Thailand’s and Nepal’s Oscar submissions, “9 Temples to Heaven” and “Elephants in the Fog,” are among 10 titles competing at the 27th edition of Tokyo Filmex, which will run Nov. 20–29 in the Japanese capital’s Yurakucho district.
Taiwanese actor Lee Kang-sheng, who has appeared in every feature by auteur Tsai Ming-liang since “Rebels of the Neon God” in 1992, will sit on the three-member international jury. Additional jurors will be named later. The panel will pick a Grand Prize winner, whose director will receive JPY700,000 ($4,500), and a Special Jury Prize winner, whose director will receive JPY300,000 ($1,900). Both awards will be handed out at a ceremony on Nov. 29.
The competition is open to emerging Asian directors with films finished in 2025 or 2026. Four of this year’s selections are first features.
Sompot Chidgasornpongse, who has worked as assistant director to Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, makes his narrative debut with “9 Temples to Heaven.” The deadpan family comedy follows a 63-year-old man who drags nine relatives on a one-day tour of nine temples after a fortune teller warns that his mother will soon die. The mother won’t get out of the car. The film launched in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight and picked up best director and best actor at the Shanghai International Film Festival.
Abinash Bikram Shah’s “Elephants in the Fog” won the Jury Prize in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard strand, the first Nepali film to make the festival’s official selection. The debut feature centers on Pilati, head of a kinnar, or third-gender, community in a village hemmed in by elephant forest, who takes over the hunt for a missing girl when police won’t help.
Venice supplies four competition titles. Phuttiphong Aroonpheng’s Horizons entry “The Burning Giants” follows a young policeman who begins to doubt a government operation that closes off a forest and moves out its Indigenous Karen residents after a strange white smoke starts burning people. Michelle Zhou drew on her own life for her debut “Big Little Things,” also from Horizons, in which a woman takes a hired fake boyfriend back to Harbin for the Lunar New Year holiday to keep her girlfriend secret from her mother. It won Venice’s Premio Autrici Under 40 prize for young female directors and has four Golden Horse nominations.
Iranian filmmaker Ali Asgari’s “A Bit of Light,” from Venice’s main competition, tracks a Tehran doctor who loses his license for treating injured protesters and plans to kill himself. Amie Song’s debut “Gu Shi,” made through Venice’s Biennale College Cinema program with Anocha Suwichakornpong as executive producer, wraps its politics in a fairy tale about a family hiding out in an isolated house wedged between forest and sea.
Two films come from Toronto. Korean director Yoon Dan-bi’s “The World Before,” from the Platform competition, centers on a 17-year-old girl on a southern island who is drawn to a childhood friend back home for his grandmother’s funeral. It earned a special mention in San Sebastian’s New Directors section. Filipino filmmaker John Torres’ first narrative feature “The Remotes,” which also played the New York Film Festival, is a neo-noir in which a widowed detective close to retirement connects a run of fatal road crashes to a voice app designed to retrain reckless drivers.
Singaporean director Priscilla Ang’s debut “Ah Girl,” set in 1994 and framed in 4:3, won the Youth Jury Award in Rotterdam’s Bright Future section and has three Golden Horse nominations. Rounding out the selection is “A Song From Beyond,” the fifth feature from Japan’s Sugita Kyoshi, whose “Haruhara-san’s Recorder” won the FIDMarseille Grand Prix. A photographer agrees to act in a student’s graduation film, only to find that her estranged father has been cast as the father.
Novelist Maha Harada’s directing debut “In My Father’s Room,” revealed as the opener earlier this month, will kick off the festival. Harada adapted it from one of her own short stories, and it stars Yu Aoi as a museum guard who receives an unfamiliar key from her estranged father, played by Issey Ogata, a month after his death. The film premiered in competition at San Sebastian, where it won the Fipresci Prize and the Ateneo Guipuzcoano Award.
Anthony Chen’s “We Are All Strangers” will close the event. The film completes the Singaporean director’s “Growing Up” trilogy, after “Ilo Ilo” and “Wet Season,” and centers on a hawker-stall owner and his son, 21, who both marry and end up sharing a small public housing flat. It was the first Singaporean film picked for the Berlinale’s main competition and is Singapore’s Oscar submission.
Both titles sit in the 12-film Special Screenings section. Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo’s 34th feature, the black-and-white “The Day She Returns,” arrives from Berlin’s Panorama, while Kogonada’s Hong Kong-set “Zi,” dedicated to the late composer Sakamoto Ryuichi, comes from Sundance’s NEXT section. Ann Hui’s 1981 Hong Kong New Wave thriller “The Story of Woo Viet,” starring a 25-year-old Chow Yun-fat, screens in the M+ 4K restoration that premiered in Venice Classics.
Poh Si Teng’s documentary “American Doctor,” about three U.S. volunteer physicians who treated the wounded in Gaza before lobbying the media and Congress, took the Hot Docs Audience Award after premiering in Sundance’s U.S. Documentary Competition. Japanese filmmaker Irie Yu’s documentary feature debut “The Day He Retires” will world premiere at the festival. It follows Takeishi Kenji, who left his job at 50 to open Fukaya Cinema in Saitama, as he hands the theater to a new generation at 76.
Lee will also be on screen in a double bill of Tsai’s two newest “Walker” films, the series running since 2012 in which he plays a present-day version of Tang dynasty monk Xuanzang, moving through cities around the world at a glacial crawl. “Dust,” the 11th chapter, was shot in San Sebastian and premiered at Venice. The 12th, “Night Journey,” takes place in the Czech town of Jihlava and is a Golden Horse nominee for best documentary short.
Jia Zhangke’s “Torino Shadow,” made at the invitation of Turin’s National Cinema Museum and first shown as a Cannes special screening, headlines a shorts program alongside work by younger directors. These include Carlo Francisco Manatad’s “And If Thuy Didn’t Exist,” a special mention recipient in Locarno’s shorts competition, and “The Bovine Comedy” from “A Useful Ghost” director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke, which won Locarno’s Pardino d’Oro for best auteur short.
The Made in Japan sidebar has three titles. Yamanishi Tatsuya’s “Goodbye, Absence” and Sasaki Omoi’s “22nd Century Cat” will both world premiere in Tokyo. Xavier Tera’s debut “The Color of the Sun,” set in Okinawa in 2012 and lensed on 35mm by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, won the Fipresci Prize in Venice’s Horizons section.
Screenings will take place at Yurakucho Asahi Hall, Marunouchi Piccadilly and Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho. Talents Tokyo 2026, held in cooperation with Berlinale Talents, will run in parallel at Vision Center Yurakucho and Yurakucho Asahi Square. The 25 films unveiled so far span three sections.
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