Friday, November 6
In honor of the 39th Annual Tokyo Film Festival (10/26-11/4), FM+ offers up a duo of acclaimed recent selections:
FM+ EXCLUSIVE: SHE TAUGHT ME SERENDIPITY
Directed by Akiko Ohku
Back at his Kyoto university after six months away following his grandmother’s death, Konishi (Riku Hagiwara) drifts through his days, cleaning a neighborhood bathhouse after hours alongside his coworker, Sacchan (Aoi Ito). Then he meets Sakurada (Yuumi Kawai), who casually repeats a phrase his grandmother always loved: today’s sky is her favorite. Adapting the novel by comedian-turned-author Shusuke Fukutoku, Akiko Ohku (Hold Me Back) crafts a bittersweet romance about the connections we stumble into, and the ones we fail to notice. With “pitch-perfect performances from her well-matched leads,” the result is “a crisply packaged and deceptively deep gem” (Variety). (2024 | 127 mins | Japanese with English Subtitles)
FM+ EXCLUSIVE: BELIEVERS
Directed by Hideo Jojo
Three members of a religious group called the Smiley Life Center, known to one another only as Operator, Chairman and Vice-Chairman, are dispatched to a deserted island off the coast of Japan to purify themselves of worldly desire through meditation, dream recall and telepathy drills. But as the rations thin and temptation creeps in, devotion gives way to hunger, jealousy and lust. Prolific genre auteur Hideo Jojo adapts Naoki Yamamoto’s cult manga, starring Hayato Isomura, Yui Kitamura and Shohei Uno. (2022 | 118 mins | Japanese with English Subtitles)
FM+ EXCLUSIVE: MARIE CURIE – THE COURAGE OF KNOWLEDGE
Directed by Marie Noëlle
Premiering in honor of Marie Curie’s birthday, November 7
Between 1905, when she and her husband Pierre travel to Stockholm to accept the Nobel Prize for the discovery of radioactivity, and 1911, when she wins her second, Marie Curie (Karolina Gruszka) lives through the most turbulent years of her life. Widowed by a sudden accident and embroiled in a public scandal over her affair with married colleague Paul Langevin, she defies France’s male-dominated academic establishment as both a scientist and a woman. Anchored by Gruszka’s “laudably intense performance” (Empire), director Marie Noëlle “fills the story with passion, debate and human contradiction” (The Washington Post). Charles Berling and Arieh Worthalter co-star in this sweeping portrait of the first woman to win a Nobel Prize — and the first person to win two. (2016 | 95 mins | French with English Subtitles)
Friday, November 13
FM+ EXCLUSIVE: THE LAND OF MORNING CALM
Directed by Park Ri-woong
Winner of the New Currents Award at the 2024 Busan International Film Festival and the Golden Cyclo at Vesoul, Park Ri-woong’s second feature is a gripping portrait of a community left behind by Korea’s economic boom. In a fading fishing village on the Korean coast, a young fisherman, desperate to provide for his Vietnamese wife and aging mother, stages his own disappearance at sea as part of an insurance scheme, with the help of his hard-drinking boat captain, a bellowing Vietnam veteran who is perhaps the worst man alive to keep a secret. As the village waits for news, old wounds and bitter prejudices rise to the surface. “Soberly put together and strongly performed” (ScreenAnarchy), the powerful drama is “filled with subtle twists and emotional bombshells” (Screen Daily). (2024 | 113 mins | Korean with English Subtitles)
FM+ EXCLUSIVE: PERSONAL AFFAIRS
Directed by Maha Haj
In Nazareth, an aging couple has settled into a state of near-total silence, while their grown children, scattered across Ramallah and Sweden, wrestle with stalled romances, family pressures and the daily absurdities of life between checkpoints. When an arrest at the border and a long-delayed trip to Sweden shake things loose, everyone is forced to confront the personal affairs they’ve been avoiding in this official selection of Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival and winner of Best Film at the Haifa International Film Festival. Director Haj, who later won Cannes’ Un Certain Regard Best Screenplay Prize for Mediterranean Fever, brings “wry, good-hearted humor” (CineVue) to her deadpan, quietly feminist debut, telling it “winningly and distinctively” (The Jerusalem Post). (2016 | 90 mins | Arabic, Hebrew with English Subtitles)
FM+ EXCLUSIVE: TWO FROM RADU – THE HAPPIEST GIRL IN THE WORLD & EVERYBODY IN OUR FAMILY
Directed by Radu Jude
Few filmmakers working today are as fearless, or as funny, as Romania’s Radu Jude. A leading voice of the Romanian New Wave, Jude cut his teeth as an assistant director on Costa-Gavras’s Amen and Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu before making The Tube with a Hat, the most awarded short film in Romanian history. He went on to win the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlinale for Aferim! (2015), the Crystal Globe at Karlovy Vary for I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018), and the Golden Bear for Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021), followed by Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World and Kontinental ‘25. TWO FROM RADU returns to where it all began with his first two features, each a scathingly funny pressure cooker that unfolds over a single day.
