When Atanarjuat won the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001, it was widely celebrated as a watershed for Indigenous cinema since it was the first Inuit-produced film to win this prestigious prize. Based on a traditional Inuit legend and set in Igloolik in an unspecified past long before…
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is a rural romance that is set in the early 1970s against the backdrop of the Cultural Revolution. It is based on Sijie Dai’s semi-autobiographical novel of the same title that charts his personal experience of Mao Zhedong’s re-education programme, also known as ‘Up…
Fruit Chan’s Dumplings blends the conventions of the food film genre with Hong Kong horror in the shape of a gruesome tale of cannibalism. Aunt Mei, a former gynaecologist who used to work in an abortion clinic in Shenzhen in mainland China, is now serving dumplings filled with chopped up…
Eat Drink Man Woman by the Taiwanese diasporic director Ang Lee is one of the most widely discussed and celebrated food films. The spectacle of exotic food is deployed as a means for exploring family dynamics at a time of rapid social change. Widowed Mr Chu, a master chef in…
Based on Elizabeth Gilbert’s best-selling memoir of her yearlong journey Eat Pray Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything across Italy, India and Indonesia (2006), the film adaptation with Julia Roberts in the lead role, was a global box office hit. The film revolves around Liz’s quest regain her zest for life after…
Embrace of the Serpent is a visually stunning black-and-white film that dramatises the encounters between an Amazonian shaman, Karamakate, a German ethnographer (Theo) and, some thirty years later, an American ethnobotanist (Evan), during the first half of the twentieth century. Though loosely based on the white explorers’ travel journals, the…
The film charts the journey of Hector, a slightly depressed, London-based psychiatrist who travels to ‘generic’ China, Tibet, Africa and Los Angeles in order to find out what makes other people happy. Throughout his journey, he jots down his realisations in memorable maxims, such as, ‘Avoiding unhappiness is not the…
Hotel Salvation has invited comparisons with The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (John Madden, 2011) since it is also set in a dilapidated Indian hotel catering to the needs of very mature guests and takes a comedic approach to old age. But whereas the Marigold franchise by and large elides death, Bhutiani’s film makes waiting…
Wong Kar-wai’s dazzingly beautiful cult classic In the Mood for Love illustrates the natural affinity between exoticism and nostalgia. Tony Rayns (2015) describes it as a ‘requiem for a lost (colonial) time and its values’, while Vivian Lee (2009) sees it as part of the ‘nostalgia fever’ that seized Hong…
Indochine is an ‘imperialist nostalgia’ film (Rosaldo, 1989) that exhibits a deep yearning for French Indochina in the 1930s without displaying the slightest hint of postcolonial guilt. The film constructs the end of the French Empire in Southeast Asia as a maternal melodrama with overtly allegorical dimensions. The protagonist Eliane, played…
A feel-good movie about twentysomething trainee teacher Ugyen, who is posted to the Himalayan highlands of Bhutan to teach a group of nine children in the remote village of Lunana. Ugyen dreams of leaving Bhutan and pursue a career as a singer and songwriter in Australia but, because of his…
Raise the Red Lantern is set in the 1920s and tells the story of Songlian, a nineteen-year-old girl who is forced by her stepmother to marry the much older Master Chen after her father dies and her family goes bankrupt. Chen has three wives already and Songlian, as his fourth wife…
Sweet Bean is a sentimental feel-good film by Japanese director Naomi Kawase that centres on a dorayaki snack stall, where the three protagonists’ lives converge over the preparation and consumption of dorayaki, a Japanese snack consisting of two small pancakes filled with sweet azuki bean paste. Sentaro’s snack stall gains in popularity when…
Set on the tropical island of Tanna in the South Seas, the film tells the story of star-crossed lovers, Wawa and Dain, from two hostile tribes. The film’s iconography of lush tropical forests, gushing waterfalls and Indigenous tribes clad merely in grass skirts and penis sheaths is reminiscent of ethnographic…
Ten Canoes has the look and the feel of an ethnographic documentary but is, in fact, a narrative films that skillfully interweaves two narrative strands: one is filmed in black-and-white, takes place in ‘the distant past, tribal times’ and revolves around a goose-egg hunt and the making of ten bark canoes….
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s first foray into the wuxia genre is set in the ninth-century China during the tail end of the Tang Dynasty. The Assassin tells the story of Nie Yinniang (Shu Qi), a female assassin who is commissioned to kill a series of government officials. Although her martial arts skills are unsurpassed,…
The popular feel-good movie The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and its (less humorous and less successful) sequel The Second Best Marigold Hotel explore what motivated a group of retirees to travel to India and how they adapt to the new life in India. The hotel ‘for the elderly and beautiful’, an old, architecturally stunning…
The Ramen Shop uses food as a means of reconstructing family ties. Against the historical background of Japan’s traumatic occupation of Singapore during World War Two a moving family-food-melodrama unfolds. Masato, a ramen chef based in Takasaki, a city in Japan, discovers a suitcase filled with memorabilia and his deceased…
Set against the backdrop of the stunning rural scenery of the Shanxi province in the late 1950s, Zhang Yimou’s postsocialist nostalgia film centres on a sentimental love story between eighteen-year-old Zhaodi and the young teacher, Changyu, who has been posted to the village to open a new school. The film’s…
Based on Maguerite Duras’ semi-autobiographical novel Un barrage contre le Pacifique (1950) and directed by the Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh, The Sea Wall is an unusual ‘imperialist nostalgia’ film (Rosaldo, 1989). First, despite inviting identification with the white French protagonist, the film is made by a Cambodian filmmaker, which is unusual for…
To the Ends of the Earth was commissioned by Japan and Uzbekistan to celebrate twenty-five years of successful diplomatic relations between the two countries. Yet instead of creating an appealing travelogue about Uzbekistan, Kurosawa purposely deconstructs both the tourist gaze and the exotic gaze. The film charts the journey of a Japanese…
