Lives Worth Telling

A few days ago, Michael crossed $1 billion at the global box office. It is the first biopic in cinema history to reach that milestone — not just the first music biopic, but the first film built around a real person to ever earn that number. There is something quietly remarkable about the fact that in an era of franchises and sequels and cinematic universes, the film that broke the record wasn't about a superhero (or MJ was?) or a spaceship. It was about a man with a glove and a moonwalk, and the story of how he became who he was.

Biopics have always asked a particular question: what does it mean to make a life into a story? The best ones don't answer it cleanly. They often reveal the gap between the legend and the person, between what we know and what we can only imagine. The ones worth watching are rarely the most flattering. They're the ones that find something essential in the distance between who someone was in the beginning and who they ultimately became.

This issue follows that thread through three films and three very different lives — a father in rural India who decided his daughters would be world champions, a lawyer in 1980s Busan who woke up one day and couldn't walk away, and a writer in early 20th century China who kept writing and died at thirty-one without seeing what she'd started. And then, because a life worth telling doesn't always end up on screen, three musicians who made their own lives the material — who turned grief, public humiliation, and the passage of time into the most direct art form available to them. 

How would you make your own life into a story?

— Yubin

The story of Dangal begins with a father who wanted a son. Mahavir Singh Phogat was a former national wrestling champion in Haryana who had given up the sport for a job and a family. When four daughters arrived instead of a son he had planned on, he let the dream go — until the day his eldest two came home having beaten up two boys who had made derogatory remarks. He began training them at dawn the next morning.

What follows is, on its surface, a conventional sports film: grueling early workouts, public mockery, slow progress, eventual triumph. Geeta Phogat, the eldest one, would go on to become India's first female wrestler to qualify for the Olympics; her sister Babita became a Commonwealth Games gold medalist. The film traces both their rises, with Aamir Khan playing their father across two different body weights — he gained 25 kilograms for the role, then lost them, filming the younger and older versions of Mahavir in reverse order.

But Dangal earns its place beyond the training montage because it takes the daughters seriously. The film shows genuine interest in what Geeta and Babita give up, what they resent, and what they eventually end up choosing. The scene in which Geeta, away at the national sports academy and now free of her father's method, calls home and realizes she has forgotten what she was training for. It is a scene from a film that understands ambivalence.

Dangal became the highest-grossing Bollywood film of all time at the time of its release, earning $300 million in China alone — a country with no particular relationship to Indian wrestling, a testament to how far a story can travel when it is told with humility. It won Best Film at the 62nd Filmfare Awards. For anyone who has been curious about Indian cinema but uncertain where to start, this film will be a great choice.

Stream on Netflix (Trailer)

The Attorney (변호인) — Yang Woo-seok (Korea, 2013)

The film never names its subject. Song Woo-seok is a self-made tax lawyer in Busan in the early 1980s — contemptuous of idealism, no college degree and proud of what he’s built. Then a student he knows is arrested under the dictatorial regime's National Security Law, tortured into a false confession. Song finds himself in a courtroom he never expected to be in, making arguments he never expected to make. The fictional Song character is modeled on the early career of Roh Moo-hyun, who would later become South Korea's president — a fact the film never states and doesn't need to. Song Kang-ho plays him with a particular kind of fury of someone who built a comfortable life and suddenly can't live in it anymore. The film sold 11.4 million tickets in South Korea, becoming one of the biggest hits in Korean cinema history. It is a proof for why biopics don't always need to name their subjects.

Stream on OnDemandKorea (Trailer)

The Golden Era (黄金时代) — Ann Hui (Hong Kong/China, 2014)

The film opens in black and white: Xiao Hong, played by Tang Wei, looks directly at the camera and tells us when she was born and when she died. She was thirty-one. The life in between — spent writing, fleeing, loving badly, moving from Harbin to Shanghai to Wuhan to Hong Kong as war closed in around her — is told not in a straight line but as a collage of testimonies from the people who knew her. Friends, editors, fellow writers speak to the camera as if they’re giving interviews decades later. It is an unusual formal choice for a biopic, and it keeps the film at a slight distance — which is honest, because Xiao Hong was herself a figure who resisted being fully known. Directed by Ann Hui at the age of sixty-seven, after forty years of wanting to make the film, it won Best Film at the Hong Kong Film Awards and closed the 2014 Venice Film Festival. What it offers the viewers, beyond a remarkable performance from Tang Wei, is an introduction to a writer whose name most of them have never heard — and whose work, once encountered, is not easily forgotten.

Stream free on Pluto TV (Trailer)

Utada Hikaru debuted in Japan at fifteen with First Love, which became the best-selling Japanese album of all time. She was seventeen when it sold eight million copies. By the time she was thirty, she had announced an indefinite hiatus from music, moved to London, married a bartender she met at a hotel bar, and had a son. Then, in 2013, her mother died.

Her mother was Keiko Fuji — herself one of Japan's most beloved enka singers, a voice that an entire generation grew up listening to. The circumstances of her death were difficult. Utada did not return to music immediately. When she finally did in 2016, the album she made was called Fantôme — French for ghost — and it is one of the most nakedly autobiographical records in the history of Japanese popular music.

