Nippon Connection & Shinya Tsukamoto in Frankfurt

The J W Goethe University in Frankfurt is the location of the world's biggest festival of Japanese Cinema, The Nippon Connection, which I recently attended. Founded by three students in 2000, who were frustrated by the sparsity of Japanese films getting distribution in Germany outside of the Berlin Film Festival, the festival has grown from a handful of films to a large and diverse programme around which gravitates an array of Japanese themed cultural events from puppet theater, to a noodle bar and Japanese DJs. This strategy of making the screenings a cultural 'event' has been hugely successful and from its inception the festival has drawn crowds numbering several thousands.

This year the festival also played host to the Kinema Club Japan a prestigious, international network of Japanese Film scholars. A festival that programmes anime and pink films next to works of the political avant garde and big name releases, and which appeals to scholars as much as it does fan boys, The Nippon Connection is about breaking down barriers as much as it about giving the exposure Japanese Cinema deserves to a nation that is traditionally resistant to subtitled films. 'We wanted to put all of these different people in a room together, to force them to interact', says Holger, one of the founders. A brilliant demonstration of grassroots cinephilia in action, the work of Alex, Marion and Holger to found and develop the festival whilst studying full time is nothing short of inspiring. Here are a few brief reflexions on what i saw...

Arch Angels (Issei Oda): A lavish manga adaptation set in a girls school were three friends (hilariously) discover they have superhuman powers and use them to foil a kidnapping operation conducted by the school's corrupt administration. Full of blistering optical effects and playful humour, including a CGI dog that turns out to be the film's wise cracking and intrusive narrator, it entertains from beginning to end.

Look of Love (Yoshiharu Veoka): Impressively shot on 8mm this surreal feature follows the exploits of a small time pimp and his two girls who undergo revelatory experience one night in Tokyo. A voyeuristic man that watches his two nude neighbours, an apartment full of abandoned children and a satellite that gropes one of the prostitutes with long metal tentacles as she floats through space are among the images that pepper this story of self discovery.

The Matsagune Potshot Affair (Nobuhiro Yamashita): Known for his dark humour Nobuhiro serves up the kind of brilliantly composed surreal, ensemble comedy that is one of Japanese cinema's most endearing and interesting genres. In a small provincial town a cop has to help out his brother who, after committing a hit and run, is blackmailed by two dim-witted criminals into helping them retrieve their stash of stolen gold - but what to do with the bullion once it is in their hands? Not to mention the severed head... Sheer comic genius.

Mushishi (Katsuhiro Otomo): Akira director Otomo's latest film after Steamboy is a live action supernatural period drama about a bug master who travels Japan taming the invisible bugs, which swarm through the air like molecules causing all manner of problems to humans. Although peppered with some very nice visual ideas (particularly a scene in which all the words escape from a library and have to be recaptured) the film has serious pacing problems not unlike Steamboy, the final scenes of which descended into lever pulling monotony.

The Prisoner (Adachi Masao): The most enigmatic and controversial film of the festival follows the survivor of a suicide attack on an airport by the Red Army terrorist group, as he is tortured mercilessly by his captors. Visited in his cell by representative from the French and Russian revolutions, he begins to philosophically explore his position. A highly personal, deeply abstract film from Adachi, who was himself involved in the Red Army (he served a prison sentence recently after finally being extradited from Lebanon where he was fighting for the Palestinian cause). Adachi was prevented from visiting the festival by the Japanese embassy but spoke to the audience via a video link.

The Pavillion Salamandre (Masanori Tominaga): A lonely radiologist is drawn into a web of conspiracy surrounding the authenticity of a giant Salamander, fought over by the four sisters of the Kinjiro foundation, charged with the care of this national treasure, and a crime syndicate. Beginning like a postmodern rendering of a Chandleresque detective story, the film rapidly descends into a baffling array of absurdist vignettes and inscrutable plot developments, not least the fact that the radiologist inexplicably turns into a faux Sicilian mobster half way through. It is all tenuously held together by the central figure of Kinjiro the giant Salamander, who passively tolerates the whole affair and periodically stares blankly at the camera in shots reminiscent of Imamura's The Eel.

