Germany, Poland201984 minPolish, Vietnamese with English subtitlesDrama, Family, Family-friendly, Women Filmmakers

What does a hot bowl of lovingly prepared soup remind you of? The taste of home? The warm embrace of a loved one? For Long, a widower and cook at a Vietnamese restaurant in Warsaw, his famous pho is his pride, and his grade-school daughter Mia is his joy. But their world changes when the restaurant is sold, forcing Long to learn to make sushi. Meanwhile, Mia is frustrated by her father's caring but old-fashioned ways, while fearing he is moving on from the memory of her late mother.

Japan-born, Polish-educated director Mariko Bobrik’s first feature tells a tender and bittersweet look at an intergenerational immigrant family with a confidently light touch from (perhaps) an unexpected Eastern European source. While Poland is their home, Long and Mia both must navigate what the idea of home means for them when dealing with change, while finding a better understanding of each other.

– Aram Siu Wai Collier

UK202090 minEnglish, Urdu with English SubtitlesToronto PremiereClosed Captions, Drama, Family

On the brink of his first international tour, Zed, a British Pakistani rapper, decides to fly home to the U.K. to reconnect with his family, only to find out his first big international break could be jeopardized by an unexpected and quickly debilitating autoimmune disease. As his condition worsens and his medical treatments intensify, Zed descends into a physical and emotional crisis. His days are marked by vivid hallucinations and long-buried childhood memories of his parents fleeing India during the Partition, forcing him to face resurfaced trauma.

A film co-written, produced by and starring Emmy Award-winning actor Riz Ahmed, Mogul Mowgli is a disquieting and electrifying exploration of identity, self-expression and intergenerational trauma. Bassam Tariq’s directorial lead and Ahmed’s transfixing performance create a gutsy, beat-packed drama authored by bi-cultural artists powerfully expressing their right to thrive in all spaces, especially those that have been built to reject them.

– Mariam Zaidi

Japan, Kazakhstan201984 minKazakh with English SubtitlesCanadian PremiereDrama, Women Filmmakers

A cowardly horse robbery ends in murder, leaving a boy fatherless and his family in disarray. When the boy’s mother is forced to move the family out of their village, a mysterious man arrives who might be able to help restore order. What may appear to us as a “Western,” with its familiar framing of vast vistas and sublime steppes, is really a story about fractured families and survival in the wake of violence.

Inspired by true events, co-directors Yerlan Nurmukhambetov and Lisa Takeba join forces for a landmark Kazakhstan/Japan co-production, starring decorated actors Samal Yeslyamova and Mirai Moriyama. These disparate yet collaborative elements are able to make something familiar but fresh, an Asian “Western”, an art film that builds to a satisfying genre conclusion and culminates with an epilogue of renowned Kazakh artist Gali Myrzashev paintings. The Horse Thieves is an atmospheric treat. Watch it full-screen, volume up.

- Aram Siu Wai Collier

USA199565 minEnglishArchive PresentationDocumentary

Cambodian-born Sokly “Don Bonus” Ny takes a Hi8 camcorder into his final year of high school in the San Francisco Bay Area, documenting intersecting events happening at school, at home, and amongst friends and family. Filmed and released in 1995, the film can be seen as a forerunner of the now-popular diary or vlog documentary format, featuring raw footage and voiceover from Don Bonus.

Although made in the 1990s, the beats of the film are familiar and still relevant, moving through issues of low-income housing, gang violence, academic struggle, and family fractures, while also featuring communal celebration, youthful camaraderie and intimate family life. These scenes are simultaneously casual and intentional, recontextualized and given resonance through Don Bonus’ frank, teenage monologic reflections.

A.K.A Don Bonus highlights how the stories that came before us, although constructed from their time and space, can continue to speak powerfully into our present.

– Jasmine Gui

Japan2019179 minJapanese with English subtitlesClosed Captions, Drama, Fantasy

Rated 18A
CW: war, sex, physical violence (beatings, executions), sexual violence (rape), attempted suicide

In the port town of Onomichi, Japan, the only movie theatre is bidding goodbye to its local audiences. The owners organize a nightlong screening devoted to historical Japanese war films. Noriko, a teenager who regularly helps in the theatre, walks toward the stage and astonishes the audience as suddenly, she mystically projects herself into an old musical. Film buff Mario, film-history nerd Hosuke, and aspiring yakuza Shigeru are also warped into the cinema screen in sequences that represent the second Sino-Japanese War, Boshin War and Hiroshima bombing. The four embark on an immersive, surreal and vicious cycle of damnation and salvation in the face of war's savagery.

Nobuhiko Obayashi's swan song Labyrinth of Cinema dives into the senselessness of wars, wrapped in cinematic oddities. His abstracted reconstruction of Japan’s darkest events points out that movies, though a fabrication of reality, epitomize suffering as universal truth.

