Merciless Shores: Edmund Yeo's AQÉRAT (WE, THE DEAD)

"Do we know where each person came from, and why, 

And from which unfriendly land?" 

-Shimen Nepom 

In the most tragic sense, the arrival of Edmund Yeo's second feature film on the worldwide festival circuit this year couldn't be more timely. The Malaysian filmmaker, now 33, wrote the screenplay for Aqérat (We, the Dead) back in 2015 when the brutal hardships suffered by the Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar's Rakhine state, brought about by a sickening nation-wide ethnic cleansing initiative, hadn't yet made international headlines. He based his story on the shocking discovery of mass graves in northern Malaysia where the bodies of over two hundred Rohingya refugees, buried by Malaysian human traffickers, were discovered. Now, the plight facing the persecuted ethnic group has reached the status of international crisis, with over 800,000 Rohingya Muslims escaping the violence aimed against them in Myanmar to Bangladesh, where they face overcrowded conditions and dwindling supplies of clean water in vast refugee camps, while those refugees who made it to India are being considered for deportation by the Indian Supreme Court on the grounds of their alleged status as illegal immigrants and "a serious national security threat." As of November 12th, 2017, it was reported that the Rohingya exodus was visible from space – a grave underlining of its status as one of the worst global humanitarian emergencies in recent memory. 

Aqérat, its title being the Rohingya word for "life after death," focuses on Malaysia's complicity in this troubling situation from the perspective of Hui Ling (Daphne Low), a character Yeo introduced in his 2014 feature debut River of Exploding Durians. That film chronicles the formative journeys the young Hui Ling and two of her secondary school classmates undertake from the safe, comforting havens of adolescence towards a greater understanding of their new roles in the politically- and economically-ruled arenas of the wide world, achieved through hands-on engagements with terrible events from Asia's recent past (via a series of arresting classroom presentations), a passion for books and faith in stories, tentative forays into activism, protest, and even vandalism, and disturbing confrontations with violence, imprisonment, and death. The film's main plot arc concerns the relationship between Hui Ling and her history instructor Teacher Lim (Zhu Zhi-Ying), whose paths, initially brought together by their shared concern regarding the controversial construction of a nearby rare earth processing plant, just as quickly begin to fracture and diverge from one another over their debates about the effectiveness of peaceful protest and, for Teacher Lim, the growing need for more extreme action in order to bring about meaningful social change. A haunting dream sequence in which Hui Ling shields a younger version of herself from burning pages, rising flames, and crumbling debris within the abandoned mansion where Teacher Lim's radical group convenes suggests the lingering presence of psychic wounds from past traumas while her connection with her increasingly fanatical mentor shows her the dangers of venturing too far into the shadowy realm of political extremism. In this respect, and especially now in relation to Aqérat and its continuation of Hui Ling's journey, River of Exploding Durians acts as a kind of origin story for Hui Ling, illustrating her preparation to leave the safe spaces of home and school behind and enter the world as an informed political being. Aqérat chronicles the next step, in which Hui Ling must now fight to survive and learn, through hard-won experience, to carry herself through the world as a moral being. 

Agnes Wang and Daphne Low in Aqérat (We, the Dead)

