Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 18/2/2016)

Among the titles on show will be Benson Lee's Seoul Searching, which harks back to 1986 to follow the fortunes of a group of diasporic teenagers at a summer camp designed to teach them what it means to be Korean. Staying South of the 38th Parallel, Belgian documentarist Steven Dhoedt profiles professional video gaming champion Lee Jae-dong in State of Play, which attends the annual Pro League live eSports event to examine the phenomenon of competitive gaming and its attendant celebrity culture. Also on offer is Shunji Iwai's first anime, The Case of Hana and Alice, a stand-alone prequel to his 2004 live-action drama, Hana & Alice, in which a teen forced to relocate to a new town with her divorced mother teams up with a recluse to discover the truth about the urban mythical disappearance of a student who was supposedly murdered by four of his classmates.

Several screenings will be followed by Q&A sessions with the directors, but the schedule is also dotted with shorts, among them Mark Johnson's silent study of a Chinese beekeeper, YúYú; Tian Guan's Drama, in which a couple of teenagers making out in a car get distracted by what is going on outside; Hana Kitasei and Shriya Pilgaonkar's documentary Panchagavya, which catches up with the sacred cows grazing in the streets of the Rajastani town of Bikaner; and Saudi director Malak Quota's With Time, which centres on two sisters who create fantasies to alleviate the harsh reality of being locked in a single room.

Opening proceedings at the Ham Yard Hotel in Soho is Yermek Tursunov's Stranger, which was selected as Kazakhstan's entry for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Completing a trilogy that began with The Daughter-in-Law (2009) and The Old Man (2012), this is an allegorical epic that examines the plight of Kazakh nomads during the Stalinist era. However, Tursunov presumes a knowledge of the period that may leave audiences confused. But such is his use of symbolic ciphers that this is readily accessible as a study in proud defiance.

Unaware of the Purges and Five-Year Plans initiated to drag the Soviet Union into the 20th century, nine year-old Ilyas loves hunting in the Kazakh mountains with his father. He also enjoys lessons with his teacher, Ybrai (Alexander Karpov). When Communist officials come to the steppes to impose collectivisation, however, Ilyas is powerless to prevent his father's arrest in the middle of the night and a grasping neighbour from stealing his horse. Determined to remain free, Ilyas rides into the hills and hides in a cave. Relying on the survival skills learned from his father, he adopts a wolf cub as a companion and captures wild animals to trade their skins for gunpowder and supplies.

As famine grips the region, Ilyas (Yerzhan Nurimbet) is kept informed of events by Ybrai. He also makes occasional contact with childhood sweetheart Katmut (Elina Abai Kyzy). However, she has married his friend, Gani (Kuandyk Kystykbayev), who has become a zealous Party apparatchik and taunts Ilyas about his refusal to join the Red Army to fight the Nazis in the Great Patriotic War. While Gani is at the front, Ilyas brings meat to Katmut to help her survive. But, while she still has feelings for him, she refuses to leave the security of her yurt for an uncertain future in the wilderness.

Ilyas is branded a traitor by the locals for not facing the enemy and he returns to his inglorious isolation. However, this is briefly breached by Zina (Rosa Khairullina), a Caucasian alcoholic who seems to have escaped from a gulag in the adjoining countryside. Together they symbolise the refusal of the ethnic populations and the intelligentsia to buckle under the weight of Kremlin tyranny. But it isn't always easy to interpret the mute Zina's eccentricities and the picture only regains its equilibrium when Stalin dies in 1953 and Ilyas is drawn to the village by the sound of mourning. He can't understand the grief and is so badly beaten by Gani and his cohorts that Yrbai has to take him to his shack to nurse him back to health. Tired of struggling, Ilyas agrees to tend a flock of sheep. But, not long afterwards, his horse is found wandering alone and a search party finds Ilyas's corpse inside his cave.

Despite the melodramatic denouement, this remains a fascinating recreation of a brutal time and it's a shame that more was not made of the forced repatriation of the Volga German population to the Kazakh tundra. Reminiscent in tone of Akira Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala (1975), which charted the friendship between an Eastern Siberian hunter and a Russian surveyor, the rugged action draws on local folklore and legends from Tursunov's own village. Moreover, it is magnificently photographed in widescreen by Murat Aliye and bullishly played by actors familiar from Tursunov's earlier outings. However, the characterisation is clumsily schematic, while the musings on tradition and progress and the right to resist cultural cleansing lack trenchancy.