Key Note lecture by Prof. Inuhiko Yomota, who gave an overview of the depiction of the Chinese in Japanese films made in Manchuria during the occupation. This prolific scholar is one of the first to broach this taboo, controversial topic and has even delivered the lecture in Beijing. The topic was approached with an admirable scholarly detachment. The most fascinating thing was seeing footage of Setsuko Hara, darling of postwar humanist cinema, in slavishly nationalistic roles, a hidden aspect of her career that casts her later performances in a rather more ambivalent light. More research clearly needs to be done here...

Nightmare Detective (Shinya Tsukamoto): The latest film from Tsukamoto, one of the figures responsible for the reemergence of Japanese cinema in the 90s after his groundbreaking 8mm masterpiece Tetsuo: The Iron Man dominated festivals in 1989, initially seems like a more mainstream film. About a gutsy police woman and a psychic who investigate a spate of gruesome suicides caused by a man (Tsukamoto himself) entering the victim's dreams, Tsukamoto however plays around with the tropes and cliches of the J-Horror genre even as he creates something so horrific that it represents a generic high point. The film opens with a man terrorised by the appearance of a girls long hair hanging on his door, a cliche that is quickly revealed to be that of his aborted daughter, at another point the police woman determines she is in a dream when her mobile phone, a standard prop of the Japanese horror film at least since kiyoshi kurosawa's Pulse, melts in her hand. In this way the tropes of the genre are literally dissolved, allowing room for Tsukamoto's own concerns such as the dulled sensation of life caused by our modern, urban, consumer existence (the dreamers all wake up on a busy overpass where they are attacked) and the monster itself, which in its horrific mutations is nothing short of a fleshy version of Tetsuo. Nightmare Detective clearly demonstrates an artist entering a popular genre and reconfiguring its conventions according to his own aesthetic and thematic concerns. I interviewed Tsukamoto (below), footage of which will soon appear on Firecracker.

Uncle's Paradise (Shinji Imaoka): The first of two pinku (or Softcore porn) films shown at the festival revealed a world of narrative experimentation on the margins of the mainstream film industry crying out for wider discovery. When Haruo's uncle Takashi invites himself to stay his life suddenly gets more than a little strange. Terrified of falling asleep, because he suffers the recurring dream of making love to a dead woman, Takashi spends the film drinking coffee and finding distractions by seducing every woman at hand, including his nephew's own girlfriend, who Haruo discovers has had the pleasure of his Uncle's company when he finds his signature on her back in green marker. The film also initially sets up a love triangle between Haruo, his girlfriend and his work colleague, which is prematurely terminated when the latter is arbitrarily dispatched by a giant and very fake looking giant spider. Having denied any possibility of a conventional narrative trajectory, making the whole thing quite a liberating experience, the film then follows Haruo's descent into the underworld, depicted as a seemingly insipid love motel curated by Yamada king of the underworld in which the unfortunate inhabitants are fellatioed until they bleed, to rescue his uncle after he is bitten by a poisonous snake whilst masturbating by a temple. As if it all didn't sound strange enough Haruo is guided on his journey by a giant squid, which represents some kind of vague sexual symbol. As this synopsis suggests the Pinku genre, which allows an easy point of entry into filmmaking, respectable budgets and a relatively large amount of freedom beyond the obligatory number of sex scenes, has created a breeding ground of auteurist experimentation, which is absolutely unthinkable in the adult industries of most other countries. The director here even undercuts the required scenes of simulated sex with some brilliantly wry, offbeat humour, and the whole thing is so wonderfully ridiculous that you entirely forget that the film is supposed to be pornographic. The lead actress Mutsuo Yoshioka obviously hadn't, however, when she told the audience at the beginning of the screening that 'I hope you enjoy my body.' Such a generous person...

Noriko's Dinner Table (Sion Sono): Something of a prequel to the director's Suicide Club, Noriko's Dinner Table even incorporates footage from that film's depiction of 54 Japanese schoolgirls committing mass suicide by leaping hand in hand onto the subway tracks. In this rather more complex film the narrative is concerned with two sisters who join a society on the internet and then leave home to stay with their virtual friends in Tokyo, only to discover that the website is a front for a kind of emotional prostitution ring in which lonely men can temporarily rent a family. thus leaving their real family for a virtual one, the girls gradually loose their identities by taking on so many roles (which can even include being the passive victims of murder if the clients so wish), so that when their father finally tracks them down they have completely forgotten him. Initially only able to approach his daughters by partaking in this illusion, the father finally snaps and and murders the girl's bodyguards before sitting down with his daughters to eat amidst the bodies, bloodstained but determined to start over. All in all the film is a very interesting philosophical exploration of identity and how easily it can be transformed by our roles in society, however it suffers from being over long and messy. Although the numerous scenes that enforce the innocent naivety of the girls in the opening half are necessary to the effect of the film's bloody climax, there are far too many of them and the twee soundtrack melody quickly becomes annoying.