When we catch up to Hui Ling in Aqérat, she is living and working in the northern state of Kelantan near the Thai-Malaysian border, and all but the faintest traces of the idealistic young student we met in River of Exploding Durians have vanished, replaced by a toughened, no-nonsense, mostly silent young woman who has learned how to look after herself (with this film, her third and greatest collaboration with Yeo, Low reaches an exciting new threshold of natural ability as an actor). Whatever importance her late teacher's books and beliefs may have held for her, they have now been either forgotten or cast aside in favor of a focused determination to save up enough money to relocate to Taiwan. She nearly reaches her goal working as a server at a small roadside restaurant only to have her stash suddenly stolen by her treacherous roommate (Agnes Wang). Desperate to regain her finances as quickly as possible, Hui Ling becomes involved with a shady group of men who traffic Rohingya refugees into Malaysia and force their family members to pay outrageous sums for their passage - or suffer terrible violence when they can't make their payments. She witnesses the arrival of boats carrying scared, weary-looking people, takes pictures and shoots footage of them when ordered, sees the dead bodies of travelers who didn't survive the voyage. At one point she is even told to help herself to whatever she finds on one body lying underneath a bloody tarp; reluctantly, she takes a wallet full of cash, a cell phone, a tiny photograph of a young child. Inevitably, Hui Ling becomes increasingly disturbed by the steady flow of brutality and suffering that she witnesses and takes part in, even after she tries to teach herself to be sufficiently cold enough to carry out her wicked work. The channels and trenches of darkness she travels through run deep, threatening the flame of goodness that still flickers within her. Will her passage cost her too much? 

Aqérat finds Yeo appropriately modifying his style to suit the graveness of the situations his characters face; the film, amazingly shot on location in a mere twelve days with a crew of under twenty during the monsoon season, feels noticeably leaner, rawer, more naturalistic and fast-paced than any of his previous works, operating as a brisk, in medias res action film of continuous motion and movement through intoxicatingly rendered environments. Even in its quieter moments, the film crackles with a persistent tension, periodically amplified by regular Yeo collaborator Wong Woan Foong's spare, experimental score, a nervous procession of rattles and creaks, dissonant chimes, and the loose jangling of fraught strings. The arrival of physical violence in Yeo's world as he moved from the impressive run of short films he made between 2008 and 2014 to feature films was a sign of his progression in maturity and confidence – a brave willingness to raise the stakes in his cinematic universe, address the darker aspects of the contemporary world, and engage with more dramatic story material. He deployed it in just a few bursts of shock and tragedy in River of Exploding Durians, then adjusted his technique to make it more frequent, nasty, and rough in Aqérat. In this respect, along with the film's close focus on its heroine, the barrage of hardships she must face to ensure her safety and survival, and her harrowing immersion into a ruthless economic machine that turns vulnerable human beings into crude units of monetary value, Aqérat makes a strong impression as a companion piece to Woo Ming Jin's The Tiger Factory (2010), the gripping exposé on the underground trade in newborn infants that Yeo edited and co-wrote with his longtime friend and creative partner. While seeming to channel that film's fast-paced momentum and close proximity to realism, Yeo also somehow successfully manages to weave his trademark visual sumptuousness into his new film's grim proceedings, working with director of photography Lesly Leon Lee to plant Hui Ling in a lush, earthy realm of cool blues, velvety shadows, and emerald greens dominated by creeping amassments of leaves, branches, and vines that surround the winding jungle roads and wind-swept sand banks dotted with impossibly tall palm trees – a humid, hazardous alien world through which both Hui Ling and the silent, fleeing refugees pass. 

Daphne Low in Aqérat (We, the Dead)

Following the late arrival of its title card some fifty-seven minutes in – a move that, along with dialogue addressing the Burmese immigrants also making their way into the country, invokes the spirit of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Blissfully Yours (2002) – Aqérat briefly crosses into the dream-like fable territory of Ingmar Bergman and Hiroshi Teshigahara with the story of Wei (Howard Hon Kahoe), a hospital worker whose encounter with Hui Ling reawakens his memories of a young woman (Ruby Yap) and her mysterious, bandage-covered sister (Daphne Low). Yet despite this beguiling, romantically charged detour, the film's central focus never falls too far from sight: in one scene, a distressed colleague (Andy Darrel Gomes) tells Wei of a mistreated Rohingya woman who now haunts his dreams while, shortly later, Wei himself risks his life to help Hui Ling as she tries to ensure an escaped group of child refugees don't fall back into the hands of the menacing traffickers. 

