Venice: Lee Chang-dong's Oscar submission "Possible Love"

Elisa Giudici reporting from Venice

POSSIBLE LOVE

It took Lee Chang-dong more than ten years to write Possible Love, after the horrifying police repression of laid-off SsangYong Motor workers in 2009 made him want to tackle the way inequality in Korean society is built around work, and around the pride or shame attached to having or losing a good job. After seeing the result, it is difficult not to marvel that it took him only ten years to write one of the most flawless and powerful films of the last decade. Every scene across its 164-minute running time works like an instrument in a concert, sometimes with almost diabolical precision, and as an homage to Kieślowski’s Dekalog (to which it is dedicated) and similarly intent on encompassing both the moral dilemmas of ordinary life and the capitalist structures surrounding them...

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The Baeksang Art Awards

by Nathaniel R

THE KING'S WARDEN won three prizes and is a huge hit in South Korea.

You might remember last year that we discussed that South Korea has a robust film awards calendar, with the first awards show of each year in May! I'm sharing it despite being well over a month llate because my number one film of 2025 No Other Choice took the big prize. The Baeksang Arts Awards do more than film -- they're an all around arts awards so they also honor theater and television. Eligibilty runs from April through March each year so it's a mix of late 2025 and early 2026 entertainments. As for the films some were eligible for last year's Oscar submission (No Other Choice prevailed obviously) and some are eligible to become South Korea's Oscar submission this year... though a lot of their competition has not yet opened.

The movie winners and nominations (and where you can watch them) --and a short epilogue on theater and tv -- are after the jump if you're interested...

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Cannes at Home: Big Names Before Their Big Break

by Cláudio Alves

Did the film student who directed PASSION dream he'd one day be a Palme d'Or frontrunner?

The 79th Cannes Film Festival continues to unfold on the French Riviera, and things aren’t looking great for Fremaux and his team of programmers. Some of the most acclaimed titles are premiering in parallel sections, while the Main Competition keeps delivering mixed stuff or provoking outright negative reactions. Asghar Farhadi has probably never received worse notices than the ones he’s getting for Parallel Tales, and even something like Pawel Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, which looked like a slam-dunk triumph going by pre-fest expectations, is struggling to gather the sort of universal critical praise most had predicted for it. Our own Elisa Giudicci loves it, but the consensus isn’t there yet. And let’s not even discuss Marie Kreutzer’s Gentle Monster, whose every element seems to be open for savage criticism apart from Léa Seydoux’s performance. Well, at least, we have Ryusuke Hamaguchi, whose All of a Sudden has inspired a fair amount of “masterpiece,” even though a few naysayers also have showered it with such epitaphs as “long, slow, boring.”

With that in mind, let’s look away from lackluster new works and consider these directors’ pasts, before their big breaks. Think Pawlikowski before Ida and his drift away from British cinema, Farhadi before A Separation and his European misadventures, Hamaguchi before Happy Hour and Drive My Car and the Oscar, Kreutzer before Corsage…

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"Kokuho" dominates the 49th Japan Academy Prize nominations

by Nathaniel R

KOKUHO is nominated across the board with Japan's Academy

While many other countries film awards operate on different time tables Japan and France, like the US, are calendar year with nominations in January and awards ceremonies in February or March. The French César nominations are a week away but Japan announced yesterday. They requiretwo continuous weeks in theaters for eligibility (the Oscars are less theatrical-focused *sigh* with only one week required). While Japan is inarguably the most successful Asian country at the Oscars, outside of anime (which Oscar ignores), Korean and Chinese cinema are more popular with US moviegoers with regular crossover hits. We've always wondered why there's that disconnect between the Oscars and arthouse moviegoers. But that's a larger and more complex topic. For now, let's look at the nominees for the 49th edition of Japan's Academy prizes. Japan's eye candy spectacle and Oscar finalist Kokuho received 17 (*gulp*) nominations with eight (*gulp x 2*) nominations happening within the 5 acting categories alone. We don't know if that's a record but it sounds like one. Kokuho has been so popular in release in Japan that it is already the highest grossing live-action Japanese film of all time there.

Nominees, commentary, and some history after the jump...

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Best of 2025: Bi Gan dreams the death and “Resurrection” of cinema

by Cláudio Alves

Before dropping my top ten of 2025, sometime near the end of the season, there are a bunch of excellent films that have gone unreviewed at TFE. Let’s fix that…

With Warner Bros. for sale and Netflix as its most likely buyer, cinephiles worldwide are despairing over the future of the theatrical experience. As monopolies keep forming stateside, Hollywood seems bound to reach a breaking point any time soon, and the effects are already being felt beyond borders. And then there’s AI and a rising devaluing of human artistry, the production of content above all else. That said, to speak of the end feels premature, foolish even. Even if the mainstream American movie industry as we know it ceases to be, cinema is bigger than that. Indeed, it’s an art form still in its infancy, still transforming and coming into itself. If death is coming, it manifests as transformation and, in metamorphosis, there’s longevity that beckons hope. So, stop doomscrolling and hold tight to what you love, be it the medium itself or the communion of sitting in a dark room with others, facing the collective dream projected on a bright wall.

There’s a way to accept the pain of change without giving in to despair, to believe, to honor, to delight in the miracle of the moving image without falling into grief. Chinese wunderkind Bi Gan's latest, Resurrection, embodies such notions in ways few films have done. As it regards the past, it speaks to the present and the mystery of a future none of us can yet grasp. With equal parts adoration and sorrow, intellect and earnestness, sadness and a strange strain of fatalistic optimism, this multi-chaptered odyssey through the human senses whispers and screams: Cinema is dead. Long live cinema…

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