Indispensable Eight (various): Part of the festival's retrospective of rare avant garde Japanese short films, this programme of experimental shorts on super 8mm by such renowned talents as Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Pulse, Cure) and Nobuhiko Obayashi (Hausu), sought to demonstrate the continued importance of this threatened medium for Japanese directors. This was particularly the case for Shinya Tsukamoto, who learnt his craft with a series of insanely innovative shorts throughout the 70s and 80s before finally breaking through with the pinnacle of his 8mm work Tetsuo: The Iron Man, about a metal fetishist and a salary man who begin to mutate into grotesque fusions of flesh and metal after being involved in a car crash. Tsukamoto still speaks fondly of the special 'flavour' of 8mm. There was a screening of an unfortunately short extract of his 40min short The Adventure of Denchu Kozo, about a boy born with an electrical pole sticking out of his back, who, after being shunned by society, travels to the future where robot vampires are taking over the world. Despite the length of the clip it was clear that the film is a work of tactile and visceral genius, which pushes the medium to its limits in terms of composition and special effects (Tsukamoto animates wires bursting from a woman's guts and consuming her after she is bitten using stop motion) - he received a round of applause for the film's plot.

Nikkomihoppy (Toshiro Enomoto): The festival's second Pinku film is a surprisingly poignant story of lost love, only somewhat disrupted by the obligatory sex scenes. After his girlfriend leaves him for an older man, Chiyohara goes on a trip to find his first love, who, he discovers from her best friend, has has been killed in a car accident only the week before. A simple comparison of this film with Uncle's Paradise demonstrates the startling range of approaches to this genre, which confounds western conception of porn consisting of plotless rendezvous between mustachioed boiler mechanics and frustrated nurses. When the film's male lead, present at the screening, was asked if he will continue to act in Pink films he rather surprisingly commented 'only if i get over the embarrassment of being naked. Quite a considerable hurdle given the demands f the genre.

Although its obviously stupidly reductive to attempt to identify a thread in such an eclectic mixture of films, its interesting to note that the spectre of realism that always hovers on the radars of western film criticism is largely absent from the films of the festival, with even such a politically engaged and autobiographical work as The Prisoner turning to dreamlike abstraction to express its themes. On top of this many films such as Paprika, Ten Nights of Dream, Nightmare Detective and Faces of a Fig Tree dealt directly with the theme of dreams and fantasy. This anti-realism in contemporary Japanese cinema is as fascinatingly pervasive as realism was in the humanist and New Wave movements in post-war film.

Letters From Iwo Jima

Letters from Iwo Jima, Clint Eastwood's attempt to think his way into the Japanese perspective of the pacific war, after exploring the American perspective in Flags of our Fathers, is remarkably sensitive and understated. Interestingly there is a similar framing device here to the South Korean war film Brotherhood, in which a team of forensic archaeologists are uncovering personal remnants of the war, in this case a bag of undelivered letters, that triggers a flashback. In both cases this metaphor of the excavation of the past fits well with the film's attempt to revise history on a more human level. This is a film that is deeply humanist, not only showing the horrors of war, though avoiding the majority of the genre's cliches, but showing attempts by individuals to bypass ideology and reach out to one another across divides. Such as the genuinely moving scene in which baron Nishi, who had once lived in America and taken part in the olympics, talks to a wounded American soldier, telling him that he has had Douglas Fairbanks as a house guest in Tokyo.

