Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 17/10/2013)

Another pragmatic arrangement becomes more complex in the debuting Chloé Robichaud's Sarah Prefers to Run, as Sophie Desmarais only discovers that Jean-Sébastien Courchesne has genuine feelings for her after they contract a marriage of convenience to allow her to take up a scholarship at McGill University to pursue her dreams of becoming an athlete. Mother Hélène Florent wholly disapproves of the deception and it is only when Desmarais grows closer to fellow runner Geneviève Boivin-Roussy that she realises that she may be investing so heavily in sport to avoid having to confront the real problems in her life. The odd character breaks into a sprint in Claire Simon's hybrid docu-fiction, Gare du Nord, which combines a snapshot of the daily routine of the busy Parisian railway station with dramatic situations involving sociology doctoral student Reda Kateb, ailing academic Nicole Garcia (who is about to undergo a major operation), harassed estate agent Monia Chokri and TV presenter François Damiens, who is searching for his missing daughter.

Amat Escalante won the Best Director prize at Cannes for his third feature, Heli, which pulls no punches in depicting the fate of a car factory worker from the Guanajato region when he becomes embroiled in Mexico's brutal drugs war. Armando Espitia lives with wife Linda González and their infant son, as well as his ageing father and his 12 year-old sister, Andrea Vergara, who is besotted with army cadet Juan Eduardo Palacios, who is five years her senior. In a bid to finance their elopement, Palacios steals a stash of cocaine that had been earmarked for destruction as part of a government PR campaign and hides it in the family water tank. Espitia tries to do the right thing by disposing of the drugs. But his actions have dire consequences that are presented in the most unflinchingly graphic detail and enacted with startling authenticity by a non-professional cast. Debutant Diego Quemada-Diez similarly corrals an ensemble of first-timers for The Golden Dream, which follows a quartet of Guatemalan teenagers as they risk all for a new start in the United States. Karen Martínez disguises herself as a boy to make the journey less perilous, but travelling companions Brandon López, Carlos Chajon and Rodolfo Domínguez (an indigenous Indian who speaks no Spanish) feel no more secure in this gritty treatise on camaraderie in extremis.

Teamwork of a very different kind is celebrated by Juan José Campanella in Foosball, a 3-D animation from the director of the Oscar-winning The Secret in Their Eyes (2009), in which a single tear brings to life the players from a bar football pitch as they try to prevent their home town from being bulldozed to make way for the giant stadium and theme park that will finally enable famous footballer Grosso (Diego Ramos) exact his revenge on Amadeo (David Masajnik) for humiliating him in a table-top showdown when they were kids. Dwelling on the past prevents twentysomething Lisandro Rodríguez from moving on with his life after he is released from a psychiatric hospital in Santiago Loza's La Paz. It's never revealed what he did to hurt ex-girlfriends Pilar Gamboa and Lorena Vega, but he remains insecure, vulnerable and morose as he pops his pills, rides his motorbike and practices on a shooting range with father Ricardo Felix, who is less willing to indulge his son than overbearingly doting mother Andrea Strenitz, sweetly caring grandmother Beatriz Bernabe and quietly affectionate maid Fidelia Batallanos Michel, who works to support daughter Ivonne Maricel Batallanos and is becoming increasingly homesick for her large family back in Bolivia.

Rodríguez winds up finding his unexpected métier, but sound recordist Rodrigo Sánchez Mariño is never quite sure where he stands in Alejo Moguillansky's sophomore outing, The Parrot and the Swan. Initially, he is helping director Walter Jakob make a documentary about ballet dancers. But, when the alternative Krapp troupe arrive on the scene, Sánchez Mariño becomes entranced by lead dancer Luciana Acuña and, when they take a break from filming, he seeks to assuage the pain of a recent break-up by making an unsubtle play for her. However, when she suddenly disappears, he is left with something of a dilemma. Being left alone also gives 12 year-old Maria Luiza Tavares a new perspective on life in Marcelo Lordello's They'll Come Back. Dumped in the middle of nowhere with older brother Geórgio Kokkosi for squabbling in the back of the car, Tavares is confident their parents will come back and collect them. But, when Kokkosi also fails to return from the gas station, she is forced to make her own way back to the Brazilian city of Recife and learns about how the other half live from her encounters with cleaning lady Mauricéia Conceição and family friend Irma Brown.

