A Pilgrimage to Cinema

The 12th edition of QCinema International Film Festival (Nov. 8-17) has just concluded. For 7 days, I was able to watch 11 full-length films from various sections of the festival. Since 2013, QCinema has already become my yearly cinematic mecca, with me literally looking forward to the next edition the moment that the current edition comes to a close. I already start saving up for the upcoming festival - even if it's still months away! It's like I don't mind not being able to attend all the other film events in the country in a given year, as long as my attendance is guaranteed in QCinema. The festival boasts of a top-quality curation of international films (mostly acclaimed and award-winning films from festivals abroad) that otherwise aren't likely to have a regular theater run in the country. You missed a QCinema film and it's possible that you won't ever get to see it on the big screen anymore on a different occasion. More importantly, QCinema makes us appre...

When you have a film titled "Neck" (the literal English translation of the Japanese title "Kubi") and the director happens to be Takeshi Kitano, then you can pretty much foretell how it will turn out to be. Those who have followed Kitano's entire filmmaking career will not be disappointed. Indeed, "Kubi" (2023) is very much a Kitano film. This is his second period film after "Zatoichi" back in 2003 and comes after the three-part yakuza saga "Outrage" (2010, 2012 and 2017). Kitano is well-known for his deadpan, quirky and brutal yakuza crime-dramas and the fact is that, in "Kubi," he transports his Japanese gangsters to 16th-century feudal Japan and turns them into warring and conniving warlords and vassals. The setting and timeline may have changed, but the characters and their dynamics are essentially the same.  "Kubi" is a sprawling tale (based on Kitano's own novel) and just like the "Outrage" tr...

There is one book about the Holocaust that has remained indelible to me until now (I first read it back in 1999): "The Informed Heart," written by the Austrian psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim. The book is a vivid, unsettling and insightful first-person account of the author's experiences in the Nazi concentration camps in Dachau and Buchenwald during World War II, when Adolf Hitler's totalitarian rule and so-called "Final Solution" were in full swing. "The Informed Heart" is not simply a memoir;it is also a psychological study of how it is to live in extreme situations, where inhumanity is at its peak and death seems to be the only escape from such an abyss. While the book is admittedly difficult to sit through, with such detailed descriptions of the horrors and sufferings of being a prisoner in a concentration camp (regardless of age, gender and social status), it is ultimately a searing call for compassion, understanding and acceptance of human di...