The film is marked by excellent performances all round and strong characterisation. Central is Ken Watanabe's nuanced perfomance as General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the officer sent to administer the godforsaken island, which is little more than a rock in the ocean, yet is deemed vitally important by the government because it is part of the sacred land of Japan. However, he finds himself not only facing the Americans but the opposition of his own conservative officers, who see his conscientious leadership as a sign of weakness. When the bombs are finally let loose on the island, it is a relentless pounding. As the troops hide in caves dug in the island's hills, the camera backs up, distancing the viewer from the carnage whilst taking in the full panorama of destruction. The red blossoms of flame seem all the more chillingly striking given the prevalence of steely blues and greys of the film's beautifully subtle palette. The cinematography is wholly appropriate in expressing the utter despair of the situation.

This is an impressive collaboration that completely avoids the orientalising aspects that plagued Memoirs of a Geisha, in which the director showed a great deal of cultural insensitivity to both sides by casting Chinese superstars as Japanese Geishas. It's nearest counterpart is perhaps the films of Ang Lee, such as Ice Storm and Brokeback Mountain; in which an Asian director has been able to deal with distinctly American genres and issues in a peculiarly insightful way in spite (or perhaps because) of his outsider perspective. Its interesting that it was Letters from Iwo Jima, not the more bombastic Flags of our Fathers, that competed in the Oscars best picture and director categories; it is a shame that in both cases such a sensitive cross cultural work lost out to Scorcese's inferior The Departed, a film that merely cribs the seminal Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs. One can only assume that the jury felt sorry for Scorcese for loosing out against Eastwood on two previous occasions. Ultimately its proof of how little faith can be put into the impartiality and objectivity of this award ceremony. As always, we all know who should have won...

Cinemas of the Arab World

Today i attended a symposium on the subject of 'cinemas of the Arab world', which accompanied a programme of ten new films from Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Palestine and Egypt organised by the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World The talks were fascinating and raised many important issues. I particularly liked Kay Dickinson's (Goldsmith College) discussion of our approach to cinema using the theoretical framework of tourism. She later told me that Chris Berry is currently based at Goldsmiths, whilst i thought he was still at Berkeley. I think i may discuss a potential PHD with him. Who knows i might end up at Goldsmiths soon, if i pursue my topic of Chinese cinema.

After the talks i went to a screening of a film called Bakarat! An Algerian road movie about a young woman who is trying to find her husband after he has been kidnapped by religious fundamentalists, and the French police refuse to do anything. She travels with her work colleague, an older woman who reveals that she fought in the war of resistance against the French, and together they meet a kindly old man who is searching for his missing sons. These three people, representing their various generations, are brought together by a common experience of suffering and historical trauma, and their growing friendship is portrayed in a beautifully understated way. In the last scene the old man throws the young womans gun, taken from her father to help her gain revenge, into the sea shouting Bakarat (Enough) - a powerful statement against violence.

A few days earlier i sawa Moroccan film called WWW What a Wonderful World, an incredibly brash and stylish arty hitman movie, which completely took me by surprise. With its focus on the city as much as the characters dispersed therein, its fragmented narrative in which various characters gravitate around one another and its central relationship between a hitman and a woman who communicates his missions with elaborate codes but have never really met, reminded me a lot of Wong Kar-wai's Fallen Angels. It had an incredible amount of stunning visual ideas, like when the hitman walks around a toilet setting off all the hand driers, so that when he strangles his victim the man's screams are muffled, and was so rife with stylistic flourishes that Tarantino looked like a hick in comparison.

Cinema China Day 10 - Final Festivities

The grey haired gentleman in the above image is none other than Xie Fei, one of the leading directors of the Forth Generation of Chinese filmmakers and mentor of the Fifth and Sixth generations. And yes, unlikely as it sounds, he is dancing in a Salsa club. This was taken at the celebratory post festival meal. Not only are his films inspiring but so is the man himself - modest, intelligent, kind hearted. Its great that enduring ten years of the cultural revolution has done nothing to dampen his sense of style, and his dancing was putting everyone else to shame - not bad for someone in their sixties. What a great end to the festival! Until next year... Ni hao

Cinema China Day 9 - BFA day

This day was set aside for the Beijing Film Academy (above). In the morning I had the pleasure of interviewing Xie Fei at his flat near the Meadows. He spoke eloquently about his films and life through an interpreter, my friend Larry also from the BFA, and I got it all on film - it should hopefully appear on Firecracker soon along with an article I am writing on Xie Fei and the festival. One thing that particularly interested me was how he conceived of the role of his generation of filmmakers. Educated before in 1965 Xie, however, could not start to make films freely until after the Cultural Revolution around the same time as the Fifth Generation directors Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou. Although his work is more classical in tone it is clear they were dealing with similar problems. He sees the main achievement of directors in this period as shifting the focus of cinema from ideologies to people. This reemergence of humanism, not unlike the period in Japan following WWII, is exemplified in a quote from novelist Shen Congwen with which he begins his masterpiece The Girl from Hunan: 'I only build Greek temples in which humanity is worshipped'. It is a phrase, i think, that perfectly sums up his ambitions as a filmmaker and the relationship between form and content in his work.

