The 2024 Festival showcases another banner line-up of films by women and female driven stories. Particularly films that illustrate depth, nuance, and complexity in the depiction of female characters and storylines. Check out this exciting line-up of narrative features from rising female directors. All of these women present their first or second features at HIFF and are HIFF Programming Director Anna Page’s ‘10 To Watch’ in 2024:
ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT
Dir: Payal Kapadia
The winner of the runner-up Grand Prix award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, director Payal Kapadia’s narrative debut is a sensitive and subdued portrait of the lives of two hospital workers finding their way through the urban sprawl that is Mumbai, and how they deal with complicated affairs of the heart. Lead actors Kani Kasruti and Divya Prabhal are excellent and expressive in their performances.
CHAPERONE
Dir: Zoë Eisenberg
Alienated by friends and family for her lack of ambition, 29-year-old Misha finds a dangerous acceptance in a bright 18-year-old athlete who mistakes her for a fellow student. Shot entirely in Hilo, CHAPERONE, from filmmaker Zoe Eisenberg, recently had its world premiere at Slamdance, where it won the Grand Jury Breakouts Award.
DESERT OF NAMIBIA
Dir: Yoko Yamanaka
Noted Gen Z director Yoko Yamamoto’s second feature is a slice-of-life portrait of an aimless young woman who leaves the passionless security of being with her longtime boyfriend for the initial excitement of another man she first met casually on a night-out with a friend. Yuumi Kawai holds the film together with her casually magnetic performance.
FLY ME TO THE MOON
Dir: Sasha Chuk
Rising filmmaker Sasha Chuk wrote, directed, and co-stars in this award-winning feature debut adapted from her own semi-autobiographical novella. She plays the wife of a Hunanese man who she reunites with in Hong Kong. The husband (Wu Kange-ren), however, is caught up in drug smuggling and is an addict himself. This observant drama is also buoyed by the performances of Chloe Hui and Yoyo Tse, who plays the eldest daughter at different points of her life.
GIRLS WILL BE GIRLS
Dir: Shuchi Talati
In a strict boarding school nestled in the Himalayas, 16-year-old Mira discovers desire and romance, but her rebellious sexual awakening is disrupted by her mother, who never got to come of age herself. A resonant and impeccably written film on generational female awakening, mother-daughter affection and rivalry, and bodily autonomy, GIRLS WILL BE GIRLS is exactly the kind of feminine coming-of-age film (for any age) that we need more of.
GRAFTED
Dir: Sasha Rainbow
This adaptation of a novel intertwines stories of fantastic creation and hard-scrabble life. A popular pulp writer during the Edo period creates his most lasting work about a group of warriors who, each carrying a magical prayer orb, embark on a harsh journey to fight the curse laid upon a powerful clan. The serialization of that story becomes the writer’s life work, but after nearly three decades, as the story finally approaches its climax, the writer begins to lose his sight.
LOVE LIES
Dir: Ho Miu-ki
A gentle drama about two people successful at work who connect emotionally through an online romance scam syndicate. She is a middle-aged widow trying to find love outside of her gynecological practice who takes on the identity of a 25-year-old nurse and he is an awkward young scam employee whose online profile is that of a French widower and petroleum engineer. Hong Kong superstar Sandra Ng will be in attendance as this year’s SPOTLIGHT ON HONG KONG Filmmaker In Profile.
THE MOTHERLOAD
Dir: Van Tran Nguyen
An imaginative telling of the story of a Vietnamese American mother-daughter duo who, in their attempt to heal the rift between them, reenact and satirize scenes from celebrated Vietnam War films while depicting a diasporic reality.
WE WERE DANGEROUS
Dir: Josephine Stewart Te-Whiu
This affecting drama focuses on a trio of rebellious girls trapped in a reform school for delinquents isolated on an island that used to be a leper colony. While they come from widely diverse backgrounds, they quickly develop a friendship, one that is challenged when the school settles on experimental forms of punishment that take place in the dead of night.
WHO’LL STOP THE RAIN
Dir: Su I-Hsuan
In 1994, Taiwanese students were in the midst of a protest. Chi-wei, a female college student joins the strike to fight for their freedom of expression. During the protest, Chi-wei is slowly attracted to Ching, whose boyfriend Kuang is the student strike leader. As passionate protest enflames personal desires, both the strike and their triangle relationship becomes wild and vibrant.