Another pair of siblings end up wiser for their experiences in Ana Guevara Pose and Leticia Jorge Romero's beautifully judged So Much Water, as 14 year-old Malú Chouza and younger brother Joaquín Castiglioni are swept away from Montevideo to the northern Uruguayan spa town of Salto by corpulent chiropractor father Néstor Guzzini for a waterlogged holiday that only starts to improve when Castiglioni befriends a kid from an adjoining chalet (Valentino Muffolini) and Chouza hooks up with flighty blonde Sofía Azambuya in the hope of pairing off with scooter-riding Pedro Duarte and his cousin, Andrés Zunini. Full of sly insights into the relationship between a divorcé and the kids he barely knows, while also wallowing in the endless hours of having to make your own entertainment when rain stops play, this is a must for anyone who has endured an interminable childhood vacation. Ten year-old Anina Yatay Salas (Federica Lacaño) makes a few discoveries of her own in Alfredo Soderguit's Anina, a computer animation that follows what happens when our heroine gets into a playground fight with arch enemy Yisel (Lucía Parrilla) and is given an eccentric punishment by the principal (Cristina Morán), who gives each girl a black envelope they are not allowed to open for a week. Yet, while she is terrified by the fate that might await her, Anina comes to learn about friendship, rivalry, secrets and love while experiencing some lively adventures.

Mariana Rondón presents a nine year-old's struggle to find his true identity against the decline in Venezuelan living standards in Bad Hair, which sees Caracas single mother Samantha Castillo become a cleaner after she loses her job as a security guard for an unspecified infraction. She could do without Samuel Lange complaining about his curls and grandma Nelly Ramos encouraging his nascent homosexuality by teaching him about 60s singing icon Henry Stephen. So, she sets out to re-educate the boy, while he plots with fellow outsider María Emilia Sulbarán how to straighten his hair in time for the school photo. Paulina García excels as another woman striving to find her niche while trying to cope with the emotional insecurities of others in Sebastián Lelio's Gloria. Divorced from Alejandro Goic for 13 years and more distant than ever from adult children Fabiola Zamora and Diego Fontecilla, García remains a regular on the Santiago singles scene, even though she is rapidly approaching 60. She has high hopes when she meets softly spoken Sergio Hernández at the disco and tumbles into bed with him. But he has only been divorced a year and wants to take things slowly, as not only is he recovering from gastric bypass surgery, but he is also too scared to tell his needy daughters about his new romance in case they disapprove.

Chile may be going through something of a cinematic golden age, but the country's best known directors remain Raúl Ruiz and Alejandro Jodorowsky. The latter enjoys cult status thanks to Fando y Lis (1967), El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973). But, as Frank Pavich reveals in Jodorowsky's Dune, he might have joined the blockbuster brigade when he secured the rights to Frank Herbert's sci-fi novel and sought to cast Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles and his own son Brontis in an adaptation that would have run 14 hours and boasted designs by Jean `Moebius' Girard and HR Giger and a score with contributions by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Magma, Henry Cow and Pink Floyd. Using original storyboards and sketches, Pavich not only tells the story of this glorious creative folly, but also animates key sequences to interpret Jodorowsky's vision.

The fact that Jafar Panahi continues to make films at all testifies both to his courage and his need to communicate with the wider world while remaining under a 20-year film-making ban imposed by the Iranian authorities. Filmed entirely at the director's three-storey beach house, Closed Curtains is a meditation on both prohibition and constrained creativity that reflects Panahi's own psychological state, as the depression he was experiencing prior to the shoot lifted as it progressed. Taking its cues from Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, the action focuses on screenwriter (and here co-director) Kambuzia Partovi, who comes to the coast with his dog in the hope of finding peace and inspiration. However, as Boy watches TV coverage of a round-up of `unclean' canines, Partovi is interrupted by siblings Maryam Moghadam and Hadi Saeedi, who demand sanctuary from the secret police after fleeing an illegal party. The supposedly suicidal Moghadam lingers after her brother leaves, but Partovi becomes concerned by discrepancies in her story and suspects she may be spying on him. By the time Panahi arrives on the scene, however, the villa is deserted and he is surrounded by posters of his films and the curtains shrouding his tall windows.

