Passage of Life

Phuong, An, and Nhu are Vietnamese women in their early 20s. The three become illegal residents in Japan after escaping from their workplace as technical trainees. An contacts a broker to help them find work. The broker takes them to a fisherman's ice-covered hut where they can stay in exchange for labour. They are happy because, as well as finding a job, they have also doubled their salary. As they start their work, Phuong suddenly falls, stricken with severe pain. Worried, An and Nhu take Phuong to a hospital, but they are refused admission for not having an ID card.

Coco, a Beijing modern girl wants to spend a romantic and fancy Christmas vacation in Osaka. However the place where she gets in is Shinsekai ( "New World" in English, is an old neighbourhood located next to south Osaka city's downtown "Minami " area, as known as one of the most poorest and dangerous area in Osaka.)When she arrives there, she starts feeling regret and frustrated by the encounters and the landscapes which are far beyond her expectation. Suddenly she is involved in an incident surrounds a Chinese family there, meanwhile she starts fascinated by Shinsekai through her wondering. In this short and unusual Christmas vacation, Coco discovers a "Japan " she never knows and a "China" that she is not familiar with.

In the hope of reuniting with their scattered family, four-year-old Shafi and his nine-year-old sister Somira leave a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh on a perilous journey to reach Malaysia.

It is impossible to comprehensively map the ultimate extent of the damage wrought by the waves of the corona pandemic in all the layers of the society. It does not, however, require a lot of guesswork to see the links between the steeply increased numbers of corona patients, domestic violence cases and OnlyFans users.

Myanmar-based director Fujimoto returns after his documentary-like feature drama Passage of Life (JC 2018) with an affective, drama-like documentary. The local Zomi people of the Chin State in western Myanmar dig to recover the remnants of 30,000 Japanese soldiers who fell in the “Battle of Imphal” 75 years ago—a form of daily labor for the Zomi that is complicated by the fact that many Burmese people died in the battle fighting for the Japanese. In this Japanese-Myanmar co-production, Fujimoto trains the camera to unravel the multiple perspectives and consider the act of digging up bones as both a metaphysical and physical act of reconciliation.