– Rolando Basmayor

Vietnam2019105 minVietnamese with English subtitlesCanadian PremiereDrama, Family, LQBTQ+ Filmmakers

Son of a prominent family in Vietnam, Van returns from America for the first time in nine years with his partner, Ian. Coming back to a community with expectations of patriarchy and legacy, Van tries to find the right moment to tell his mother, Mrs. Hanh, about his love for Ian. With the heir unable to bear children, the family fights over their inheritance, surmounting to a violent reveal of truths. Everybody has a secret. An intricately assembled ensemble, Goodbye Mother is a queer story and more.

Director Trinh Dinh Le Minh portrays characters with dignity in this uplifting story, providing positive resolution to otherwise challenging conversations within the Asian family dynamic. Paired with colour palettes that lends itself to the beautiful scenery of Vietnam, the portrayal of queer lovers making plans for the future provides an enriched leading story that normalizes queer Asian narratives in cinema.

– Bertha Lee

India, Italy, Qatar, Romania202089 minGondiya, Madiya, Hindi with English subtitlesNorth American PremiereDocumentary, Family, Open Captions, Women Filmmakers

Somi and her husband met and fell in love while fighting alongside fellow Naxalites, a communist rebel group fighting for the rights of tribal communities in India for the past 50 years. Although the group represents a quarter of the population and lives in extreme poverty, Naxalites are seen as the biggest threat to national security for the State of India.

After a decade of armed struggle, Somi and her husband choose to surrender under the government’s Surrender Policy and begin the draining bureaucratic process of integrating into a hostile and unwelcoming Indian society. Through thoughtfully executed vignettes and with intimate access to Somi and her family, directors Arya Rothe, Cristina Hanes, and Isabella Rinaldi of the NoCut Film Collective construct a moving verité portrait of an ex-Naxalite family seeking a future for their children while being held hostage to the whims of a rigid and unforgiving contemporary Indian State.

– Mariam Zaidi

South Korea201978 minKorean with English SubtitlesNorth American PremiereDrama, Open Captions, Thriller

Unfolding over a tumultuous three days, Dust And Ashes is a quiet thriller following a grieving Hae-su, forced to learn and navigate the system in order to collect insurance after the death of her mother. Overworked, underpaid, and facing eviction, Hae-su takes desperate measures in order to escape impoverishment.

In his enigmatic directorial debut, Park Hee-kwon confronts the aftermath of death just as he does the act of living: with method and process. He steeps the bureaucracy of dying in intensity, slowly burning away the mystery surrounding Hae-su and the social injustices faced by the underclass in contemporary South Korea. Actress Ahn So-yo (seen in Albert Shin’s 2014 In Her Place) carries the grief as if it is her own—delivering a performance of few words but nonetheless affecting and steadfast in its resolve.

– Roxanne Fernandes

South Korea2019105 minKorean with English SubtitlesOntario PremiereDrama, Family, Women Filmmakers

Broke and evicted from their basement apartment in Seoul, teenager Okju, her little brother Dongju, and their divorced father must move in with their ailing grandfather at the city’s outskirts. Soon joined by an aunt reeling from her own failed marriage, they spend the summer getting reacquainted with each other as an ad hoc multigenerational family unit, which was the norm just a generation ago.

Told through beautifully sun-soaked summertime moments, Moving On is a wistful, nostalgic, and sometimes painful look at growing up and growing old through the adolescent eyes of Okju. These nuanced observations about family will call to mind the films of Ozu or Yang (and is the utmost compliment). However, first-time feature director Yoon Dan-bi assuredly tells a semi autobiographical story with a sincere flair that will resonate with the trials of life that every family must face.

– Aram Siu Wai Collier

Canada2019112 minFrench, Vietnamese with English SubtitlesDrama, Family

A right-wing government controls Quebec, closing its borders and pushing immigrants to leave. Widower Hiên lives a meager life running a dépanneur. Enticed by his daughter Phuong’s move to Vietnam, Hiên makes arrangements to leave everything behind. But when a neighbourhood boy is left under the temporary care of Phuong’s aimless Quebecois boyfriend, Hiên is driven to solve the mystery of the boy’s missing mother.

Veteran Quebec actor Nguyên Thành Tri gives an intense performance as Hiên, a stoic ex-soldier with a deep history in conflict and post-war trauma, whose eyes have seen things many of us would never understand. Inspired by watching his refugee parents during the 1995 Quebec referendum, writer/director Ky Nam Le Duc’s film is framed by the Vietnamese refugee experience, where this not-so-alternate universe reveals desperate people in no-win situations whose only choice is to try to make the best of their newfound chaos.

– Aram Siu Wai Collier