Panahi is not alone in being outlawed by Tehran and Mohammad Rasoulof, who was also arrested in 2009 for filming without a permit, returns with Manuscripts Don't Burn, an audacious political thriller which, in a candid bid to connect the Islamic Republic with Stalinist Russia, takes its title from a line in Mikhail Bulgakov's anti-Soviet satire The Master and Margarita. Drawing on a campaign that sought between 1988 and 1998 to eliminate opponents to the regime, the action was filmed in Iran and Germany (as Rasoulof has periodically lived in Hamburg since his release from prison) and was played by an uncredited cast. At its centre are Khosrow and Morteza, who are charged with tracking down a text inspired by an attempt to murder 21 poets by crashing their bus over a precipice. Khosrow had been the driver that day and he is worried that his past deeds are responsible for the fact his son needs hospital treatment he cannot afford. Morteza dismisses such concerns and puts his faith in Sharia law as the pair head into the northern mountains to dispose of Kian, a writer who has defied the threats of a bullying newspaper editor and remains loyal to his friends Fourouzadeh and Kasra, whose account of the coach incident is keenly sought by the authorities.

Hany Abu-Assad similarly seeks to reveal the human side of the Palestinian struggle in Omar, a tense drama replete with Shakespearean undertones that centres on baker Adam Bakri, who is so determined to impress high school student Leem Lubany that he agrees to help her militant brother, Ehab Hourani, and his livewire buddy Samer Bisharat kill an Israeli soldier. The shooting prompts swift Israeli reprisals, however, and Bakri is beaten and interrogated by IDF agent Waleed F. Zuaiter, who offers him freedom in return for betraying Hourani. Naturally, he refuses. But, when a plan to ambush soldiers in a café goes wrong, Bakri suspects there is a traitor in the camp and accepts Zuaiter's commission in the hope of smoking him out. Good intentions also lead to violence on the outskirts of Tel Aviv in the debuting Tom Shoval's Youth, as siblings David and Eitan Cunio seek to alleviate the financial pressure on unemployed middle-class father Moshe Ivgy and menial-working mother Shirili Deshe by using the 18 year-old David's army rifle to kidnap Eitan's classmate Gita Amely and demand a ransom from her wealthy parents. Exploring the effects of the recession and decades of embattlement upon Israeli society, this is a morally complex picture that refuses to condone or condemn the political and cultural climate that has spawned a new brands of machismo among the younger generation.

Although this is flecked with gallows humour, Cherien Dabis considerably lightens the mood in May in the Summer, in which she also stars as a Christian Arab-American returning to the Jordanian capital, Amman, to marry her Muslim boyfriend. The trouble is, mother Hiam Abbas wholly disproves of the match and Dabis is forced to consider her options after provocative encounters with sisters Nadine Malouf and Alia Shawkat, father Bill Pullman (who is now married to the much younger Ritu Singh Pande) and charming local Elie Mitri. However, the tone darkens again in Ladder to Damascus, which sees Syrian director Mohamed Malas return to cinema after a decade-long absence for the story of an aspiring actress (Najla El Wa'za) whose conviction that she is sharing her body with the spirit of a woman who drowned herself on the day she was born (Gianna Aanid) fascinates film-maker Bilal Martini.

