Thailand’s and Nepal’s Oscar submissions, “9 Temples to Heaven” and “Elephants in the Fog,” are among 10 titles competing at the 27th edition of Tokyo Filmex, which will run Nov. 20–29 in the Japanese capital’s Yurakucho district. Taiwanese actor Lee Kang-sheng, who has appeared in every feature by auteur Tsai Ming-liang since “Rebels of the Neon God” in 1992, will sit on the three-member international jury. Additional jurors will be named later.
The panel will pick a Grand Prize winner, whose director will receive JPY700,000 ($4,500), and a Special Jury Prize winner, whose director will receive JPY300,000 ($1,900). Both awards will be handed out at a ceremony on Nov. 29. The competition is open to emerging Asian directors with films finished in 2025 or 2026.
Four of this year’s selections are first features. Sompot Chidgasornpongse, who has worked as assistant director to Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, makes his narrative debut with “9 Temples to Heaven.” The deadpan family comedy follows a 63-year-old man who drags nine relatives on a one-day tour of nine temples after a fortune teller warns that his mother will soon die. The mother won’t get out of the car.
The film launched in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight and picked up best director and best actor at the Shanghai International Film Festival. Abinash Bikram Shah’s “Elephants in the Fog” won the Jury Prize in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard strand, the first Nepali film to make the festival’s official selection. The debut feature centers on Pilati, head of a kinnar, or third-gender, community in a village hemmed in by elephant forest, who takes over the hunt for a missing girl when police won’t help.
Venice supplies four competition titles. Phuttiphong Aroonpheng’s Horizons entry “The Burning Giants” follows a young policeman who begins to doubt a government operation that closes off a forest and moves out its Indigenous Karen residents after a strange white smoke starts burning people. Michelle Zhou drew on her own life for her debut “Big Little Things,” also from Horizons, in which a woman takes a hired fake boyfriend back to Harbin for the Lunar New Year holiday to keep her girlfriend secret from her mother.
It won Venice’s Premio Autrici Under 40 prize for young female directors and has four Golden Horse nominations. Iranian filmmaker Ali Asgari’s “A Bit of Light,” from Venice’s main competition, tracks a Tehran doctor who loses his license for treating injured protesters and plans to kill himself. Amie Song’s debut “Gu Shi,” made through Venice’s Biennale College Cinema program with Anocha Suwichakornpong as executive producer, wraps its politics in a fairy tale about a family hiding out in an isolated house wedged between forest and sea.
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