The diverse selection of languages spoken throughout Aqérat - Malay, Thai, Hokkien, Cantonese, Mandarin – further builds upon Yeo's longstanding fascination with the intricate multiculturalism of 21st-century Asia, explored to such great effect in his short films, which has in turn led him to critique with increasing persistence the prejudicial nature of Malaysian politics and culture that places preference on the Malay portion of the population while pushing the less-favored ethnic groups such as Chinese and Indians to pursue more accommodating living conditions and avenues of opportunity abroad, as Yeo's characters do in Inhalation (2010), River of Exploding Durians, and Aqérat (and as Yeo, himself a Malaysian Chinese, did when he went to live in Australia and Japan in the 2000s for school and work). But Aqérat paints an even fuller picture of the global migration crisis now reaching heightened levels of complexity and severity in the Asian region, with the conditions pressuring Hui Ling and her Malaysian Chinese counterparts to leave Malaysia for Japan, Taiwan, or Singapore forming one angle of the issue, those forcing the Rohingya to look for new homes in Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, and beyond forming yet another. Of the latter, the resulting shockwaves of widespread horror and collateral opportunistic corruption that have spread to Yeo's own countrymen are brought to light by the unflinching attention he and his collaborators have brought to their work, their fine efforts having produced a compelling artistic statement, at once a feverish reverie, an intense sensory rush, a tender poem to the possibility of love even in the most unlikely surroundings, and a moral quest journey that leads right to the brink of a consuming, potentially unending cycle of hate and harm, the reality of which driven home by the film's chilling final shot. With the force of a typhoon and solemnity of a whispered prayer, Aqérat is a sincere plea for awareness and compassion towards those less fortunate than us - an urgent reminder for us to keep our humanity in check for as long as the storms of strife persist. 

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Aqérat (We, the Dead), a Pocket Ideas-Greenlight Pictures coproduction represented by Good Move Media, had its world premiere at the 30th Tokyo International Film Festival (2017), where it earned Edmund Yeo the Best Director prize and lead actress Daphne Low a Tokyo Gemstone Award, a new prize recognizing four up-and-coming actors and actresses featured in the festival selection. Aqérat most recently screened at the Singapore International Film Festival and Indonesia's Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival, and is set to next appear at India's International Film Festival of Kerala (Dec. 8th-15th, 2017).

Out of Sync: Takuya Fukushima's MODERN LOVE

Azusa Inamura in Modern Love

A mysterious new planet called Emanon, three overlapping parallel universes, a secret country, and a grotesquely realistic brain replica are only the more surreal components of Takuya Fukushima's spellbinding new feature film Modern Love. The multi-talented Japanese writer and director first grabbed my attention years ago with his 2009 film Our Brief Eternity, which similarly blends science fiction elements (in that film's case, an amnesia-inducing global epidemic) into a nuanced story about love and generational malaise within a circle of disillusioned thirtysomethings in contemporary Tokyo. True to both its title and Fukushima's proven aptitude for rendering the complex emotional states that pervade and are further complicated by the world in which we live, Modern Love smoothly continues his unique sensibilities into the present-day landscape of dating apps, one-night stands, texts, and the omnipresent influence of screens and phones, only to highlight the timeless longevity of true love. 

"Timeless," however, might not be the term Fukushima's heroine Mika (Azusa Inamura), who is working on her Master's degree in theoretical physics, would use to describe the predicament she finds herself in when she begins to experience unexpected jumps into parallel worlds that closely resemble her own, taking her back into skipping sequences of previously-lived events that hit her like unexplained waves of déjà vu. Time, for her, thus becomes multiplied, confounded, and bunched up over itself, forcing her to experience three different time tracks of her life and even interact with three different versions of herself. These physics-defying occurrences may be due to the increasing influence the new planet Emanon (also the name of the cryptic memory disease in Our Brief Eternity) is exerting upon the Earth as it rapidly expands, or they may have something to do with the bizarre brain figure a client gives to Mika at the travel agency where she works after she tries to help him book a trip to someplace called Agartha. Either way, as Mika gets pulled further into the temporal distortions rippling through her life, she becomes transfixed by the reappearance of her lover Teru (Takuro Takahashi) in one of the three time tracks, whereas in the other two (including the plane she knows as her own version of reality), he killed himself, yet lives on within her in the form of a disembodied voice that pipes up at unexpected moments. 

