As It Actually Happened

Nathan Fielder's new documentary, You Can See Everything, premiered at Telluride last month and opened in theaters this week. It’s an unnervingly close look at Elizabeth Holmes and her family during the last month before she went to jail for the fraud she committed with her company Theranos. I went to see it yesterday, and it just blew my mind in many aspects. But that’s not what I wanted to talk about. It made me realize that 4 months into Oblique, I had never actually recommended a documentary.

That felt like a real gap once I started looking at what was actually out there. Asian documentary filmmaking doesn't travel the way narrative cinema does, but some of it has gone further than you'd expect. A film about Delhi's black kite bird rescuers became the first documentary ever to win top prizes at both Cannes and Sundance. A quiet Korean film about an elderly couple's marriage became one of the best-selling independent films in the country's history. 

I think documentaries deserve more attention as they blend real life and art. When done right, they can be very entertaining and enlightening. I hope you watch one this weekend.

— Yubin

Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad run their rescue operation for black kites out of a basement in Delhi, a makeshift clinic built from spare parts and whatever medical supplies they can scrape together. The birds, raptors that circle the city by the thousands, keep falling out of the sky sick or injured, poisoned slowly by some of the worst air pollution on earth. The brothers have been doing this for over fifteen years, treating as many as they can, mostly because nobody else will.

Shaunak Sen spent several years filming them, and All That Breathes earns its reputation through patience. Delhi's smog hangs over almost every frame, something the brothers and the birds are both just trying to survive. Communal tensions tighten in the background throughout, audible in snippets of news radio and distant protest, but Sen never turns the film into a statement about it. The documentary instead focuses on the two men's daily lives, caring for the birds.

The film became the first documentary ever to win the top prize at both Cannes (the L'Œil d'or) and Sundance (the Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema Documentary), and went on to a shortlist for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. One of the judges called it “a graceful portrait of empathy and interconnectivity between nature and man.” The phrase perfectly captures what this documentary is about.

Stream on HBO MAX, Amazon Prime, Roku (Trailer)

My Love, Don't Cross That River (님아, 그 강을 건너지 마오) — Jin Mo-young (Korea, 2014)

Jo Byeong-man and Kang Gye-yeol had been married for 76 years when Jin Mo-young started filming them in 2012, following the couple for fifteen months in their small rural home. They still dress in matching colorful hanbok for no particular occasion, still play-fight with leaves and snowballs in the yard. Kang gave birth to twelve children; six died young from childhood diseases, and she's sewn six pairs of children's naebok (Korean thermal underwear) that she plans to have burned when she or Jo dies so the six who didn't make it can finally wear them and stay warm. None of it comes with narration beyond the couple themselves. The film became the highest-grossing independent documentary in Korean box office history, drawing over 4.8 million admissions, extraordinary for something this quiet and peaceful.

Stream on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, YouTube (Trailer)

Last Train Home (归途列车) — Lixin Fan (China, 2009)

Yang Zhang and Changhua Zhang left their village in the early 90’s for a factory job in Guangzhou, nearly a thousand miles away, to pay for their daughter Qin's education. Lixin Fan, in his directorial debut, picked up the family's story years later during Chunyun, the Spring Festival travel rush that moves roughly 130 million migrant workers across China at once. Qin, 16 by the time the cameras catch up with the family, has seen her parents about as often as her age. The reunion goes badly, and when her parents head back to the factory, they learn she's dropped out of school to look for city work herself, against everything they'd sacrificed to prevent. Fan shoots it all without a single interview, just the family as it actually is. The film won Best Feature Documentary at Hot Docs and the International Documentary Association's award for Best Feature.

Stream on Apple TV (Trailer)

All three of this week's picks come from the same under-covered theme: Asian artists collaborating directly with each other, across different countries.

88rising isn't a band. It's a label and media company founded in Los Angeles in 2015 by Sean Miyashiro and Jaeson Ma, built from the start around an explicit mission: get Asian and Asian-American artists heard outside the lanes usually reserved for them. Head in the Clouds, their first compilation album, is the clearest statement of that mission.

Its signature track Midsummer Madness puts Joji (Japan), Rich Brian (Indonesia), Higher Brothers (China), and August 08 (US) on the same track, four artists from four different countries. Each came to 88rising from a different direction: Joji as a former YouTube comedian reinventing himself as a moody R&B singer, Rich Brian as a teenager who'd gone viral rapping from his bedroom in Jakarta, Higher Brothers as a Chengdu rap crew rhyming mostly in Sichuanese dialect. Putting them on one track was less a calculated crossover than a bet that the audience for all of them was actually the same audience, just scattered across platforms that hadn't yet met each other.

