Curated by Kunal Chandra this season brings together a selection of Asian films where folklore and myth intersect with transgressive dimensions of desire, revealing spaces that challenge our perceptions of desire and meaning making. Often signified by social upheavals and transitioning cultures, civilisations and traditions, these spaces create bridges between the fables of our past and visions for our future. Often, these bridges are evoked in films that challenge tradition through formal experimentation, explore liminal spaces between desire and denial, and embrace the chaotic collisions of traditions and desires.

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Mekong Hotel
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2012, 61 min

At once the portrait of a landmark and a poem of liminality, Mekong Hotel is, eponymously, set in a hotel overlooking the Mekong river. The river lies on the border of Thailand and Laos, once flooded with civil war refugees, now submerged in talks about floods in faraway Bangkok. In bedrooms and terraces, the actors play out scenes from a script about reincarnated lovers and folk spirits, reflecting on their worlds both as characters and performers. The film blends fact and fiction, spirits and humans, a flesh-eating ghost mother and her daughter, young lovers and the river, gently weaving together waves of demolition, politics, and a floating desire of the future. Using characters constantly transitioning between the real and unreal, Apichatpong contemplatively embraces the liminal, and reconstructs the dreams and darkest desires of a civilisation and its future.

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Diary of a Shinjuku Thief
Nagisa Oshima, 1969, 96 min

Responding to Japan's radical student movements and the general climate of social upheaval, Oshima draws upon the transgressive writings of Jean Genet, the Tokyo folk experimental-theatre scene, and documentary footage of recent student riots to create an artful chaotic portrait of disruptive desire. Much like the Left Bank in Paris, or the Greenwich village in New York, the Shinjuku neighbourhood of Tokyo in the 60s was a melting pot for university students, artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers and experimental performers to coalesce into a revolutionary subculture. Oshima uses this setting as the canvas for his transgressive universe, introducing us to a young man who's caught by a salesgirl while trying to shoplift some books. The two develop a perverse attraction to one another, their deviant liaisons becoming the springboard for a provocatively experimental deep dive into theatrical artifice, social satire, unhinged surrealism and cultural subversions. In the process, Oshima creates a darkly comic mosaic of chaotic tomfoolery and desire, challenging us viewers to make sense of his carefully constructed confusion.

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Om Dar Babar
Kamal Swaroop, 1988, 101 min

To summarise the plot of Om Dar Badar is to attempt articulating the truly incomprehensible. Steering clear of the modernist collisions of meaning and desire, Kamal Swaroop spins an 'ism' denying prism of absurdly fragmented surrealisms, positing Indian society as intrinsically postmodernist, regardless of prevailing religious conservatisms and contradictory philosophical musings, or rather, because of it. On the face of it, the film is a portrait of life in Ajmer, Rajasthan, telling us the story of a boy named Om during his carefree adolescence, gifted with the skill of holding his breath for a long time. His father, Babuji, a government servant, leaves his government job to dedicate his life to astrology. His sister, with a sense of independence and agency, dates a spineless good for nothing. He studies science, but grows increasingly fascinated with magic and religion, visiting a fantasy city and taking a home close to a frog pond. Avowedly non-committal to any theme or plot, the film whimsically satirises the interspersing of Western concepts with Hindu religion, blending the sacred with the profane, the carnal with the divine, and antiquity with modernity. In doing so, it mocks the sacred pursuits of meaning and desire, weaving together an idiosyncratic pastiche of consciously contradictory nonsense. The kind of nonsense that happily subverts all cinematic expectations into a satirical anti-cinema of scientific and religious aphorisms, pseudo moralistic science fiction, pop mythologies and ingenuously purposeless musical numbers.

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Curated by Kunal Chandra, as part of an MA in Film Studies, Programming and Curation at the National Film and Television School