Just as the Emanon virus in Our Brief Eternity gave that film's characters the chance to re-live their romantic relationships with one another, the time travel phenomenon that seizes Mika in Modern Love allows her the opportunity to fall in love with Teru all over again – while, more agonizingly, the other two Mikas can only watch and long for the man they loved and lost in their own worlds. But rather than giving in to grief, jealousy, or confusion as time continues to loop and repeat around her/them, all three Mikas vow to work together to make sense of the strange events occurring around them and do their best to save Teru from whatever fate lies in store for him. 

Azusa Inamura in Modern Love

Fukushima keeps his mind-bending odyssey firmly grounded by sticking close to lead actors Inamura and Takahashi, whose chemistry with one another and respective acting talents lend Mika and Teru refreshing measures of depth, charm, and personality. Modern Love is carried along by the reverberating soundwaves of a lively score from the band Toruko-Ishi and Hiroyuki Kawahara of floating mosque that subtly elevates the film's creeping paranoia and cosmic intrigue while Mika and her friends' frequent visits to Roppongi's VARIT. music venue allow Fukushima to feature such bands as Dead Lennons, Glow and the forest, and DieByForty (by way of 350showcase, an ongoing concert series highlighting Tokyo's thriving underground music scene) both onscreen and on the soundtrack, keeping the proceedings charged with robust blasts of raw punk-rock energy. The film's final act sends Mika to the shores and hills of Agartha itself – in reality the port town of Cadaqués, Spain – where she finds a welcoming, communal gathering of fellow far-flung souls and, finally, an unexpected solution to her long, strange search to save the man she loves more than anything else in her life. 

As seen in Our Brief Eternity, Modern Love, and his 2016 short Legacy Time, Fukushima is accustomed to strategically introducing large-scale calamitous events into the "normal," mundane flow of everyday life in his films to get his characters to stop, take a close look at themselves, and consider deep, serious questions about what they are living and working for and who they truly love – if anyone at all. But though he enjoys playing with apocalyptic scenarios, Fukushima is ultimately no doomsday cynic, and time and time again (no pun intended), he presents love as a true and real force to take strength and solace from – even in the face of memory-altering diseases, inexplicable disappearances, anomalies that stretch the boundaries of space and time, or, simply, the stifling melancholia of contemporary life. In his newest adventure, he reaffirms his faith in the future despite the shortcomings of the present, putting forth love as that crucial element that can break through the mundane surfaces and mystifying currents of our modern age and restore some measure of hope and meaning.

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Modern Love was produced by Takuya Fukushima's production company P-kraft. 

Pieces of Mind: Bruce McDonald's THE TRACEY FRAGMENTS

Ellen Page in The Tracey Fragments

In his 2007 adaptation of Maureen Medved's 1998 novel The Tracey Fragments, working from a screenplay by the author herself, Bruce McDonald lays bare the turbulent inner world of an angry fifteen-year-old girl in spectacular, kaleidoscopic fashion. It now having been a full decade since its release, the film remains shockingly underappreciated even among in-the-know cinephiles despite its many remarkable attributes, the most integral and ingenious of which being McDonald's bold strategy of meticulously arranging the thoughts, sights, sounds, and events of Tracey Berkowitz's life into a fractured, relentlessly busy mosaic of images of varying shapes and sizes, forging a sense of restless fluidity that pushes and pulls the viewer through a wild flurry of events, actions, and sensations. In lesser hands, the end result might have proven to be too gimmicky, alienating, challenging, or abstract for viewers to fully appreciate or absorb – and that may still very well be the case for some with the film that exists today, given how dramatically it estranges itself from conventional storytelling methods. But where some will surely see off-putting pretension or needless convolution, others will find a fresh burst of aesthetic originality that operates according to its own peculiar logic, working to draw them deep into the emotionally devastating passages of Tracey's life. 

