In the ecologically decimated post-war ”United Korea,” mutated mermen called Omegas are society's pariahs, exploited as cheap labor. Park Syeyoung (The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra) emerges with a unique eye for artful, experimental genre cinema.
Set between Incheon and Seoul Jeong Jae-eun’s cult debut Take Care of My Cat stars Bae Doona in her breakout role and chronicles the lives of five graduating friends whose bonds begin to fracture as they contend with a rapidly evolving society.
Sho Miyake's debut Good for Nothing, set in his native Sapporo, chronicles the lives of a trio of young men on the cusp of graduation. Captured in a spellbinding, rough-edged monochrome, it is a poignant reminiscence of youth.
Sho Miyake’s breakthrough follows Jun Murakami as an actor at an impasse, dreaming his own death. Shot digitally and finished in luminous 35mm black-and-white film, it established its filmmaker at the vanguard of Japanese arthouse cinema.
Seijun Suzuki slingshots his career-long obsessions back towards America, in this late-career masterwork that follows a naniwa-bushi performer who travels to San Francisco, convinced that Al Capone is President of the United States.
Sid Lucero (Mark Gil) desperately wants to join the Alpha Kappa Omega fraternity. Overt echoes of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and John Carpenter abound in De Leon’s horrific drama that casts college life in a fascistic blood-red light.
Upon losing a reliable American client, 18-year-old gigolo Pol leaves his native province to try his luck in the soapy gay clubs of Manila. One of Brocka's enduring successes, Macho Dancer blends socially conscious melodrama with pulp provocation.
A landmark film for Cantonese cinema, Chor Yuen's The House of 72 Tenants follows a colourful cast of renters banding together to resist the abusive landlord looming over the town square.
At the terminus of the Japanese Bubble era, a call-girl and a dominatrix navigate a life dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure and the joys of hanging out. A surprising workplace sex comedy from pink and V-cinema veteran Banmei Takahashi.
Angie Chen (Maybe It's Love) offers a rebuke to the colonial imagination of The World of Suzie Wong (1960) with the story of Shui-Mei, a “salt water girl” from the outskirts of Hong Kong, who finds a way out of poverty in the Red Light district of Wan Chai.
Entirely shot on location in New York City's Chinatown, Mabel Cheung's debut is the quintessential American tale: that of the “illegal” immigrant trying their best to survive in the so-called land of the free.
When aspiring musician and single mother Kumi drops off her young child with her ex-husband, the world is bled of colour and she hits town for one last bender. Punk auteur Masashi Yamamoto at his most anarchic and transgressive.
Mostly seen on the gay pink film circuit at the time of its release, Akihiro Suzuki’s debut is an experimental foray into grief and memory, set against a hazy, blue city - and now restored to its rightful place in the Japanese arthouse canon.
Nihilistic drifter Utamaro meets Giko, a female-presenting shoplifter and the couple soon find themselves on the lam. A newly rediscovered landmark of Japanese queer cinema, directed by Isao Fujisawa, former assistant to Hiroshi Teshigahara.
A candy-colored concoction emblematic of 1980s Japanese erotica, Pink Cut reveals Yoshimitsu Morita as a thoroughly versatile filmmaker taking his first steps towards the playful postmodernism that would define his oeuvre.
Shot on-location in a near-documentary style that forefronts bygone locations and the camaraderie inherent to a strip club’s troupe, Yoshimitsu Morita's first Roman Porno for Nikkatsu hits a surprising note of coming-of-age.
When a string of young women in floral dresses are found dead, alarms are sounded throughout Yokohama about a serial killer on the loose, with all evidence pointing to our beloved detective. Will Maiku Hama escape the trap? Kaizo Hayashi's trilogy concludes.
As Yokohama's most legendary stripper returns and gangs vie for further control of the waterfront, private eye Maiku Hama stumbles on a past he thought he’d long left behind. The trilogy continues, now in vibrant color!
Kaizo Hayashi's stylish Maiku Hama trilogy kicks off in reverential akushon B&W, as Masatoshi's Nagase private eye get embroiled with pan-Asian gangs on the brink of war in the port city of Yokohama.
As 21-year-old Kana's mood oscillates between high and lows, her relationships devolve into increasing chaos. Yoko Yamanaka's sophomore character study is a searingly honest examination of womanhood and mental health in contemporary Japan.
Yoko Yamanaka's debut, a story of teenage obsession and passion described as "a distant cousin of Louis Malle’s Zazie dans le métro” indebted to the DIY spirit of the Japanese self-produced film (jishu eiga).
A middle-class girl from the Philippines drops out of high school to follow Gardo, a minor actor in low-budget films, to soon find herself not the wife, but rather the maid. Lino Brocka's lost masterpiece of Filipino cinema, newly restored in 4K.
Carried by Harumi Inoue’s bold performance, Takashi Ishii's icy, allegorical Freeze Me places a heavier emphasis on the haunting effects of trauma than is customary from the rape-revenge genre.
Dancer-turned-filmmaker Nao Yoshigai makes her debut with this experimental documentary about one of Japan’s most secluded and magnificent areas: Shari, a small town on the north-east coast of Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido.
Unemployed in the wake of the pandemic, 26 year-old filmmaker Taku Aoyagi decides to try his luck in Tokyo as an Uber delivery rider. A thrilling, first-person perspective on the gig economy.
Investigating the murder of the young Hanzel, detective Juan Mijares plumbs the depths of the Filipino youth gangs of Jersey City. Lav Diaz's sole film shot in the U.S. establishes the epic scope and Dostoyevskian themes that would define his oeuvre.
