Time Machine: Cinema as Therapy

Blue Heron (2025) - Romvary It's the 90s. A family of 6- mother and father, 3 boys and one girl, of Hungarian heritage, moves into a house in British Columbia, Canada. It's summertime. Just like any other young family, we see the family dynamics playing out. There are laughs, there are arguments, there are beautiful little moments. Daughter Sasha (played by Eylul Guven and later Amy Zimmer), is our main observer, as she is getting acquainted with the surroundings. There's a bit of prejudice against her among her young playmates in the neighborhood - maybe it's her slight accent or her status as the new girl in town, as she is left playing in the neighbor's pool covered in tarp, while other girls giggle in the distance. But that doesn't deter her sunny disposition.

It is clear that the eldest son Jeremy (Edik Beddos), a tall, lanky blonde with square thin rimmed metal glasses, has behavioral issues and the parents don't know what to do with him. He is constantly in trouble for shoplifting and violent outbursts. There are no government health authorities to help them cope with his deteriorating conditions. But we see the gentle side of Jeremy with his younger siblings as he silently watches over them. With dad always on the computer for work, the duty of taking care of children during the summer falls on mom, and with Jeremy constantly acting out whatever he is experiencing mentally, falls on her to deal with. And she is on wit's end.

After the social worker's visit, there are things that are revealed about Jeremy. He wants to be rich and famous. He loves drawing maps. He loves the idea of time travel- typical teenager stuff, and also the yearning for structure and perhaps a re-do.

In the halfway point, we are introduced to a filmmaker Sasha (Zimmer) in the present day. After her brother's passing, with her memories of her childhood fading and unreliable at times, she is in the process of making a film about her older brother who passed recently.

In a very poignant moment, past and present intersect: we see a grownup Sasha visiting the family as a social worker and telling her distressed parents that nothing they would do for Jeremy would make any difference - therapy, medications, foster care, institutions. That the outcome of Jeremy's life trajectory really wasn't their fault. While all of the children are watching TV, the present Sasha whispers something in her younger self's ear and smiles while Jeremy's eyes are fixed on blinking TV lights.

Sophy Romvary's semi-autobiographical debut feature beautifully displays yearning for understanding and closeness that was never meant to be. Some people in our lives are unreachable however we try, but it doesn't mean we don't love them any less. Astute observations of life's complications and emotions, Blue Heron is one of the most emotionally resonant films in recent years.

All the World's a Stage

W's Tragedy (1984) - Sawai Shizuka (played by Hiroko Yakushimaru, Sailor Suit and Machine Gun), is a 20-year old aspiring stage actress, not afraid to sleep with an older actor who is in business in the hopes of getting rhe role of Mako, a heirless of the wealthy Watsuji family, who is accused of murdering the family's partriach/her grandfather. But the role goes to her classmate and she as an apprentice and prompter girl behind the curtain. Disappointed but still determined, Shizuka confides in Akio (Masanori Sera), her suiter and former actor who has given up the profession.

During the production tour, the star actress Yoshiko (Sho Hatori), who plays Mako's mother in the play finds herself in a pickle - the producer of the production dies of a heart attack during sex with Yoshiko and confides in Shizuka, who happens to be stopping by her hotelroom door. It would be a big scandal for the star and it will surely end her career. But maybe Shizuka can say that the dead man was with her. It would be less of a scandal with her youth and innocence, the press will be more forgiving. In exchange, Yoshiko can help her career.

After the media conference about the death and Shizuka taking the blame, in exchange for the role of Mako, Akio wants an explanation. Is Shizuka that ambitious to get the role of a lifetime, and be willing to sacrifice her reputation and self dignity? Shizuka has no explanation for him but begs him to attend her big performance in Tokyo. The real life starts mimicking the stage production.

80's J-pop idol, Yakushimaru shines as a likeable, ambitious aspiring acccress who would kill for a role. Her deer in the headlight expression with her small mouth and big hairstyle, leg warmers and pastel colored wardrobe are all quintessential 80s Japan. The smooth dolly movement and muzak playing in the background add to that artificial 80s aestehtic. But W's Tragedy is a fun film built around the charm of Yakushimaru as she carries the film.

Proof of Existence

Mother, You Have Not Died Yet. But You Will. And When You Do, You Will Finally be Alive Again (2026) - Beni \ With perhaps the longest movie title that I've encountered, South African filmmaker Advik Beni's impressionistic film examines the post-apartheid Indian township of Cato Manor, near Durban, South Africa, still simmering with ethnic tension. It is told through Lishana, an Indian descendent who is caring for her aging, dying mother and her family history.