From the very first time I saw it, I considered The Tracey Fragments to be nothing short of revelatory. I firmly stand by that assessment to this day, reinforced by multiple viewings and many hours spent contemplating its myriad twists, turns, and techniques. At the 2007 Berlin Film Festival, it was awarded the Manfred Salzgeber Prize "for an innovative film that broadens the boundaries of cinema" – one of the only signs of recognition, official or otherwise, of the film's incredible formal innovations that I've been able to detect, much to my dismay. While the multi-image format, previously used in narrative films like Mike Figgis' Timecode (2000) and Hans Canosa's Conversations with Other Women (2005), might have easily appealed to a filmmaker like Jean-Luc Godard for one of his far-reaching forays into philosophical and theoretical territories – or better yet, one of his intense examinations of the moving image – McDonald and his editors Gareth C. Scales and Jeremiah Munce (who is also credited for the film's conceptual design) instead harness the raw expressive power and freedom of this approach to craft an immersive, emotionally volatile experience wholly dedicated to its young heroine. Ellen Page, who shot to stardom that same year thanks to the popularity and success of Jason Reitman's warm indie charmer Juno (2007), inhabits the role of Tracey Berkowitz with passionate energy and commitment, without which The Tracey Fragments might indeed have come across as an off-puttingly hollow experiment in form. But this is a film animated and driven by her performance, her ferocious intensity and feeling charging the film with fresh, startling life. While at certain points the maelstrom of images and sounds seems ruled by a sentient flow of poetic logic and association, the overall impression is ultimately that of a willful and fiercely intelligent young woman taking charge of her own story by way of intensely personal voiceover narration and confrontational monologues directly addressed to the viewer that blow away all traces of the fourth wall. Tracey's story may bring to mind such other gritty female coming-of-age films as Mouchette (1967), Rosetta (1999), and Fish Tank (2009), yet those works consistently maintain a measure of distance and detachment from their main characters, who are patiently observed and followed by their directors' watchful cameras, but never really given the chance to illustrate for themselves their own stories or the pained inner psyches that dictate their actions save for what we see onscreen. The Tracey Fragments, in stark contrast, fully dives into the dense mindscape from which Tracey's lingering fixations flow onto the screen in rich, expressive torrents of information, her words guiding us through the paths of regret, rage, pain, and longing that follow her wherever she goes. "How do you know what's real and what's not when the whole world is inside your head?" she asks. 

Ellen Page in The Tracey Fragments

For Tracey, that world is a deeply insular place, stacked with mesmerizing repetitions and echoes of faces, voices, lines, sounds, settings, gestures, and events that come back again and again to haunt her like stubborn ghosts. She finds temporary refuge from the storms both within and around her (many times, she is warned of the threat of an approaching blizzard) at the back of a city bus, where she sits, alone, weary, and naked under a "fucked up" shower curtain decorated with lurid green and pink blossoms against a field of white. In an ongoing search to find her missing little brother Sonny (Zie Souwand), she is headed no place in particular – she simply sits and rides through a bleak winter landscape of dirty snowbanks, impoverished neighborhoods, and shabby storefronts, streetlights dimly glowing against stark skies painted melancholy shades of blue, white, grey, pitch-black. Here, the special gloominess so particular to the seamy downtown cores and barren industrialized areas that dot the Canadian landscape in-between its vast expanses of highway and wilderness is captured particularly accurately (the film is set in Winnipeg and was shot there and in Toronto and Hamilton, Ontario). Steadily, as the stream of images begins first as a trickle, then a swelling rush, we become rapidly acquainted with the details that contributed to Tracey's distressing predicament: a home life devoid of affection where her mother and father's tense auras of resentment, bitterness, and depression fill the cocoon-like, orange- and yellow-hued rooms of their house like noxious fumes; the hellish trials of bullying at school where Tracey is mercilessly harassed by her bratty peers in the icy glare of blue- and white-lit hallways and classrooms; the series of frustratingly inconsequential psychiatric sessions with her therapist Dr. Heker (played by a cross-dressing Julian Richings). A new arrival at her school, a punkish dreamboat named Billy Zero (Slim Twig) sends Tracey into blissful fantasies of him taking her away on a motorcycle down the school corridors, while what few signs of actual kindness shown towards Tracey come from Sonny, whom, before his disappearance, she accidentally hypnotizes into thinking he is a dog. Though, sure enough, he spends most of his screen time barking and scampering around on the ground, we see his human self in one crucial flashback to a particularly glum birthday party where he gives his older sister a necklace – perhaps the nicest thing anyone has ever given her, a rare, precious gift of kindness that, like so much else, is ripped away from her, only to reappear again and again (as does Sonny's sky-blue winter coat and knit red hat) within the inventory of reoccurring objects and signs that pepper the film's image field like bits of debris blown from the wreckage of her past life. 

