Asian cinema’s presence at the Warsaw Film Festival (9-18 October 2015) was relatively small. The overwhelming number of films came from Europe (mainly Poland, France and Germany). Even the US and the UK had their fair share but surprisingly there were only three from Russia.

The NETPAC competition had 11 films (some of them co-productions) in a variety of styles, genres and themes. Nepalese director Min Bahadur Bham presented his wonderful debut film The Black Hen (Kalo Pothi) which had premiered in Venice earlier this year. Set in a village in northern Nepal during the civil war in 2001, it tells the simple story of two young boys who dream of owning a hen which will lay eggs and enable them to sell them and make a little money. But they have to contend with the serious Maoist threat in the country. Well shot and refreshing in its unfussiness, Bham succeeds in bringing a poignant note to the drama in the hills. A filmmaker to watch out for.

From Kazakhstan came two radically different films. Bopem by Zhanna Issabayeva (Kolysanka), a tale with an allegorical touch. An adolescent faces two intensely agonising issues in his life: the death before his eyes of his beloved mother in an accident when he was a child (the bribing of his father by the policeman-driver had shut the case) and own sickness and possible death. With the starved Aral Sea in the background, the emptiness of the steppe, and the beautiful images he imagines of his mother and he walking amidst ruby red flowers – the adolescent knows it is time to act. The Walnut Tree (Zhangkl Tal) by Yerlam Nurmukhambetov is a light-hearted, gently satirical-humorous story about a bride and groom and a wedding. But in this case, upholding tradition and culture means stealing the bride…

The Laundryman (Qing tian jie yi hao) by Taiwanese director Chung Lee was action-packed, with contract-killers and a policewoman on the chase performing unbelievably breathtaking stunts. Two Korean films meanwhile, showed some sad realities beneath sparkling surfaces of life in Korea. In Alice in Earnestland (Seong-Sil-Han-Na-Ra-Eui-Alice) by Ahn Gooc-jin, a young husband’s indebtedness and ill health leads the frustrated young wife to aggression and even murder. In Stay with Me (Ul-Bo) by Jinwoo Rhee we see young school children living alone in apartments, we see tough teenaged schoolboy gangs who pick up nasty fights, a sulky, brooding schoolgirl whose mother is dying and a rich, intelligent and sensitive boy who tries to help her out.

Niki Karimi’s Night Shift (Shift-e Shab) from Iran casts a shadow of fear in the mind of a young mother. Whatever is wrong with her sullen, estranged, uncommunicative husband? Told with sensitivity and restraint and occasional stormy outbursts, Night Shift lifts itself out of its weary emotions to a strong final scene which wordlessly explains all that had happened before. Palestinian director Hany Abu Assad’s The Idol (Ya Tayr El Tayer) is far removed from his earlier works, Paradise Now and Omar. A feel-good film with a commercial approach, which can yet reach out to audiences anywhere and win them over, this story of a young boy with a golden voice who wins an Arab idol contest against impossible odds and makes his people proud is finely shot, speedy, playful, moving by turn. In the background is the political setting, the bombed houses, the barbed wires, the impossible border crossings, but that doesn’t interfere with the movement of the story.

Parvez Sharma’s A Sinner in Mecca, an India-USA-Germany-Saudi Arabia coproduction does what no other film has done so far: reveals the flip side of the Haj pilgrimage. Sharma, an Indian now residing in the US, decides to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca and sins twice over – he is gay and he films with a hidden phone, both haram. He discovers a conflicting Mecca, “a city of secrets” and of giddy commerce where people are “consumed by fear and death.” Men grope women, streets are trash-ridden, and intense scrambles for water regularly erupt. And the director is on a personal quest of whether there is place in Islam for sinners like him. A well-made and daring documentary, but with a touch of self indulgence.

Turkey had two films in the NETPAC selection. In And the Circus Leaves Town (Ve Panayir Koyden Gider) by Mete Sozer you have a remote humdrum sparsely-populated village, you have the arrival of a stranger, you have dark secrets unveiled. Straightforward. But the other film, Motherland (Ana Yurdu) was a clear winner. Director Senem Turzen’s first full-length film took both the NETPAC and the FIPRESCI awards for its intimate yet turbulent portrayal of a mother-daughter relationship with excellent camera work that accentuates as well the closeness as the friction between the two women, as the turmoil in the mind of a young divorced daughter, yearning to change her life and be a writer, be herself, and a concerned mother smothering her with consideration that the daughter doesn’t want. “A finely crafted debut film,” said the citation, “combining a dense script with powerful images that evoke tensions both between and within characters."

Warsaw Film Festival is well organised and well attended. Attentive crowds who watch with keenness works from cultures they may not be too familiar with.

-by Latika Padgaonkar