Production of this enigmatically poetic film, which is filled with references to Arab writers and thinkers, as well as documentarist Omar Amiralay, was often halted by skirmishes in the ongoing Syrian power struggle and Ahmad Abdalla's Rags & Tatters was similarly affected by the ongoing civil unrest in Egypt. Set just before Hosni Mubarak stepped down in 2011, the action commences with a jail being flung open and Asser Yassin and seeks shelter in an abandoned shack with a wounded companion. Promising to deliver a letter and a phone to the man's wife, Yassin heads to Cairo promising to bring help. However, he barely recognises the city as armed gangs man checkpoints and he only just manages to get home to his family. Aware he is a fugitive, he moves on to spare them harassment and seeks refuge in a mosque before moving to the vast cemetery known as the City of the Dead. Hearing about attacks on Sufis and Christian Copts, Yassin tries to fulfil his mission and winds up in the infamous Ezbet El Zabbaleen district, which is populated by Christian rubbish collectors, who are held in contempt by the rest of the citizenry. Yassin gets the shocking footage on the phone to a news agency. But his concern for the stranger's family proves his undoing.

There is almost more song than dialogue in this contemplative and deeply moving picture and Hind Meddeb captures the new sound of Cairo in Electro Shaabi, which reveals how the likes of Oka, Ortega, Weza and MC Sadat are drowning out such established musical icons as Oum Kalthoum and Abdel Halim Hafez with furious cascades of drums, bass and electronic vocals that combine the spirit of punk with hip hop attitude, while also reflecting the confidence, conflicts and confusion besetting Egyptian youth. Further south, Angolan Kuduro music is also causing quite a stir and, in Off the Beaten Track, Portuguese director João Pedro Moreira travels between Luanda, Caracas, Paris, India, London and the Lisbon suburb of Amadora to profile Branko, Riot, Conductor, Kalaf and Blaya, who are collectively known as Buraka Som Sistema. Complete with illustrations by Kate Moross and plenty of previously unseen footage, this is a vital introduction to the electro ghettotech scene and its hottest combo.

Music also plays its part in The Rooftops, as Algerian auteur Merzak Allouache rises above the hubbub for a unique snapshot of daily life in the capital Algiers. Bookended by the first call to prayer and the muezzin's last chant, the five vignettes are set high above the city. First up, film-maker Salima Abada strays into Notre Dame d'Afrique to scout locations for her documentary, Algiers, Jewel of the Arab World, only to interrupt Mourad Khen as he tortures Mohamed Takiret for information about a crooked real estate deal. Moving in to Bab el-Oued, landlord Hamid Remas gets more than he bargained for when he comes to evict Nassima Belmihoub, drug-addled great nephew Djemil Adlan and his half-crazed mother Amal Kateb from their squat above an upmarket apartment block, while Rachid Benalal lives shackled in a wooden cage in the Cashbah and regales young Myriam Ait el Hadj with tales of his exploits in the War of Independence until he is silenced by radical preacher Kader Affak delivering a sermon in which he lauds Muammar Gaddafi as a Muslim martyr. Further downtown, Adila Bendimerad is appalled by her bandmates when they refuse to disrupt their rehearsal to help Meriem Medjkane, who has just been beaten by an unidentified man on a neighbouring terrace, and the treatment of women comes under further scrutiny in Belcourt, as Ahcene Benzerari rents a room from alcoholic Aissa Chouat in order to abuse Yasmine Abdelmoumen under the guise of offering her pastoral care.

The connection between poverty and crime is further examined by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun in Grisgris, which opens spectacularly with Soulémane Démé making light of a leg injury to strut his stuff on the floor of a N'Djamena disco and be richly rewarded by enthusiastic onlookers. Démé is a photographer by trade and has agreed to take some glamour shots for mixed-race prostitute Mariam Monory, who has ambitions to become a model. But when he is suddenly confronted with a sizeable medical bill after his uncle falls ill, Démé joins a petrol smuggling gang run by the ruthless Cyril Guei and he soon finds himself in grave danger. Events also threaten to engulf middle-class twins Thandie Newton and Anika Noni Rose in Biyi Bandele's Half of a Yellow Sun, an adaptation of a Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie bestseller that is set against the 1967-70 civil war that decimated the newly independent Nigeria and charts how the conflict impacts upon the estranged sisters, Newton's radical academic boyfriend Chiwetel Ejiofor, his teenage houseboy, John Boyega, and Rose's phlegmatic English lover Joseph Mawle. Chika Anadu brings things into the present in B for Boy, which follows the efforts of 39 year-old Uche Nwadili to disguise the fact that she has miscarried the son that husband Nonso Odogwu has been longing for and arrange for the adoption of a baby to coincide with her delivery date, while under pressure from a mother-in-law who is keen to invoke the Igbo tradition of discarding a wife unable to provide an heir.