Lishana describes her grief after the hindi funeral ceremony, as she feels the void of her mother's presence in her everyday life - everything and nothing has changed at the same time. As memories of her mother, Leela, doing mundane things with her - cooking, tending to the garden, having conversations and eating together, persist, it's like the line between the past and the present is blurring.

Everyone deals with grief differently- Lishana delves into her art practice: portrait photography. With her relative's barbershop in town, she takes pictures of her neighbors and citizens of Durban - young, old, black, indian. And her photographs are physical links to the sordid history of colonialism, immigration, and apartheid.

Lishana's family history is an interesting one - Her grandmother was one of thousands of Indians brought in to South Africa to work in the sugarcane plantations, an indentured labor force by the Colonial British Empire. Lishana, who never had been to the homeland of her ancestors, nevertheless kept her Indian traditions and hindu culture within the working class neighborhood of Cato Manor. Her imagined India created a lore in her mind, much grander than the reality.

There has always been violence in KwaZulu-Natal province and the city of Durban both under apartheid and post-apartheid period. The 1949 Durban riot was against Indian settlement, then the unrest in 2021 amid economic hardship during COVID-19 and the imprisonment of former president, Jacob Zuma. Accompanied by archival footage, Lishana recounts the region's checkered history and ongoing tension and violence.

Shot on grainy film stock and shaky handheld camera, Mother... has the looks and feels of old ethnography documentaries of the bygone era. Beni also incorporates a multitude of art/film techniques that include stop motion, drawings, immersive sound design and reenactments. The filmmaker portrays a picture of an immigrant enclave using impressionistic film language, often focusing on life's little details - the color, sounds, ephemeral qualities of everyday life.

Merging past and present, personal and historical, the film has a quality of a lucid dream, where memories and imaginations merge and create new reality personalized for its subject. Mother, You Have Not Died Yet. But You Will. And When You Do, You Will Finally be Alive Again, is a beautiful audio visual experience. Mother, You Have Not Died Yet. But You Will. And When You Do, You Will Finally be Alive Again, enjoyed its world premiere at FID Marseille 2026 where it won the Audience Award. Visit the film's page at the official festival site for more information.

NYAFF 2026 Preview

Funky Freaky Freaks - Han Yong-gi, Jisook and Dumbo are foul mouthed, troubled highschool friends. When not in class, they engage in various mischief - including selling dirty underwear and pretending to be a girl online. The film's rough, handheld aesthetics and with jumpcuts, mixed media formats, and urban decay settings give it an energetic, edgy feel to the trio's shenanigans. Everything changes with the arrival of Woojoo, a handsome Judo champ transfer student from a rich family. Much to the distress of Yong-gi, Jisook's childhood friend who has been carrying a flame for her, Jisook destructively falls for Woojoo, who is a known womanizer.

After Woojoo unceremoniously dumps Jisook, they devise a plan to kill him - lure him into a deserted building. But Dumbo never shows up and Woojoo gets spooked and runs away. Jisook chastises Yong-gi and drives him to kill Woojoo in school.

Funky Freaky Freaks features the social media saturated environment and its pressure to conform in the most artificial ways, where looking good means everything and deception becomes the weapon of choice for the outsiders and non-conformists. It's a stark, uncompromising debut.

Kinki - Shiraishi Kinki is a south central region of the mainland of Honshu, also known as Kansai. So despite how it sounds, it's not that kind of film. The found-footage horror master Shiraishi Koji (Noroi), directs this Lovecraftian horror that has a lot of creepy imagery and jump scares, also touching on Japanese folk horror involving torii gates, a cult group and resurrection.

It plays out as a missing persons case involving a reporter on a big mystery case. The mountains of clues in physical media- videotapes of interviews, folklore, anime, CDs and newspaper clippings and thumb drives, throw a young journalist and a friend of a missing reporter deep into the mystery, where peoples head vends back in unnatural ways, disappearing limbs, falling deaths, etc. It's a good throwback to early 2000 Japanese horror.

