Joel Ferrer

Hong Sang-Soo’s Lost in the Mountains (South Korea, 32min) the visitor is the supremely self-centred Mi-Sook, who drives to Jeonju on impulse to see her classmate Jin-Young – only to discover that her friend is having an affair with their married professor, who Mi-Sook once dated herself. The level of social embarrassment goes off the scale. In Naomi Kawase’s Koma (Japan, 34min), Kang Jun-Il travels to a village in rural Japan to honour his grandfather’s dying wish by returning a Buddhist scroll to its ancestral home. Amid ancient superstitions, a new relationship forms. And in Lav Diaz’ Butterflies Have No Memories (Philippines, 42min) ‘homecoming queen’ Carol returns to the economically depressed former mining town she came from – and becomes the target of an absurd kidnapping plot hatched by resentful locals. Serving as his own writer, cameraman and editor, Diaz casts the film entirely from members of his crew and delivers a well-seasoned mix of social realism and fantasy. —bfi

Man is good and man is evil; man’s complex nature and existence has always been defined by these two opposite sides. In a remote island in the Philippines, the inhabitants of a once-prosperous town have been struggling since a giant Canadian gold mining company was forced to close down. While the company’s departure carried an important victory for people who fought for its closure because of environmental concerns, it also made a lot of people bitter, angry and desperate. It was an economic debacle for them. And they perpetually long for the return of the company. In these desperate times, Ferding, Santos and Willy drown their frustrations by endless drinking of alcohol. The visit of a young Canadian woman who was born in the mining village changed everything.

Deliberately structured and less beholden to its narrative, the film is told in three parts, with each part pertaining to each of the three visits of the time-travelling visitor from when the country was fighting for independence from Spain.

A heartbroken writer tries to get back with an ex through his romantic comedy hugot script but fails and instead finds himself magically living-out the scenes he has written. He’s forced to follow everything verbatim or else face being stuck in an existential loop of scenes that repeat over and over again.