Dante Perez

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.

A Filipino poet hearkens back to his village after spending years in Europe. Horrified to discover that the community has been buried under landslides, he begins wandering through the countryside, reconnecting with friends, lovers and family members whose lives teeter on the brink of destruction.

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 story about victims of summary executions. Three people start a strange therapy to escape their agonies.

Years ago, Tina (Andi Eigenmann) was sent away to the United States to live with her aunt because of an incident involving her parents that has never been explained to her. She moves back to the Philippines into their old home, hoping for a new start. Unfortunately for her, shes not alone in the house. The kitchen is home to a demonic, human-eating refrigerator. Tina must dig into the past to discover the truth about what happened to her parents, and to find a way to defeat the infernal appliance.

Mondomanila tells the story of teenage anti-hero Tony de Guzman and the rough neighborhood he calls home.

What can a family do if someone disappears in a dictatorship? You can’t go to the police for help or information. Many families were affected in this way by the cruelty of the Marcos dictatorship (1972-1986). The film shows one of them as an example of paradise lost.

Marinduque, an island province in the Philippines 172 kilometers south of Manila, is where the largest mining disaster in the country’s history occurred. MINA, an environmental activist trying to make ends meet financially, sets out on a journey to Marinduque to seek answers to the mining disaster. She joins a secret organization led by FRANCIS who feeds her confidential information regarding the people responsible for the tragedy.

An intimate epic made with uncompromising and austere seriousness that patiently and methodically observes the collapse and hopeful revival of a poor farming clan, meant to symbolize a nation’s history spanning 1971 to 1987.

Eight days before Christmas, Typhoon Sendong ravaged a small city in the northern coastline of the Philippines, burying most of it in water. 8,128 families displaced; almost 5,000 dead; at least a thousand missing, most of them presumed to have been buried alive. Three weeks after, a man is found walking around the city in broad daylight, a dead "baby" in his arms. He wanders around the business district, dogged by locals who wondered, sympathized, empathized. Following the ghost of his wife, he walks on until he reaches a river and drowns himself.