‘Exploring’ features the filmographies of filmmakers that I’ve largely completed and celebrates them on the week of their birthdays.
Exploring #17: Edward Yang
Author / Eternality Tan
Living the Land (2025)
Winner of Best Director at the Berlinale, this assured work about growing up in a Chinese village in 1991 as the winds of modernity begin to change lives, reminds one of a cross between Zhang Yimou’s early rural dramas and Yang’s Yi Yi.
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Match Factory Girl, The (1990)
Arguably Kaurismaki’s bleakest film, this portrait of a woman trapped in work and domestic monotony spirals into quiet doom and gloom as she contemplates a drastic action.
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No Other Choice (2025)
Park channels detestation, deception and anxiety into this slick and entertaining, if somewhat protracted, black comedy about a family man who loses his cushy job and thus must devise a nefarious plan to eliminate his competition to get the new job he so desires.
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Watermelon Woman, The (1996)
The first-ever feature made by a Black lesbian filmmaker, this deceptively smart auto-fictive engagement with the ‘absence’ of Black film history and personal identity asks us to recognise the voices that are missing in the age-old narratives that have come to pass.
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My Night at Maud’s (1969)
Rohmer’s Oscar-nominated international breakthrough sees a reticent Catholic man navigate Pascal’s wager, sexual temptation and self-doubt during a wintry night of talk with a seductive divorcee, shot in striking black-and-white by Nestor Almendros.
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Cape Fear (1991)
A rapist released from prison hatches a nefarious plan to desecrate the family of the lawyer who ruined him in Scorsese’s disturbing and intense Hitchcockian take on vengeance, control and submission, a studio remake of the 1962 original.
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Death in Venice (1971)
A tale of beauty and decay, Visconti’s cinematic requiem for Thomas Mann sees Dirk Bogarde, in a quiet, despairing performance, playing an ageing composer obsessed with the perfect looks of a teenage boy, accompanied generously by Mahler’s heart-aching ‘Adagietto’.
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One Battle After Another (2025)
PTA’s tour de force, operatic long-arc film not only sets a new tone for studio filmmaking but ‘bobbles’ with such incredible airtight momentum that it oscillates between absurdist comedy and high-stakes action-thriller with effortless ease, as a man is haunted by the consequences of his past political actions.
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Love Hotel (1985)
Somai shoots this artful Nikkatsu Roman Porno effort with trademark long takes, fusing eroticism with a sense of fate and lingering despair in the sexual encounters between a suicidal man and a woman prostituting herself for the first time.
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