Brillante Mendoza covers similar territory in Thy Womb, which is set on the Philippine island of Tawi-Tawi off the Borneo coast and turns on the efforts of infertile midwife Nora Aunor to find a second spouse for fisherman husband Bembol Roco so that he can have a son. As Muslim secessionists fight with government forces, the couple find themselves pursuing several false leads in the search for a new bride. Moreover, as Roco is no longer a young man, the interested families demand a sizeable dowry in return for their daughter and they have to make substantial sacrifices to raise the funds. Eventually, twentysomething Lovi Poe agrees to a match. But she drives a hard bargain that will prove devastating to the devoted Aunor. Making exceptional use of the distinctive hardscrabble setting, this may not be as combustible as some of Mendoza's earlier outings. But its attention to custom and ritual is as compelling as the socio-political comment in the margins, while the performances of Aunor and Roco (who both worked with Lino Brocka in the early days of Pinoy cinema) are poignant and persuasive.

In recent times, Lav Diaz has become one of the standard bearers of Philippine cinema and while his 12th feature (filmed in colour and deep focus) may not be as long as some of his 11-hour monochrome epics (hence his reputation as a master of so-called `Slow Cinema'), Norte, the End of History is notable for its reworking of Dostoevsky, as impecunious and nihilistic law student Sid Lucero kills moneylender Mae Paner and her daughter and allows innocent family man Archie Alemania to be wrongly accused of the crime. The focus shifts to Alemania's friendship with prison tough Soliman Cruz and the efforts of wife Angeli Bayani to keep the family together during his four-year incarceration. But, as one might expect of this uncompromising auteur, a new spin is imparted on the expected notions of punishment and redemption.

Angeli Bayani also plays a Filipino maid from the eponymous province in Ilo Ilo, which earned Anthony Chen the Camera d'Or for best first features at Cannes. She has come to Singapore seeking work during the 1997 Asian financial crisis and finds keeping an eye on troublesome 10 year-old Koh Jia Ler is a full-time job, especially as pregnant mother Yeo Yann Yann is wearing herself out as a secretary and father Chen Tian Wen is trying to cover up the fact that he has lost his position as a sales executive. And another 10 year-old comes to learn about life in Kim Mordaunt's The Rocket. Considered cursed because his twin failed to survive, Sitthiphon Disamoe finds himself homeless after his village is earmarked for submersion to facilitate a hydro-electric project. So, along with parents Sumrit Warin and Alice Keohavong, he moves to a shanty beside the yet-to-be-built town of Paradise in rural Laos and incurs the wrath of the new neighbours by befriending nine year-old Loungnam Kaosainam, whose James Brown-obsessed uncle, Thep Phongam, collaborated with the enemy during the Vietnam War. However, the settlement's annual rocket launching contest gives Disamoe (a street kid making his acting bow) the chance to earn first prize and some respect.

Cambodian director Rithy Panh endured a much more terrifying childhood, as his cosy middle-class existence in Phnom Penh was cruelly ended by the tyranny of Pol Pot. Panh has already explored the crimes of the regime in S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003) and Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell (2012). But, in The Missing Picture, he teams with writer Christophe Bataille, clay modeller Sarith Mang, cinematographer Prum Mesa and editor Marie-Christine Rougerie to recall his experiences in a Kampuchean re-education camp through an inspired and deeply affecting mix of monochrome archival footage and charmingly animated recreation. Raising fascinating questions about remembrance and representation, this is a work of artistic audacity and deceptively devastating power.