Human Resource - Thamrongrattanarit Fren works at the HR department of a company situated among the glass and steel towers in Bangkok's business district. She discovers she is in early stages of pregnancy, but her feelings on expecting a baby are ambivalent at best. The world is a scary place according to the news which is bombarding the airwaves every day in her commute. Her husband, Thame, is a sales person for an anti-stabbing protective gear company. Fren and her co-worker interview many young people for an entry level position in her company, vacated by a young woman who failed to show up to work for several days now. The applicants are all overqualified and demanding. But in this economy, it is hard to be choosy. The company wants someone who can work 6 days a week with low salary, under a tyrannical boss, whose bad temper goes unchecked.

The threat of the everyday world escalates in a monstrous traffic jam in Fren's neighborhood and confrontations become more frequent. Fren's stress and exhaustion results in a fenderbender and Thame finally finds out that they are expecting a baby. He is overjoyed and busies himself to provide for his family - enquiring about the elite international school, decluttering the house, etc. But for Fren, often seen in silhouette or in profile at night, something is eating at her.

With constant overhead shots of the urban jungle combined with long static shots of inanimate objects and great sound design, Human Resource shares the universal concern of treating human beings like resources, leaving humanity behind.

Montreal, My Beautiful - He Joan Chen stars in this queer drama set in Montréal. She plays Feng Xia, a dutyful housewife of Wang, an immigrant who has a convenience store business. They have two kids - daughter just started college and son is in elementary school. She is having hot flashes and irritability due to menopause. Her daughter's refusal to translate anymore in public forces Feng Xia to take up French classes, after living in Montréal for 14 years. With the encouragement of a gay Cuban classmate who finds the city liberal and open, Feng Xia joins a dating app and finds Lisa (Charlotte Aubin), a stunning 30 year old blonde, working as a server in a cafe. Feng Xia has a secret love in her youth with another girl.

Forbidden love, duty, culture clash all take part in Chinese Canadian filmmaker Xiaodan He's immigrant story. Joan Chen, at 65 is still luminous and plays Feng Xia, a woman trapped between tradition and desire, gracefully. Aubin, as a young woman still trying to figure out herself and finding love is also commendable.

Japan Cuts 2026 Preview

North America’s largest festival of contemporary Japanese film returns for its 19th year this summer at Japan Society! Take a closer look at over 30 curated films from across Japan featuring major award-winners, indie darlings, up-and-coming filmmakers, restorations, documentaries, short films, anime and more. JAPAN CUTS will present lauded actress Hirose Suzu with the CUT ABOVE Award for Outstanding Achievement in Film and host the New York Premiere of A Pale View of Hills starring Hirose as our Centerpiece Film, and the festival will conclude with legendary director Koreeda Hirokazu appearing in-person for the North American Premiere of Sheep in the Box, as the Closing Film. The festival runs July 8 through 18.

And these are the films I was able to sample:

Burn - Nagahisa With expressionistic visuals that combine lo-fi aesthetics and 3D animations, Burn tells the story about Ju-Ju, a teen runaway from a religious zealot household where she and her little sister get regular whipping from her parents. Ju-Ju joins a colorful misfits group headed by seemingly benevolent leader Kami in the famous Toyoko Square in Kabukicho, Shinjuku. She befriends Mitsuba, a girl with a limp from a childhood accident, who uses her disability to lure men in for money. Soon Ju-Ju learns the rope in prostitution from Mitsuba, in the hopes of earning enough money to save her sister from parental abuse. But she slowly learns that her new-found family is not all unicorns and rainbows. She learns that the world is a sinister and endless destructive cycle that she can't escape from. Ju-Ju has only one option - burn it all down.

Burn features perhaps the most sinister foreshadowing in the presence of a pink dildo in the first half, later used as a murder weapon. Saccharine, yet sad, Nagahisa burrows into the narcissistic and fatalistic journey of an outcast teenage girl.

A Pale View of Hills - Ishikawa *Center Piece, featuring Cut Above Award recipient Hirose Suzu Niki (Aiko Camilla), a half-Japanese journalist in England is visiting her mom (Yoshida Yoh) in the countryside. Mom is selling the house that Niki and her sister Keiko grew up in. It's the 80s and everything 'Oriental' is in vogue and she is asked to write about her family origins in Nagasaki. So starts A Pale View of Hills, an understated, complex, handsome adaptation of famed English Author Ishiguro Kazuo (Howard's End, Never Let Me Go)'s debut novel.

