Tokyo International Film Festival 2025 Dispatch —
Part One
Sasha Han — Saturday, 3 January 2026
When Ando Hiroyasu, a former diplomat, was appointed Chairman of the Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF) in 2019, he proclaimed his ambitions for the festival to one day be comparable to Cannes, Venice, and Berlin. To do so the festival would need to gain a foothold in the Asian festival circuit, competing with the other juggernaut that is the Busan International Film Festival while contending with the rising Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival (JAFF) and the ambitious Singapore International Film Festival (SGIFF). But unlike Busan, JAFF, and SGIFF, whose competition sections are limited to Asian films, TIFF’s competition sections have films from across the world going head-to-head for a slew of prizes, offering the scintillating suggestion that every film can stand on its own merits.
The festival has seen a steady increase of Southeast Asian films in its Competition section. This year, the section was stacked with the Asian and world premieres of some of the region’s most celebrated directors: Pen-ek Ratanaruang for Morte Cucina (2025), Chong Keat Aun with Mother Bhumi (2025) and Rithy Panh via We Are the Fruits of the Forest (2025). Singapore director Michael Kam’s directorial debut, The Old Man and His Car (2025) world premiered at the Asian Future section. Meanwhile, everyone’s favorite radical, Lav Diaz, appeared in the World Focus program through Magellan (2025) alongside Bùi Thạc Chuyên’s domestic box office hit Tunnels: Sun in the Dark (2025) and the Eric Khoo-produced omnibus Kopitiam Days (2025).
Elsewhere, the Southeast Asian diaspora was well documented across the Taiwan Cinema Renaissance section with Malaysia-set The Waves Will Carry Us (2025) by Lau Kek-huat, and in the Nippon Cinema Now bracket through Japanese director Akio Fujimoto’s Lost Land (2025). Following the film’s win for the Special Orizzonti Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, Lost Land is notable for being the first film made in the Rohingya language.
TIFF invited MARG1N Magazine to cover the Southeast Asian films at the festival. In this two-part series, I report on those films and observe the links between them.
Sex under any circumstance
At the end of the film marathon that comprised my first day in Tokyo, I was struck by what could only be characterized as “sex under any circumstance.” The two regional films I caught, Morte Cucina and Tunnels: Sun in the Dark, literally brought lust and climax to other planes. In Morte Cucina, Pen-ek Ratanaruang dices and fries the rape-revenge thriller subgenre with as much grease and salt as a weekend food trip to Bangkok provides. Lensed by Christopher Doyle in his third collaboration with Ratanaruang, the film follows a talented chef named Sao, who is played with stunning magnetism by newcomer Thanutphon “Bella” Boonsang. She exacts her revenge on her childhood abuser, whom she reencounters at work, through an elaborate plot involving marriage and a sumptuous albeit deadly feast of local delicacies centered around endless servings of kor moo yang.
Ratanaruang confessed at the TIFF Q&A that he endeavored to cook up a commercial hit centered on the massage parlors and cuisine that he felt Thailand was well-known for. However, pointless backstories and unbelievable coincidences in Sao’s B-plot revenge render the film’s potential dramaturgy into clumsy beats that only artificially inflect the story’s stakes. Between the disorienting and jarring color grading and indistinguishable montage sequences, Morte Cucina finds its footing through Boonsang, whose stoicism carries the film through its denouement. Unmoved throughout the indulgence that her husband seeks from her cooking and her body, she finally finds jouissance when her revenge is completed in a mating sequence that sees her literally straddling death. This scene is what the film seems to have been made for. But in true Ratanaruang style, no one gets what they want. When Sao finally manages to relax after vengeance, an unexpected return causes her to regain all that tension that previously held her together, damning Sao to serve her rapist in the afterlife.
I’d thought Tunnels: Sun in the Dark might be one of those prolific, big-budget action films with cheesy humor and decent special effects that can only be made with the support of military funding in the region. Tunnels retains a nationalistic sentiment ripe in war movies as well as a terrible subplot involving the repeated rape of a woman comrade “redeemed” from the shame of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy through an arranged marriage. Yet Bùi Thạc Chuyên’s vision to make a war film like nothing that had preceded it in Vietnam was executed without funding from the military. Tunnels depicts a twenty-one-person team of guerrilla resistance fighters living and fighting from the elaborate Củ Chi tunnels. Under intense bombing and an increasing number of tanks from the Americans, the group must grapple with limited supplies. Meanwhile, de facto second-in-command, Ba Hương (Quang Tuấn), finds herself disconcertingly attracted to Tư Đạp (Thu Anh Hồ), a mysterious mechanic who arrives alongside the news that their team has been infiltrated by a spy.