Indonesian Ifa Isfansyah also attempts something audacious in One Day When the Rain Falls, which casts each of its three chapters in a different generic tone. Opening with a family feast to mark the end of Ramadan, the first segment is a sensitive drama centres on son Vino G. Bastian's efforts to tell divorced father Landung Simatupang that he is gay. The second slips into horror mode, as younger sister Tara Basro has a shocking experience on the way home to mother Jajang C. Noer that sends her spiralling into mistrust and violence. But as a sharp knife and a banana tree ensure her night goes from bad to worse, younger brother Tora Sudiro finds himself in the middle of a sitcomedic scenario as he is faced with having to console ex-girlfriend Permata Sari Harahap just as current lover Aulia Sarah becomes convinced she is pregnant. Riri Riza adopts a more traditional approach in getting his non-professional cast to speak in their native Tetum language in Atambua 39º Celsius, which is set in the eponymous Indonesian town 13 years after East Timor voted for independence and follows teenager Gudino Soares as he tries to take care of his drunken bus driver father Petrus Beyleto and copes with being apart from his mother and younger sisters listens to the audio letters. However, his life changes when he meets Putri Moruk, who harbours a dark secret and has come to the predominantly Catholic Atambua from Kupang in order to complete the ritual mourning of her grandfather.

A passed grandparent also proves key to the action in Tso chi Chang's A Time in Quchi, a homage to rite of passage pictures like Hou Hsiao-Hsien's A Summer at Grandpa's (1984) that accompanies tweenager Yang Liang-yu and younger sister Lin Ya-ruo as their parents pack them off to stay with grieving grandfather Yun-Loong Kuan while they attend to their divorce. Bemused by Kuan painting faces on stones and mumbling snippets of Zen wisdom, Tang befriends local kids Hsieh Ming-chuan, Wu Bing-jun and Gao Shui-lian and soon comes to love his new surroundings. But everything changes when a violent typhoon blows in and Yang is forced to grow up in a hurry. Coping with the unexpected gives wealthy Carina Lau a new perspective on life in Flora Lau's feature bow, Bends, which is set on the border between Hong Kong and Shenzhen and contrasts Lau's struggle to acclimatise after businessman husband Lawrence Cheng suddenly disappears and chauffeur Aloys Chen Kun's bid to ensure that wife Tian Yuan gives birth outside Mainland China to avoid the fine for breaching the infamous one-child policy.

Washed-up actor Chin Siu-ho also finds himself having to make a readjustment in singer Juno Mak's directorial bow, Rigor Mortis, which harks back to the popular Mr Vampire franchise of the 1980s  Having moved into a dilapidated apartment block, Chin attempts to hang himself. But he is rescued by food-stall owner Anthony Chan Yau, who introduces him to fellow residents Kara Wai and Nina Paw Hee-ching. However, when the latter attempts to bring husband Richard Ng back to life, she unleashes supernatural forces that force Chin to make a stand. The eerie aura is more subtly established by Vivian Qu in Trap Street, a study in urban paranoia that begins with part-time secret surveillance operative Lu Yulai becoming obsessed with the beautiful He Wenchao after he spots her while on an assignment for a digital mapping company. Puzzled why Forest Lane doesn't show up on any official maps, Lu becomes increasingly intrigued when he discovers that He works in the mysterious Laboratory 23. But her boss, Liu Tiejian, has no time for his doting chivalry and threatens to charge Lu with espionage unless he betrays He and recovers a set of memory sticks. 

Invoking the lawless setting of classic wuxia cinema, Jia Zhangke presents his own snapshot of contemporary China in A Touch of Sin, an exercise in pulp realism that crosses the country to expose the social ramifications of the economic boom in four interlocking vignettes whose storylines were inspired by a series of tweets. In the first episode, ex-miner Jiang Wu acquires a rifle to ensure the corrupt officials who cost him his job in the northern Shanxi province take his protests seriously and a gun also proves crucial to migrant worker Wang Baoqiang going off the rails when he returns to the south-western city of Chongqing for his mother's 70th birthday. Receptionist Zhao Tao ends up with a knife in her hand somewhere in the central province of Hubei, when her married lover spurns an ultimatum, while 19 year-old Luo Lanshan tires of lurching from one dead-end job to another in the industrial city of Dongguan and finds herself working in a high-class brothel specialising in kinky uniforms.

