THERE was no hiding his emotions when Jin Ong stepped up on stage at the 25th Far East Film Festival (FEFF) to accept his first award of the night for his debut feature Abang Adik.
"[For] this movie, I had no intention of making anyone cry, but to share a lot of love to everyone, and hope that everyone is loved, every day," began the Malaysian filmmaker.
By the end of FEFF award ceremony, that love had been returned several times over by the town of Udine, in northern Italy, as Ong walked away with three awards — including the festival's highest honour, the Golden Mulberry audience award.
Ong's awards sweep marks the first time a Malaysian and Southeast Asian filmmaker has placed first in the audience choice at the Italian festival. FEFF screens the best in Asian popular cinema and came to a close on April 29. His win consolidates the growing momentum of Southeast Asian features as they continue to reach a global audience.
Abang Adik follows a pair of undocumented Malaysian men — played by Taiwan's Wu Kang-Ren and Malaysia's Jack Tan — who form a family unit spanning migrant workers and a transgender neighbour, who doubles as the mother hen of their enclave. Set in the busy Pudu market, the brothers are forced to reassess their co-dependence after one of them lets his impulsive nature get the better of him.
"It's been so exciting to receive such good feedback and encouragement from the audience and the jury," enthused Ong, adding: "I can't wait to meet the audience in more territories." The film's acclaim at FEFF, arguably Europe's most prominent showcase of Asian cinema, cements both Ong and Malaysia's potential for excellence in film production.
"Ong's accomplishment has given Malaysia's film industry reason to believe that local films have the potential to be seen all over the globe," said Joanne Goh, the founder and president of the Malaysian International Film Festival (MIFF), who was also in Udine. "Malaysia has received a boost of confidence as a result of the win," she added happily.
A very different Malaysian film — the blockbuster Coast Guard Malaysia: Ops Helang (2023) — was the other film from the country to screen at FEFF.
On curating the vastly different Malaysian films this year, FEFF president and co-founder Sabrina Baracetti explained: "Coast Guard was a huge success. It's a blockbuster in the purest (sense) of that word. Abang Adik has interesting — some might say challenging — commercial possibilities. With these two films, we're giving our audience an insight into contemporary commercial cinema in Malaysia."
NEW LIFE
It's what the festival does best: bringing together popular cinema and those that "might have slipped through the cracks in terms of box office success to give them new life".
Aside from its signature horror, the majority of this year's Southeast Asian film selection showcased diverse stories of women across the region. Of the 13 films curated, nine films featured women in leading roles, indicating the increasing popularity, and commercial viability, of women's stories on screen.
Those figures are as much a celebration of how women's stories have always been represented in Asian cinema as it is a reminder that the fight for equal billing is far from over.
"What we wanted to do this year is show how there are so many struggles that continue for women, not just across Southeast Asia but the world. We hope our audience can recognise this commonality and things can continue to change," said Baracetti.
SINGAPORE'S RETURN
After a three-year absence from the programme, Singapore made a thunderous return to FEFF. He Shuming's charming and endearing Ajoomma (2022) held its European premiere and opened the festival on April 21.
Ajoomma reconsiders the derogatory phrase in Korean for "aunty" and uses it to dignify a woman's late-term middle age crisis. Hong's titular Aunty (Hong Huifang) is faced with the prospect of being alone in the latter part of her life as her son prepares to migrate for work and love.
Giving in to her desire to see the country of her dreamy Korean soap opera obsession, Aunty ultimately finds that she has always possessed the capacity to be the main character of her own story; she's not as powerless as she thought herself to be.
"(Aunty) is the embodiment of a lot of Asian women and mothers we know, not just my mum, but our crew members. Every decision we made, wardrobe, camera position, went back to one question: what would your mum do, and how would she react?" said He.
He, along with star Hong and producer Anthony Chen, were on hand to present the film to a full-house on opening night that ended with rapturous applause.
In the film, Korean dramas serve as accompaniment to Aunty's life and are instrumental in enabling her to enact a reunion with her son. In doing so, she makes peace with herself and moves forward. It seems that the making of Ajoomma has similarly allowed both He and Hong to dream about their future.
"I'd really like to play a serial killer next," confided Hong, grinning broadly.