Tursunov is further represented by his follow-up feature, Little Brother. Echoes of Alexei Balabanov's Brother (1997) reverberate through this polished thriller, which leaves the plains behind and heads for the Kazakh capital of Astana to show how modernity is impacting upon a people still trying to cling to traditional values.

Amidst the skyscrapers and the trappings of onrushing capitalism, Zhandos Aibassov is trying to raise his son to be a decent human being. However, he also has a secret to hide, as Aibassov makes his living as a hitman for his ruthless older brother, Eduard Ondar. As they came to the city from their rural village as kids, Ondar has always kept a fraternal eye on Aibassov, whom he contacts by mobile phone whenever he has a mission. But, when Aibassov bungles a job, he realises he is being followed by the statuesque Olga Zaitseva and it soon becomes clear that his son and wife Ainur Niyazova are in danger from a vengeful killer, who may well be his own sibling.

Despite touching on the morality of murder and the dehumanising effect that consumerism is having on Kazakh custom and community, this is a stolidly generic affair. Indeed, it's hugely disappointing to see a director who has worked so hard in the past to put his own stamp on evidently personal projects has lapsed into mainstream cliché. The action is slick and generates a decent amount of suspense, as Aibassov tries to fathom who to trust as his options narrow. But, for all the lustre of Sergei Kozlov's photography and the propulsive energy of Kuat Shildebayev's, this could have been made anywhere by anyone.

The setting switches to a remote village in Tajikistan for Saodat Ismailova's 40 Days of Silence, which couldn't be more distinctive in its use of silence, ambience and allusion in tracing three generations of oppression in an insular Islamic society that has been beset by civic unrest since emerging from under the Communist yoke. Born in Tashkent, but based in Paris, Ismailova makes few concessions to the audience, as she forces them to piece together the connections between her characters and the incidents that brought them to this cloud-shrouded outpost that is seemingly off limits to the menfolk.

When Rukhshona Sattarova arrives on grandmother Saodat Rahimova doorstep intent on performing the penitential 40-day Chilla-nashini silence, the gossipmongers presume it is because she has fallen pregnant. Others speculate that she is grieving for a vanished lover. But Sattarova keeps her counsel, even after aunt Barohat Shukurova returns from the city for the first time in several years to see how Rahimova is coping with her illegitimate daughter.

As the women settle in together, however, it becomes clear that Rahimova married young, was widowed when her spouse was killed in the war and then had to endure the agony of a still birth. By contrast, Shukurova has her daughter out of wedlock, after her fiancé dies in possibly mysterious circumstances. But she has never shown Olimova any affection and initially spends much of her time furiously texting a male admirer. Yet, during the course of this intense reunion, Shukurova finally acknowledges Olimova as her child. But, as a jagged montage sequence suggests, Sattarova is only at the start of a journey that will begin in earnest once the silence ends.

Exploring custom, faith, motherhood and the status of women in a rapidly changing society, this is a challenging picture that exploits silence, space and stillness to convey the suffering these women have endured and can expect to bear in the future. The performances are necessarily mannered, as Ismailova and co-scenarist Ulugbek Sadikov tease out the details of lives half lived. Azamat Turajev's production design, Benito Strangio's photography and Ranko Paukovic's extraordinarily rich sound design reinforce the sense of confinement, as even the wide open spaces seem to be closing in.

Moving into features after making her mark with documentaries, Ismailova rather delights in obfuscation, while symbols like the cracking mirror, the ravenously destructive goat and the cord in the mud feel somewhat heavy handed. But this is a bold bid to tell a story and examine complex themes in a predominantly visual manner.

The least likely director makes perhaps the most surprising film on this year's Asia House slate. Starting out as a migrant worker from Hunan Province, Zhang Wei gravitated to the southern city of Shenzhen, where he made millions from the production of video intercom doorbells. Not content with being an entrepreneur, however, Zhang was also keen to inform Chinese audiences about the pressures placed upon their employers by market forces, the legal system and their own demands for better pay and conditions. The result is Factory Boss, a stark study of business reality that almost pulls off the impossible feat of making one feel sorry for the fat cat.