Weixia Gao has also had to move away from her village in the Gansu province that abuts Tibet in order to complete her education and find worthwhile work. However, on having a premonition at the start of Chunya Chai's Four Ways to Die in My Hometown that father Guiqing Yang is ailing, she returns to assist with his mission of stemming the exodus of young people. Dividing the narrative into chapters concerning the elements of wind, earth, fire and water that Buddhists believe are the essence of life, the debuting Chai makes an accomplished transition from journalism with a work of poetic simplicity that also contains a trenchant denunciation of the neglect of China's struggling rural regions. Acclaimed actress Vicki Zhao uses a college reunion to assess the state of the nation in So Young. Adapted from the Xin Yiwu novel To Our Youth That Is Fading Away, this was Zhao's graduation assignment at the Beijing Film Academy and performed admirably at the Chinese box office. The bulk of the action is set in the early 1990s and follows Yang Zishan as she arrives at the University of Nanjing to study civil engineering. Picturing herself as a fairytale heroine, she is billeted in the same room as the imperious Jiang Shuying, tomboy Cya Liu Yase and the obsessive Zhang Yao. However, she soon falls foul of Jiang when she attracts the attention of maverick Bao Beier, the affluent Zheng Kai and his roommate Mark Chao, even though she only has eyes for hometown boy Han Geng, whom she has adored from a distance for years.

Romantic entanglements are just part of the problem facing Jeong Eun-Chae in Hong Sang-soo's Nobody's Daughter Haewon. She wants to be an actress, but is despised by her classmates, who have just discovered she is sleeping with married tutor Lee Sun-kyung, who was once a renowned film-maker. Jeong also strives to be independent, but misses recently emigrated mother Kim Ja-ok that she reads too much into a casual remark after bumping into Jane Birkin (playing herself) in downtown Seoul. With trendy US-based academic Eui-sung Kim also on the lookout for a wife, Jeong has got to make a commitment or stop finding solutions in drink and dreams. And the prolific Hong presents a variation on this theme in Our Sunhi, as film school graduate Jung Yoo-mi ree finds herself being consoled over countless drinks by ex-boyfriend Lee Sun-kyun and his director friend Jung Jae-young when she asks professor Kim Sang-joong for a letter of recommendation to study in the United States and he accuses her of being introverted and weak.

The tone is much more muscular in screenwriter Park Hoon-jung's directorial bow, New World, which borrows liberally from the Godfather and Internal Affairs trilogies in following undercover cop Lee Jung-jae, as he seeks to feed handler Choi Min-sik with inside information about the notorious Goldmoon crime syndicate. However, when the boss is killed in a road accident, Lee finds himself caught in a power struggle between superior Hwang Jung-min and rival commander Park Sung-woong. Moreover, when Choi refuses to let him retire after eight years in the mob because his wife is expecting a baby, Lee starts feeling a greater loyalty towards the sympathetic Hwang. Staying in gangland, Japanese provocateur pitches a novice film crew into the middle of a yakuza turf war in Why Don't You Play in Hell? Originally scripted 18 years ago, but updated to add a lament for the death of celluloid to the affectionate parody of the crime sagas of Kenji Fukasaku, the action picks up a decade after boss Jun Kunimura's wife, Yukiko Tomochika, is jailed for excessively attacking house intruder Shinichi Tsutsumi. She now wants daughter Fumi Nikaido to become a star and hires hopeless director Hiroki Hasegawa (who witnessed the earlier assault as a boy) to oversee the project. However, the plot involves a real-life showdown between Kunimura and the vengeful Tsutsumi.

Journalist Nao Omori similarly finds himself out of his depth in Tatsushi Omori's The Ravine of Goodbye, as he and new partner Anne Suzuki are assigned to cover the story of a woman suspected of murdering her own child. As they dig, the pair discover that the suspect had been having an affair with neighbour Shima Onishi. But, with his own marriage starting to crumble around him, Omori insists that Onishi has nothing to do with the crime, even though he participated in the gang of his lover, Yoko Maki, when they were at school together. Adapted from a novel by Shuichi Yoshida, this complicated study of female empowerment and male guilt and the manipulatory power of the media shares a fascination with moral and emotional extremes with Hirokazu Kore-eda's Like Father, Like Son, as proud, middle-class Tokyo parents Masaharu Fukuyama and Machiko Ono discover a hospital mix-up that means six year-old Keita Ninomiya is not their biological son, but belongs to appliance store owner Lily Franky and his wife Yoko Maki, who have equally unwittingly been raising Hwang Sho-gen in the suburbs. Convinced by father Isao Natsuyagi that bloodline is paramount, Fukuyama begins getting to know Hwang in preparation for parting from Ninomiya. But the transition proves more painful than he ever could have anticipated.