The bet paid off. Midsummer Madness went RIAA Platinum and reached #23 on Billboard's Hot R&B Songs chart. 88rising went on to produce the Shang-Chi soundtrack, run Coachella takeovers built entirely around Asian artists, and was named Netease's Label of the Year in 2019. We recommend their music not because any one artist on the track is the biggest name in the genre, but because the song is a pan-Asian effort by design and we need more of that.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

Everywhere I Go — Novelbright feat. Eric Nam, from Pyramid (2026)

Novelbright started in Osaka in 2013 as a cover band working through One Ok Rock's catalog before growing into one of Japan's bigger rock exports in their own right: Best New Artist at the 2020 Japan Record Awards, a top-five finish on Oricon with 2024's Circus. The track Everywhere I Go, credited as Novelbright × Eric Nam, sits on Pyramid, the band's fourth major-label album and first in two years. It pairs an Osaka rock band with a Korean-American singer who's spent his own career moving frequently between Seoul and Los Angeles.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

Magnetic — Rain feat. Jackson Wang, from Pieces by Rain (2021)

Jackson Wang was a nationally ranked fencer in Hong Kong, son of an Olympic fencer father and a mother who competed on China's national gymnastics team. Then, JYP Entertainment discovered him in 2010 and brought him to Seoul the next year. He debuted with GOT7 in 2014. Magnetic landed in 2021 on Pieces by Rain, Rain's first mini-album in four years, right as both men were independently signing with the same label, Sublime Artist Agency. Wang has called it a "full circle" moment: he idolized Rain as a 17-year-old JYP trainee a decade earlier, and now calls him "big brother." Wang also wrote the concept for the song's music video and co-directed it with 88rising's Mamesjao.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

Ulysses Aoki grew up in Tokyo modeling in front of cameras for nearly two decades before he picked one up himself. He says the shift happened simply: he realized he preferred taking the picture to being in it. He taught himself on a Leica M6 specifically to force himself to learn manual focus and composition, shot well over a thousand rolls of film over the following years, and only moved to digital relatively recently. 

What he's spent that decade on is Tokyo itself, almost entirely in color, almost entirely candid. He cites Saul Leiter and Alex Webb as his clearest influences, and it shows: rich, slightly off colors, figures caught mid-motion in frames, even though he insists most of his shooting is unplanned. He's also direct about moving away from the confrontational, up-close style associated with photographers like Bruce Gilden, toward something more subtle. "I'm not pointing the camera at them thinking 'I got the shot,'" he said. Nobody in his photos looks caught.

Scenes Left Behind, exhibited at Kitamura Camera's Shinjuku flagship store in October 2024, gathers a decade of that work: Tokyo moving through its final preparations for the 2020 Olympics, through the pandemic's emptied streets, through the ordinary churn of demolition and reconstruction that any growing city produces but rarely documents with this much attention. Fragments of torn-down walls, people in the city's long shadows, LED signage bleeding color into otherwise gray scenes. The show paired his Tokyo images with photographs of Rome, a reminder that every city is disappearing and rebuilding itself at the same time.

Follow his work on his website and IG @ulysses_aoki

The National Museum of Korea drew 6.51 million visitors in 2025, reported this January, nearly double the 3.79 million it drew the year before. It's the highest single-year total since the museum's founding in 1945, and cumulative visitors crossed 6 million for the first time. Per comparison data from 2024, that puts the museum in a visitor-count range occupied by just a few in the world: the Louvre and the Vatican Museums, and not much in between.

What's notable isn't just the number but what it's attached to. The National Museum of Korea isn't a flashy contemporary space riding a single blockbuster exhibition; it's a national history institution, the kind of place that in most countries draws a steady, modest crowd of school groups and tourists working through a checklist. Counting its 13 affiliated museums nationwide, the full system drew nearly 14.8 million visitors in 2025. The museum's director, Yoo Hongjun, called the number a reflection of public trust and expectation. It's also hard not to read it as one more data point in a now-familiar pattern: whatever's driving the world's curiosity about Korea right now isn't staying contained to music and television. It's showing up in ticket counts at a history museum too.

Oblique is a weekly letter for people who discover culture sideways. obliquemag.com