I had bagels with Xie Fei and the festival organisers Mark Cousins and Dorota Ostrowska before he gave a lecture on the role of the BFA in Chinese cinema at the old College. It made me want to go there even more. Next there was a quick sprint across town to the Filmhouse to see some recent work from the BFA. First there was a showcase of shorts, all shot on 35mm and to quite an impressive standard for student work. There was a quirky animation that explored three alternate futures based on the play of cause and effect after a begger steps on a dogs tail, in a way reminiscent of Run Lola, Run (Xie has noted the influence of directors like Tykwer and Luc Besson on the current generation of students). Another good film called Innocent as I Was, was about a kid who deliberately set out to 'lose' his absent minded grandfather after he shamelessly eats all of the meatballs his grandma has made for him. Feeling a pang of guilt when he sees how upset granny is he rushes off to find the old man, only to find he has returned safely home himself. As the boy cries, the grandfather silently pushes a bar of chocolate across the table - all is forgiven. I don't know why but this reminded me of Kiarostami's early child centred short films such as Bread and Alley and Ear. Sunshine on her Shoulders, about two pretty girls falling for the same guy and finding their friendship tested, is more of a guilty pleasure, I admit, than a masterpiece. Sentimental as it is at times, the emotions are quite subtly alluded to. Then there was Mama, a Self-reflexive film about a student making a documentary about his attempt to make a film about his mother visiting. Although it had all the potential to turn into a pretentious student film, there was far too much wry humour for that and the whole thing became quite a charming exercise in ritual self-humiliation on the part of the filmmaker. The showpiece film, called Grassland, was by a Tibetan graduate and looked at the confrontation that occurs within a small traditional society after a sacred Yak goes missing. I think this description pretty much says it all. I found it beautifully shot but pretty cliched. It has all of the ingredients required to woo a middle class audience - a simple story from a traditional culture shot in crisp cinematography with lots of shots of sublime natural surroundings. Unfortunately there's not much else to say about it. It certainly isn't as interesting in terms of form and narrative as Story of the Weeping Camel.

After the shorts was an award winning feature by one of the BFA's recent graduates: Distance by Wei Tie. About a poor, lumpen peasant who comes to the big city to find work and stays with his more sophisticated graduate cousin and his girlfriend, who are both also unemployed, the title refers to the distance between the characters but also between the viewer and the film. Its practically a transposition of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Uzak, which also means Distance, onto Beijing. It not only shares that film's title and plot, but also its atmosphere of dislocation and alienation. However there is none of the wry humour that cuts through Ceylan's film, and Distance has far less empathy for its characters and is far less mature stylistically. It is also derivative of the films of Jia Zhang Ke, which focus on alienated youth.

Speaking of Jia Zhang Ke the next film on my itinerary was Unknown Pleasures, which i thought would make quite a hard double bill with Distance, but instead glowed all the more brightly in contrast. When I first saw Unknown Pleasures, which is about two nihilistic youths aimlessly roving around Beijing, I had a strong sense of malaise but this time i found the whole thing exileratingly. Actually the incredible thing is that the film manages to be both breathtakingly stylish and completely downbeat, much like the films of Takeshi Kitano, whose production company produced this film. Jia Zhang Ke is one of the freshest voices in world cinema, developing a minimalist aesthetic that is constructed from repetitions and fragments. Few people say so much with so little. Jia Zhang Ke also represents the new film literate generation of directors, gorged on films from the BFA archive and China's booming blackmarket DVD industry. Unknown pleasures contains covert references to Pulp Fiction, Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde, when the two decide to finally rob a bank. But these references are often ironic, such as the character's motorbike that breaks down constantly. I also loved the self-reflexive touch of a character attempting to buy Jia Zhang Ke's own films from the protagonist who is attempting to sell DVDs in order to pay back a loan.