Ryuhei Matsuda goes through his own emotional wringer in The Great Passage, Yuya Ishii's take on a Shiwon Miura novel that opens in 1995, as Tokyo publisher Go Kato announces the launch of a project to compile a 240,000-word Japanese dictionary. Unfortunately, experienced editor Kaoru Kobayashi is about to retire to nurse his ailing wife and the burden of leadership falls on the timid Matsuda, whose bashful inability to string a sentence hardly inspired confidence among his underlings. But, with Joe Odagiri doing his bit to bolster Matsuda's ego, he not only comes to inspire his team, but he also finds the words to woo elderly landlady Misako Watanabe's culinary student granddaughter, Aoi Miyazaki. Food is also central to the debuting Ritesh Batra's The Lunchbox, which riffs on the notion that Mumbai's 5000 lunch couriers never make a mistake with their deliveries. However, when widowed and soon to retire accounts clerk Irrfan Khan opens an identical box to his own, he knows from the first bite that this is not his usual fare. He tries to apologise and send the box back to lonely housewife, Nimrat Kaur, whose husband, Nakul Vaid, hasn't noticed anything different about his repast. But, as soon as he hands over his duties to newcomer Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Khan sets off in search of the cook who has stirred his heart, as well as his taste buds.

Dancer Shahana Goswani also takes a risk when she agrees to pose for lower class sculptor Devesh Ranjan in Khyentse Norbu's Vara: A Blessing. Working from a story by Sunil Gangopadhyay, the acclaimed Bhutanese film-maker offers some fascinating insights into the subcontinent's hierarchical structures, particularly when the artist and his model become lovers and their secret is discovered by the village elders and Goswani is faced with accepting the charity of wealthy admirer Pankaj Pawan. Photographed by Bradford Young and scored by Nitin Sawhney, this study of rural custom and religious duty finds a curious companion in Bengali maestro Buddhadeb Dasgupta's Sniffer, which presents a darkly comic view of town and country life from the perspective of private eye Nawazuddin Siddiqui, whose devotion to his dog and the booze have alienated him from his neighbours in a strict Muslim apartment block and whose habit of getting too close to his suspects lands him in trouble when a case forces him to confront a romantic tragedy from his own past. 

Danger also pervades the Ontario-born Richie Mehta's Siddharth, as Rajesh Tailang has to travel hundreds of miles outside his comfort zone to find missing tweenage son, Irfan Khan. So wrapped up in the daily grind of makes a pittance as a chain-wallah fixing zips and other metal items on the streets of the Malviya Nagar district of New Delhi, the timid and taciturn Tailang has to overcome his fear of technology on leaving wife Tannistha Chatterjee behind when Khan disappears while working underage in a Punjabi factory owned by a distant relative. The bond between a parent and his child also seems set to fray in first-timer Nagraj Manjule's Fandry, a denunciation of the caste system that sees teenage Dalit Somnath Avghade slip away from tending the pigs in his village to attend school, where he develops a crush on a fair-skinned high-caste classmate. His ostracised father is saving hard to arrange his sister's wedding, but Avghade can only think of finding the ashes of a fabled black sparrow that will enable him to cast a love spell suggested by the kindly shopkeeper.

Culminating in a pig chase through the village that ends in an eruption of shame and fury, this is a powerful picture worthy of the late Rituparno Ghosh, who died in May at the age of 47. His final feature, Jeevan Smriti, concludes this overview of LFF 57 with a very personal profile of Rabindranath Tagore, which uses dramatic reconstruction to reveal some of the lesser-known aspects of the Bengali poet and artist's life.