the popular Lowyat forums, normally a cesspit of dumb opinions but there is enough of a critical mass of people there to discover interesting bits of news. It helps that this Thai film is very popular, being currently the most internationally successful Thai film after having done especially well in China. Plus of course its high Rotten Tomatoes rating means that it likely isn’t commercial crap.
I’m pretty sure I got this pick from The Economist and since I try not to spoil myself, I thought that this was an Indian film. As it turned out, even though about half of it is set in India, it’s really an Australian film, being based on a real-life event that was apparently quite a big deal in the country. I believe it’s the feature film debut of its Australian director Garth Davis.
Again it’s Oscar season and I thought it would be cool to catch some of the nominees and winners in an actual cinema. Unfortunately session timings for The Shape of Water didn’t work for us so I picked this instead, a film that received a number of nominations but failed to actually win anything. It helps that we’ve already seen Saoirse Ronan in a number of roles and it’s the first feature film directed by Greta Gerwig, an actress who both my wife and myself liked in a couple of films.
This is yet another quintessentially Japanese film that was a recommendation from our cinephile friend. Given its title and its premise, I expected it to be light fare. Indeed, though it touches on some heavy themes, it’s ultimately a very sentimental film if a very well-made one.
So this got bumped up the list a whole lot sooner than I expected. I have watched this one before and had a high regard for it back then. As with Summer Snow, finding a copy of it anywhere proved to be impossible and we resorted to watching a YouTube version. July Rhapsody is also notable as being the last film appearance by Anita Mui before her death in 2003.
So the whole reason why I put this onto my list was because I heard about it on Broken Forum and I found the idea of an environmentalist documentary that argues in the opposite direction to be very appealing. It’s about the practice of seal hunting by the Inuit peoples and while we are familiar with campaigns against it, this documentary argues in favor of it.