THE HAPPIEST GIRL IN THE WORLD
Directed by Radu Jude
Delia, an unworldly teenager from small-town Romania, wins a car in a soft-drink company’s contest and travels to Bucharest with her parents to shoot the commercial. While the crew struggles through take after take, her parents scheme to sell the prize, and the girl who is supposed to be the happiest in the world grows more miserable by the hour. Jude’s razor-sharp debut, a “droll satire” (Empire), skewers advertising, family and the promises of post-communist consumerism. (2009 | 99 mins | Romanian with English Subtitles)
EVERYBODY IN OUR FAMILY
Directed by Radu Jude
Hungover, divorced and running late, Marius (Șerban Pavlu) arrives at his ex-wife’s apartment to pick up his young daughter for a long-planned seaside vacation. But her mother, grandmother and new boyfriend have other ideas, and a simple handoff spirals into an escalating domestic siege. Described by Jude himself as “a mixture of Steven Seagal and Chekhov,” this “violent, funny and disconcerting” (RogerEbert.com) pitch-black comedy premiered at the Berlinale Forum and “makes for compulsive viewing” (CineVue). (2012 | 107 mins | Romanian with English Subtitles)
FM+ EXCLUSIVE: WANDERING
Directed by Lee Sang-il
On a rainy evening, 19-year-old university student Fumi finds 9-year-old Sarasa alone in a park, unwilling to return to the aunt she lives with. She stays with him for two months, until he is arrested for kidnapping. Fifteen years later, Fumi (Tori Matsuzaka), still branded by the public as a predator, and his victim Sarasa (Suzu Hirose) meet again by chance, and the truth of their bond slowly surfaces. Lee Sang-il (Villain, Rage) adapts Yuu Nagira’s Japan Booksellers’ Award–winning novel, with cinematography by Hong Kyung-pyo (Parasite). The result, per The Reel Bits, is “shot in striking style and filled with terrific performances.” (2022 | 150 mins | Japanese with English Subtitles)
ETURNING TO FM+: HOTEL SALVATION
Directed by Shubhashish Bhutiani
An ominous dream convinces 77-year-old Daya (Lalit Behl) that his time has come, and he insists on spending his final days in the holy city of Varanasi, where dying promises release from the cycle of rebirth. His dutiful, overworked son Rajiv (Adil Hussain) reluctantly drops everything to bring him to Mukti Bhawan, a guesthouse for those awaiting death. But as the days pass, Rajiv struggles to keep his life back home together, while his father begins to bloom. A world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, Bhutiani’s debut is “an Indian comedy full of emotional depth and understated paradox” (The Hollywood Reporter). (2016 | 99 mins | Hindi with English Subtitles)
RETURNING TO FM+: YALDA: A NIGHT FOR FORGIVENESS
Directed by Massoud Bakhshi
Maryam (Sadaf Asgari), a young woman sentenced to death for killing her much older husband, has one chance to save her life: on a live reality-TV show broadcast to millions on Yalda, the Persian celebration of the winter solstice, she must win the forgiveness of his daughter Mona (Behnaz Jafari). Inspired by a real Iranian program, Massoud Bakhshi’s “riveting and superbly acted” (Los Angeles Times) chamber drama, winner of the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, is a searing critique of public justice, spectacle and the social pressures bearing down on two women, with scenes “so uncomfortable and so tense that you won’t soon forget them” (RogerEbert.com). (2020 | 89 mins | Persian with English Subtitles)
FM+ EXCLUSIVE: THE EXALTED
Directed by Juris Kursietis
When renowned German organist Anna learns that her Latvian husband is implicated in a corruption scandal, the comfortable life they’ve built together begins to crack. Forced to confront who he really is, and what her privilege has quietly cost, she must decide whether she can accept this new reality. A Best Film nominee at Tallinn Black Nights and the winner of Best Production Design at the Latvian National Film Festival, where it earned six nominations including Best Film and Best Director, Juris Kursietis’s predominantly English-language satire is what Screen Daily calls “bracing, sharp-toothed.” It takes a stripped-back, Dogme-like scalpel to tainted privilege and the culture clash between Eastern and Western Europe. (2024 | 98 mins | Latvian and German with English Subtitles, English)