Finally there was Black Snow by Xie Fei, a tragic drama starring the inimitable Jiang Wen, China's greatest actor, as a recently released convict attempting to return to society and live an ordinary life, but is hounded by gangsters, struggles with illiteracy and social changes, has his parole threatened by a visit from his fugitive brother and is finally arbitrarily stabbed by muggers. In this final scene he trudges through a crowd of people, destined to move against the tide of society to which he so desperately wanted to belong, their voices inaudible over the exaggerated staccato of his footsteps. Various voices play out moments from his past before he collapses in a square, the camera drawing out in an overhead shot. The expressive power of the film is remarkable and was made even more so by the quality of the new digital print.

Cinema China Day 8 - Vive L'Amour

Spent the whole day in the university editing suite putting together clips for Xie fei's masterclass. I also managed to watch Xie Fei's Girl from Hunan on video. It is an incredibly powerful film about a twelve year old girl who is married off to a two year old boy in a remote village at the turn of the century. They grow up more like brother and sister than husband and wife, but then the girl, Xiao Xiao, transgresses the clan rules by having an affair with a farm hand, which is shown through soem very inventive metaphoric staging, and becomes terrified at being found out after she witnesses another woman being drowned for committing a similar crime. At the end of the film she perpetuates the cycle of abuse by marrying off her son to a young girl. Somehow i managed to get a part time job at the Languages and Humanities Centre whilst hanging around there. I start on Monday straight after the festival!

A theme is slowly starting to emerge from the festival. Almost all films are about sexual repression in various ways, not least Vive L'Amour, a masterful almost wordless drama about supressed homosexual impulses developed by a man (Lee Kang-Sheng) who steals the key to an empty apartment and spies on the sales agent and her lover having sex. I also love the fact that after seeing Tsai Ming-liang's films you can never take a watermelon seriously again - watch it and see. Perhaps this theme is the reason why i like Chinese cinema so much. Its comforting to know that there are over a billion people out there who are as repressed as me (homosexuality excluded of course).

I missed the UK Premier of Zhang Yimou's Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles to do some research on Xie Fei for the interview tomorrow. Alexander saw it and said he had not been so moved by a film in ages. I hope i get to see it soon.

Cinema China Day 7 - Raise the Red Lantern and Wedding Banquet

Professor John Orr gave a brilliantly insightful discussion of Hou Hsiao-hsein's film aesthetics today in the posh Elder room of the university's Old College. There i met Pin Lu, the founder and manager of the Chinese Internet Movie Database. I discussed with him the rough idea i have of developing a website on Chinese cinema modelled on Midnight Eye, providing a growing database of reviews, interviews and commentary, which would serve to further develop an audience for Chinese cinema. Considering how exciting the films coming out of China have been of recent years, this strikes me as a vital project that is yet to be seriously taken up.

later in the day I saw Raise the Red Lantern (my second favourite film of all time after In the Mood for Love) on a fantastic print. I could spill rivers of ink enthusing on this film but i will save it for the book i would like to write on Zhang Yimou and just say for now that no film has such a rigorous, architectural control of film form, except perhaps those of Ozu. The visual system of symmetrical, repeated compositions and colour motifs create a sense of entrapment that perfectly reflects Songlian's imprisonment within the patriarchal household. Like the house, the images form a beautiful prison, in which all dissent is turned inwards into petty power struggles between the fourMistresses, whilst the faceless master lingers in the shadows like some terrifying Corleone pulling the strings.

I also saw Ang Lee's the Wedding Banquet, a charming comedy about Wei-Tung and his American gay lover Simon in Manhattan, who attempts to hide his relationship from his visiting Taiwanese parents by holding a fake marriage with his tenant, a struggling artist named Wei-Wei in need of a green card and emotional sustenance. A very funny and uncliched treatment of the material, which completely avoids sentimentality or sensationalism. Expectations of the viewers and parents alike are undermined as the film joyously mocks every 'serious' issue from immigration to heterosexual union, ending in the formation of a very unconventional, though undoubtedly happy, family unit. Few directors have looked at the issue of family recently with as much originality and compassion as Ang Lee.