Mostly told in flashback, the story centers around Niki's mother Etsuko (Hirose Suzu) in Nagasaki in post-war Japan. The year is 1952. As the country quickly recovered from the atomic bomb devastation and war defeat, the trauma and guilt are deeply felt in everyone. As a young woman expecting a child, Etsuko befriends Sachiko (Nikaido Fumi), a flamboyant woman with her daughter Mariko, yearning to move to America with her GI boyfriend. Mariko, who witnessed the aftermath of the atomic bomb blast and is deeply traumatized, has severe behavioral issues. The film addresses generational conflicts, survivor's guilt, and deep seeded traumas through an unreliable narrator. As with many Ishiguro's books, the emotional revelation in A Pale View comes slowly and subtly, like ripples in a pond. Through her mother's story, Niki is able to understand her sister's suicide and women's choices in the modern world.

Hirose, donning a bobbed curly hairstyle, has a striking resemblance here to Hara Setsuko, a darling of classic Japanese cinema, who starred in countless Ozu films.

Gosh!! - Odagiri Odagiri Joe's freewheeling comedy packed with familiar faces in Japanese cinema - among them, Odagiri himself as a K-9 unit police Dog who seems to be appearing in a middle aged womanizer in a dog suit to his human partner. There's a Bollywood style song and dance number, an elite K-9 handler police woman who faints like a goat when startled, surreal tacoyaki (fried octopus ball) festival, crooked red doors in the middle of the sea that transports you to another dimension, an old white haired ‘super volunteer’ who meddles in missing persons cases, gangsters in a swinging jazz club and a little old man fairy.

Odagiri shows his penchant for slapstick physical comedy here. Playful but directionless, Gosh!! plays out like a loosely connected string of comedy skits that doesn't really land hearty laughs.

Our Little Sister - Kore-eda *Featuring Cut Above Award recipient Hirose Suzu The movie starts. The three Koda sisters gather in a mountain town for their dad's funeral. They hadn't seen him in more than 15 years. He had an affair with other women and their mother ran away long ago. It was the eldest, Sachi (Haruka Ayase)'s job to take charge of their old style home in picturesque seaside Kamakura and raise her siblings. They find out they have a wide eyed, 15 yr old little step-sister, Suzu (Suzu Hirose) who'd been taking care of their father on his deathbed. She doesn't get along with her step-mother (he was married 3 times). Sachi decides to invite Suzu to live with them. Suzu accepts the offer and they say their goodbye at the train station until their next encounter. The little girl runs after the leaving train... waving madly at the step-sisters, total strangers she just met... like a puppy dog in a shelter who just got some attention...

I break down. It's only been twenty minutes into the movie and I am sobbing like a little girl. Fucking Koreeda. He got me real good. Our Little Sister is such an old fashioned movie - a small town where everybody knows each other, sibling rivalry, life's little complications, family traditions.... But it's done in such a gentle, loving way, you can't deny its honest-to-god innate goodness in ordinary people Kore-eda's portraying. It's an achingly beautiful movie.

Rex: A Dinosaur's Story - Kadokawa Seldom seen outside Japan, this Jurassic Park meets E.T. story was a massive hit domestically, until it was pulled out of theaters amid scandal involving its director, Kadokawa Haruki and his cocaine smuggling business. It was released in 1993, just a few months after Spielberg's Jurassic Park debuted.

This Children's film tells an unlikely friendship of a baby T. Rex and a young girl named Chie (Adachi Yumi). Akira, a paleontologist father of Chie, discovers a frozen dinosaur egg inside a crystal pyramide, after following a Jomon period pictograph into an ice cave, with the help of an Ainu (indigenous people in northern Japan) in Hokkaido. Chie is reunited with her emotionally distant mother who happens to be an embryologist in New York, flies over to help in hatching the egg. She abandoned Chie over her career. Just like dinosaurs abandoning their offsprings after they are born. Chie becomes the baby dinosaur's surrogate mother after the egg hatches- wink-wink, nudge-nudge. But the sinister corporation is trying to capitalize on the discovery by putting Chie and Rex in commercials and selling merchandise, against their will. Rex is mistreated and caged like a circus animal. So it is Chie and the local munchkins to break Rex out, with snowmobiles and air balloons!

Created by the special effects legend Carlo Rambaldi (King Kong, Alien, Possession, E.T.), Rex is a wide-eyed adorable lizard-puppy, a live-action pokemon character with wagging tales, rather than a killing machine with razor sharp teeth. Jolly fun!