When he purchased a toy factory in the booming south-eastern town of Shenzhen, Yao Anlian hoped to make a killing. However, increasing competition from some of Asia's emerging nations has left him facing ruin, even though he has cut his margins to the bone. Realising that his premises face closure unless he can secure a contract, Yao is forced to accept the terms of an American corporation, who have driven him to such a hard bargain that he has to lengthen the working day and cut corners on health and safety in order to hit his deadline to the tightest budget.

Unfortunately, the boom years have taught the workers that they are entitled to the good life and Yao is inundated with complaints when they discover that he has deliberately delayed the payment of their wages in order to keep himself in the black. Journalist Tang Yan senses a scoop and takes a job at the toy factory and interviews her workmates as they produce thousands of cheap plastic dolls with a growing sense of exploitation. However, no sooner has Tang published her exposé and Yao is charged with unscrupulous practices, she realises that he was seeking to protect his workforce by keeping the factory open rather than fleecing them for his own profit.

Ultimately, Yao gets his day in court and launches into a diatribe that sounds as though it is rooted in bitter experience. In fact, Zhang and screenwriter Zhang Ming overcook this speech in their effort to make the villain appear a victim of the same circumstances that have brought his employees to the point of penury. They also rather lazily blame the United States for the problems of the world financial system. But the point about the global economic downturn hitting the seemingly untouchable Chinese powerhouse is well made and such is the brilliance of Yao's performance that he evokes memories of Kenneth Williams's strike-harassed toilet manufacturer in Gerald Thomas's Carry On At Your Convenience (1971) and Mr Weed in Family Guy.

Rounding off the programme are a couple of documentaries. In Live From UB, American debutant provides a brief history of Mongolian rock music and how its impact on a population that was cut off for so long from outside influences. When Western music first reached Ulan Bator in the early 1970s, the government decided to deflect interest in bands like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones by forming Soyol Eddene, a combo whose name meant `Cultural Jewel' and who played sanitised anthems like `Chinggis Khan' and `Khonkhny Duu' that were supposed to inspire a love of country, as well as allowing youth to let off a little steam.

But, translating as `The Bell Song', the latter became a favourite of the peaceful protesters calling for democracy during the freezing winter 1990 and Knapp goes on to show how the influx of outside music via MTV helped shape the consciousness of post-Soviet society. That is, until new bands like Mohanik began to explore how traditional Mongolian instrument like the horse-head fiddle and the overtonal singing technique could be used on their new album to create a unique sound that speaks to local audiences and beyond.

Introducing the wider world to a little-known culture is also the theme of Dutch director Daan Veldhuizen's delightfully named, but deceptively problematic Banana Pancakes and the Children of Sticky Rice. Sometimes seeming like a travelogue rather than a study of an enclosed community in epochal transition, this avoids the paternalism that used to characterise corporate shorts produced by companies like Shell and BP to show how much they were doing for the peoples whose natural resources they were tapping. But the viewer is often left uneasy, as Veldhuizen befriends Khao and Shai, who are keen on the idea of inviting tourists to their village of Muang Ngoi in northern Laos, but not sure how far to expose a traditional Buddhist community of farmers and fishermen.

Beautifully photographed by Veldhuizen, this is strives to be respectful and detached, as Shai and Khao begin disagreeing over how many cottages to convert into guesthouses, restaurants and gift shops and whether to let the backpackers encroach into the jungle and risk disturbing the local wildlife. It is clear from the outset that the residents are decent people and that they have no real idea of what to expect by opening their lives to the scrutiny of affluent curiosity seekers from far away. The discussion about competing with neighbours for much-needed lucre is dispiriting in the extreme, as is the growing evidence that the balance of Muang Ngoi's economic well-being is tipping away from sustainable self-sufficiency. The insights into the difficulty of preserving the past while living in the present and the relentless march of modernity and consumerism are entirely valid. But one can't help but worry that such exposure is merely luring more trouble to paradise.