When Mila announces to her father that she is pregnant, he begins a sordid game to reassert control over his kin. Mike De Leon's Martial Law-era masterpiece: an unflinching portrait of the horrors of authoritarianism and patriarchy.
In this demented spin on the unwanted guest scenario, iconoclast Masashi Yamamoto (Robinson's Garden, What's Up Connection) invites you to an absurdist party, an unhinged matsuri, that never stops giving.
Ten-year-old Marble witness a murder in Angie Chen's Shaw Brothers debut: a rich ensemble drama, part comedy of manners, part Nancy Drew-esque twist on Rear Window, with a dash of the erotic thriller in the mix.
Four best friends are graduating from the University of the Philippines, their paths diverging in significant ways. Marilou Diaz-Abaya's feminist epic Moral, restored from near-unsalvageable elements.
A fork in the road brings newlyweds Narcing and Puring the provinces, a small town not so far from Hell. Inspired by a sordid true crime story, this classic Filipino melodrama turns to horror. Marilou Diaz-Abaya's masterclass on Filipino Gothic.
Sakura, an aspiring rapper who lives next to the American military base in Yamato, sees her routine disturbed by the arrival of Rei, a Japanese-American relative. Daisuke Miyazaki's sophomore feature: an ode to his hometown of Yamato.
Two fans of cult 70s band Exne Kedy and the Poltergeists fall in and out of love around their shared passion, in this colorful, rock-inflected coming-of-age tale from Daisuke Miyazaki inspired by the music and lore of Kensuke Ide's musical universe.
Lap (Joey Wong) is caught in the crossfire of a Triad favor gone wrong in Patrick Tam's cult classic: the blue jewel in the crown of the Hong Kong heroic bloodshed sub-genre.
A Tokyo greengrocer risks it all to help a group of Chinese exchange students. A neglected masterpiece from director Nobuhiko Obayashi (House) that chronicles the end of a decade marked by the Japanese economic bubble and the brutal close of possibility in China.
Rookie cop Chui goes undercover and soon his world spins out of control. Long before Infernal Affairs, Alex Cheung redefined the Hong Kong crime sub-genre with this New Hollywood-inspired story of undercover cop mayhem.
A rambunctious batch of students rebel against expectations to be good and clean. Every frame of Cleaners is xerox'ed and hand-coloured, providing a deeply nostalgic outlook on growing up in the Philippines in the early 2000s.
Tang Zhijun wants to believe, no matter what. Kong Dashan's Journey to the West transposes the classical tale referenced by its title to a group of new-age UFO hunters gazing at the stars yet failing to know themselves.
A laced cassette tape sets off the Yakuza, the Filipino-Chinese Triad, and a convent of fake nuns. Kakabakaba ka ba? finds master Mike De Leon at his most outlandish, comedic and biting.
Living near the US Clark Air Base, Corazon de la Cruz dreams of a better life in America… until the unspeakable happens. Nora Aunor starts in this timeless, galvanizing classic conceived as a protest film against the horrors of American imperialism.
Flanked by her ride-or-dies, 13 year-old Cookie journeys into town to find an abortionist. Lawrence Lau updates his 1988 debut Gangs—a shocking account of underage Triads— with an all-girls cast and a delightful Y2K palette.
Plainclothes officers (Francis Ng & Louis Koo) form a fortuitous family unit during a stakeout in Wilson Yip’s playful and effortlessly cool sitcom subversion of Hong Kong bullet ballet expectations.
Qiu Fu, the most renowned clown of Sichuan opera, has reached the netherworld and puts off his final meal through colourful stories of his life. Painter-turned-director Qiu Jiongjiong unveils is a sumptuous journey through China's 20th century.
A product designer invents a flawless soybean machine and attracts the ire of his bosses. Long-unavailable, this zany Kuala Lumpur musical satire takes equal aim at corporate monopolies, film festivals, reality TV and consumerism!
"Be more Wong Jing than Wong Kar-wai!" Leslie Cheung stars as a filmmaker making his soft-core debut in this electrifying behind-the-scenes look at the world of Hong Kong Category III filmmaking. Co-starring Shu Qi (Millennium Mambo).
A Hong Kong teenager wins a trip to Japan and unleashes a chaotic chain of events (full of hackers! thieves! UFOs!) in Masashi Yamamoto's Hong Kong-Japan coproduction, an unhinged globalization mini-epic.
A bohemian drug-dealer discovers an abandoned building on the outskirts of Tokyo. Lensed by Tom DiCillo on the heels of Stranger Than Paradise and Variety, Masashi Yamamoto's second feature is his defining anticapitalist, punk statement.
Ai wakes from a night out to find footage of a sexual encounter on a porn share site. Without recourse, she resorts to a strange solution. Daisuke Miyazaki unveils a paranoid thriller set on the backstreets of Osaka, captured here in striking monochrome.
Alienated Sonya struggles to keep her funeral home afloat, until an unexpected corpse lands at her doorstep. A powerful meditation on longing, Dwein Baltazar's Filipino Gothic Ode to Nothing is a captivating arthouse horror hybrid.
When the domineering Señora Pina asks her favorite son to name his inheritance, she sparks a feud that boils over into all-out filial war. in Lino Brocka's pulpy Cain and Abel, a powerful examination of the landed class and frontier justice.
Carefree Takashi would rather play the bongo, but a Tokyo family is determined to open a countryside café in his home. Miike meets Ozu in Tadashi Nagayama's eccentric pastoral comedy examining Japan’s growing urban-rural divide.