His latest signing with Sugar23 opens him up for projects that would enable him to work beyond the independent budget constraints that persist in Singapore's film industry, and to further expand his craft.
COMING-OF-AGE TALES
In other coming-of-age tales, Thai twins Wan Wanwaew and Waew Waewwan Hongvivatana's directorial debut You & Me & Me (2023) depicts the strange but no less acute grief of having to disentangle oneself from a beloved.
The film stages the disruption of twin sisters Yu (You) and Mi (Me)'s idyllic lives when they fall for the same person. It serves as a catalyst for the sisters to find autonomy whilst reinforcing the unassailable bond they share.
With six films on show, the Philippines retained its strong presence this year. From 80s and 90s films about scorned women to stories about the horrors that plague women in the present-day, the films presented a panorama of women's struggles regardless of class and sexuality.
From the ABS-CBN Corporation's archives, Flowers in the City Jail (1984) and A Separated Woman (1994) dramatise the crises of a working class and bourgeois woman, respectively. Both spotlight the struggles of single mothers who go up against the justice system to defend their right to raise their children outside traditional nuclear family structures.
Deviating from the realm of the maternal that earlier Filipino films had relegated women, director Kenneth Dagatan's In My Mother's Skin (2023) — fresh off an appearance at the Sundance festival in the United States — held its Italian premiere at FEFF.
Amidst the threat of World War 2, young Tala's (Felicity Kyle Napuli) family begins to be tormented by supernatural forces. Grasping on to religion, she soon finds that it might just be the very thing that's eating her mother alive.
The film is rooted in the Philippines' history of colonialism, but its most important inspiration also happens to come from a classic Filipino film. "I based the floor plan in my film off the iconic house in Oro, Plata, Mata (1982)," shared Dagatan.
When none of the ancestral homes they viewed could be used, they decided to check out the very house he'd originally only used as a reference. "We went through the forest and suddenly there was an old house in the middle of nowhere. I told my producers we needed to film there."
The rest is history.
BEST OF ASIAN CINEMA
FEFF alum Mikhail Red returned to Udine with Deleter (2022). The techno-horror reportedly broke box office records in the Philippines after its overwhelming reception at the Metro Manila Film Festival.
Popular actress Nadine Lustre stars as Lyra, a content moderator struggling with the emotional labour and trauma of erasing violent content from the Internet. Desensitised to the point of disassociation, she's doubly haunted by a violent spectre and her inaction at a crime.
"The Philippines is starting to become the social media content moderator of the world. It's a really mentally and emotionally taxing job," Red explained. On the success of the film, he offered: "Tiktokers talked about the film (on the platform). Content moderation is very much like going on Tiktok (to swipe on videos). It all kind of fell into place."
Cat-fishing takes on a new level of sinister in Quark Henares' Where Is the Lie? (2023). "Technically, our film isn't horror," said trans actress E.J. Jallorina, adding: "But it's important to view it through the lens of horror to understand the experience of trans people whose lives are being threatened."
Based on a real-life viral Twitter thread, Jallorina plays Janzen Torres, an interior designer whose life spirals after her dream match on a dating app turns out to be the work of a syndicate led by an insidious art director. It's especially cruel, given the queer community's reliance on apps to find love.
"The future of cinema in the Philippines would be a lot more colourful if there were more diverse stories like ours through our perspective," Jallorina said.
Indonesian superhero film Sri Asih (2023) also made its Italian debut. Directed by Upi, the film follows the origin story of Sri Asih (Pevita Pearce), the first superhero in Indonesia's comic book history. The film is the second entry in the Joko Anwar-produced Bumilangit Cinematic Universe, a franchise modelled after Marvel's.
While FEFF continues to help introduce Asian cinema to the world, there's no escaping the increased influence streaming platforms have in doing just the same. Ajoomma and Deleter, for example, can both be streamed on Amazon Prime in selected regions.
"A movie ticket now costs 400 pesos," said Dagatan, whose In My Mother's Skin was acquired by Amazon Studios after its successful screening at Sundance. "A streaming subscription costs 420 and has a lot more options," he added.
Sasha Han attended the 25th Far East Film Festival as part of its FEFF Campus initiative for aspiring journalists and critics.