The proudly irreverent voice that made Bruce McDonald the rebel hero of Canadian cinema with such tough-yet-tender cult classics as Roadkill (1989), Highway 61 (1991), and Hard Core Logo (1996) comes through loud and clear here in a thrilling new form, his rock 'n' roll sensibility nicely revamped for the 21st century by way of a score by Broken Social Scene (this particular iteration of the Canadian music collective consisting of Brendan Canning, Charles Spearin, and Damon Richardson, including Liz Powell on vocals in a rousing cover of Patti Smith's "Horses") and an eclectic soundtrack featuring Fembots, Deadly Snakes, Rose Melberg, Peaches, and Duchess Says. On the visual front, McDonald thrives upon the freedom and raw, expressive beauty of the digital arsenal at his command (in a manner not unlike David Lynch at certain points), embracing the unpolished roughness of the images that map out the drab settings through which Tracey wanders. Weaving together a hallucinatory dreamscape, The Tracey Fragments incorporates resolution lines, shapes and figures that blur in and out of focus, superimpositions, slow motion, freeze-frames, graphic novel panels (sampled from Chester Brown's Ed the Happy Clown), and playfully satirical facsimiles of teen television series and magazine covers in hilariously on-point jabs at celebrity mania into the gritty realism of seedy bars, filthy alleyways, shadowy tunnels, and creepily desolate rural areas. As she continues her desperate quest to find Sonny (more a journey of penance than a practical search), Tracey becomes increasingly lost in a dangerous underworld populated by outcasts, wanderers, and sinister characters who drink $2 beers at odd hours in the morning in dingy rat holes, who take refuge from approaching blizzards in dilapidated apartments with broken windows and worn carpeting. Weathering vicious waves of despair and defeat, abandonment and heartbreak, she drifts increasingly closer to a breaking point that threatens to rip away the last of her sanity. Whatever will become of her, we are left to wonder, shattered in our seats by the film that has just ripped across our screens like a ferocious storm unto itself. And we also can't help but wonder, whatever will become of all the other Traceys out there – all those street kids and homeless youth with stories too similar to hers, still out there in the cold and the dark, just like her? 

The Tracey Fragments is a raw, devastating film, delivering an infinitely rich barrage of searing poetry and prose quite unlike anything I've encountered in any medium. The girl at its core is as inseparable from the courageous actress who plays her as she is from the dazzlingly complex film before us; she essentially is the film. When we see it, we see Tracey Berkowitz, age fifteen, caught in a tight gauntlet of adolescence that might as well be laden with razor wire and broken glass. But though she suffers, she still endures, persistent and determined –  to survive, to be heard, to hold on to those fragments of life still dear to her, to keep moving no matter what, until she finally reaches some safe haven, some measure of peace. "No one can stop me," she tells us in the serene final moments of her film. "No one can make me stand still."