Actors playing soldiers haven’t been covered in as much dirt as the cast in this film. Bùi’s dedication to depicting the realities and conditions of the war unfolding in the tunnel and the fully-embodied perspective of the guerrilla underground makes Tunnels a compelling entry in the canon of war films. The movements of the fighters are particularly vivid: every actor in the film crawls through mud in extended sequences as they navigate paths to strike back at the invaders. Above their heads, the destructive nature of napalm bombs is rendered in all its horrific capacity, licking its way through rivers and incinerating forests. When the bombs fall, the wooden planks and structures that prop the tunnels up shudder. Caverns tremble as dirt falls like brown snow, blanketing the sparse kitchen, living space, and upturned cutlery. And, of course, the fiery passion of desire and the revolutionary spirit that spurs Tư Đạp into appropriating undetonated explosives for increasingly effective weapons against the invaders eventually results in an intersection of climaxes between the battlefield and a pair of lovers. During a particularly harrowing sequence, Ba Hương and Tư Đạp finally find themselves alone, seeking shelter under a table to finally consummate their love as debris falls around them.
Generating nostalgia
Contemporary Singapore films never stray far from nostalgia. Kopitiam Days takes it one step further into the future by using AI to generate its yellow-tinted poster: a typical backdrop of a kopitiam completed with grimy tiles; red Monobloc chairs; and the kaya toast and soft-boiled eggs with kopi of a breakfast set. AI replicating its aura indicates how thoroughly we have perfected the craft of nostalgia. The Ministry of Digital Development and Information (MDDI) must have been pleased to no end, with the resulting film aligning with its efforts to become AI thought leaders.
Succeeding the SG50 anthology 7 Letters (2015), which also shares co-producers Fran Borgia and Tan Fong Cheng and is supported again by the MDDI, Kopitiam Days celebrates “Singaporean-ness” in the 60th year of Singapore, once again bringing the shiniest directors of the decade together: Yeo Siew Hua (A Land Imagined, 2018), M. Rihan Halim (La Luna, 2023), Tan Siyou (Amoeba, 2025), and Ong Kuo Sin (Number 1, 2010) alongside rising filmmakers Shoki Lin (Chasing Paper, 2019) and Don Aravind (Silk, 2020).
Beginning with a wuxia love story, the film attempts to situate the small neighborhood coffee shop to a microcosm that charts changes in society through different meals. Most of the shorts that center the kopitiam as a set or reference seem too eager to give into the Chinese New Year films that cater to the “general” Chinese nuclear family. Others rhapsodize about how the chairs scraping across humid-slick floors create an inimitable sound or give into racial tropes.
The centrality of a kopitiam for an anthology is quite puzzling: many small neighborhood kopitiams have narrow menus that cannot cater to the multiple dietary restrictions across Singapore’s diverse communities, which makes the centering of the coffee shop as a hive of activity tenuous. The further we get away from the coffee shop, the more compelling the stories become, with the most noteworthy of them being Lin’s Meet Me At The Pavilion about an amateur opera troupe singer’s struggles in identifying with her character’s lovesickness. Raihan Halim’s iZ-1, highlighting a makcik’s (auntie’s) friendship with a Baymax-like caretaker robot, is equally charming. In both stories, the kopitiam barely appears, save for brief scenes where the characters drink coffee.
Film lecturer and master of short Super 8 films (One Day in Lim Chu Kang, 2022, and Kristin dan Kuching Kuchingnya, 2023), Michael Kam’s debut feature The Old Man and His Car presents a surprising deviation from this model in more ways than one. Far from chasing state funding, Kam made the independent film on a shoestring budget of $50,000, proposing an alternative structure of filmmaking in Singapore where budgets for independent productions begin at $200,000 to $1 million SGD. Set in one of the oldest estates in the country—Tanglin Halt, whose older flats have been designated for demolition—, the film follows Hock (Lim Kay Tong) as he sells his belongings in preparation to migrate and join his son in Canada. He’s unable to part with a fantastic vintage Mercedes sedan in champagne gold.
Many plot holes are left unaddressed, such as the use of Super 8 footage from Kam’s personal archives to stand in for Hock’s family without sufficient background as to why his memories are in Super 8 (if he were a home movie enthusiast, then he should have cameras lying around). Furthermore, the reason for his attachment to his car is revealed too late in the film, which just makes it all feel a little too manipulative. While there isn’t a need to provide backstory for Hock’s rudeness, that decision flattens June, a potential buyer and unlikely friend played by Kristin Tiara, into that trope of a kinder, queer and non-Chinese person who is around primarily to perform the emotional labor of aiding the protagonist in their journey. But I can’t shake off the fantastic performance by Tiara, who anchors the heart of the film, or the image of one of Singapore’s most celebrated actors cycling and smiling at the end, finally having parted with his car. From one Singaporean to another, here’s a proposition on how to move forward without nostalgia: simply let it go.
Stayed tuned for Part 2. Coming soon.