The album does not announce its grief explicitly. Manatsu no Tōriame is a meditation on loss so restrained it takes several listens to understand what you're feeling. Ningyo sets one of her mother's own melodies inside a song of tribute, Utada's voice carrying her mother's music forward as the only way she could. The production strips away the glossy pop of her earlier work — what's left is acoustic, sparse, and entirely present. 

Fantôme debuted at number one in Japan and became, by wide critical consensus, her masterpiece. It is the record that only her own life could have produced — made from grief, made from love, made from eight years of silence that had something real waiting at the end of them.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

LILAC — IU (Korea, 2021)

If Fantôme is the album Utada Hikaru could only make after loss, LILAC is the album IU could only make after a decade of being watched. She debuted at fifteen — the same age Utada did — and became South Korea's most beloved singer-songwriter, a figure whose public life and private growth have been inseparable from each other in the eyes of Korean audiences. LILAC, released as she turned twenty-nine, is her accounting of that decade: a farewell to her twenties structured as both a goodbye and a greeting. The album title comes from the flower's meaning — "memories of youth" — and the music carries that meaning naturally. City pop grooves, retro-funk, quiet ballads: the range is deliberate, a summary of everywhere she's been. IU and Utada are not the same artist, but the parallel is worth noticing — two extraordinarily gifted women who debuted as teenagers in their respective countries, grew up in public, and eventually made the record that only their particular life could produce.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

Epik High is Here (Parts I & II) — Epik High (Korea, 2022)

Tablo graduated from Stanford University in three and a half years with both a bachelor's and master's degree in English literature, studying under novelist Tobias Wolff. He went back to Korea and started a hip-hop group. By 2009, Epik High were one of the biggest acts in the country. Then someone on the internet decided his Stanford degree was fake. What followed was a two-year campaign by thousands of people that included a media circus and the dissolution of his record label. Stanford confirmed his degree, but it didn't matter for a long time. Epik High Is Here, their tenth studio album released across 2021 and 2022, is the document of twenty years of music made in the face of all of that — funny, wounded, literary, and completely unbroken. The title is both a statement of arrival and a declaration of survival. The closing line of the album is: Epik High was here. Tablo also founded the independent label Highgrnd, which launched both Hyukoh and The Black Skirts — the artist who appeared in Oblique Issue 03. The wit, as promised, is very much intact.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

When Parasite won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2019 and then swept the Academy Awards the following year, something shifted in how the world looked at Korean cinema. The films had always been there. Now the global audiences were. What followed was a problem that sounds almost absurd: a sudden, global hunger to know the faces behind Korean film — and almost no proper photographic archive to satisfy it.

The Korean Film Council's response was Korean Actors 200, a campaign to document two hundred actors representing the past, present, and future of Korean cinema. For the photography, they called on Kim Jung-man — a photographer who had spent four decades studying and photographing Korean actors more carefully than anyone.

Kim had returned to Korea from Paris in 1979 as one of the first generation of Korean photographers trained abroad, and built what became an unparalleled visual record of Korean popular culture. He had already shot film posters for Bong Joon-ho's The Host and Kim Jee-woon's A Bittersweet Life, and portraits of over a thousand actors and celebrities, each one sought for its natural honesty rather than its flattery — he rejected conventional angles, waiting instead for the unguarded moment. By 2006 he had walked away from commercial photography entirely, drawn toward Korean landscapes and a more personal artistic practice. 

Then he came back for this one. The resulting exhibition, The Actor Is Present — shown at the Korean Cultural Center New York in September 2021, alongside photographer Ahn Sungjin — brought together portraits of figures including Youn Yuh-jung, Cho Yeo-jeong, and Lee Byung-hun, each image conceived as a single, complete statement. Not a promotional photograph. Not a red carpet moment. After a century of Korean cinema, and one extraordinary year that finally made the world look, this work properly showed the real faces of it.

Kim Jung-man died of pneumonia on December 31, 2022. He was sixty-eight.

Follow his work on IG @kimjungman_photography

In February 2025, FamilyMart — one of Japan's largest convenience store chains, with 16,000 locations in Japan and 8,000 more internationally — announced its new Creative Director. Not a retail executive. Not a logistics specialist. NIGO: the founder of A Bathing Ape, the creative director of Kenzo, one of the architects of Japanese streetwear's global dominance over the past three decades. His responsibility covers visual branding, next-generation store design, product categories, and marketing. The first collaboration dropped Spring 2026. "Convenience stores," he said in his statement, "best embody Japan's unique lifestyle and culture."

For most Western observers, that claim sounds like hyperbole. For anyone who has spent time in Japan — or South Korea, or Taiwan, where the same culture exists in local form — it sounds obviously true.

The Japanese konbini is not a convenience store in the Western sense. It is a piece of infrastructure designed with the same seriousness that other countries bring to transit systems or public libraries. Open 24 hours, never dirty, never out of stock. The food — onigiri, sandwiches, hot meals prepared fresh behind the counter — is genuinely good. The services bundled inside a single location include bill payment, ATM access, ticketing, printing, dry cleaning drop-off, and occasionally public notary functions. The design of everything, from the packaging to the lighting to the spatial arrangement, exists with intention. FamilyMart alone holds a 45-year legacy of continuous iteration on what a convenience store can be.

What the NIGO appointment signals — beyond the obvious cultural cachet of attaching his name to the brand — is that Japan is now formally treating the konbini as a design object worthy of the same intentional creative direction it has historically brought to fashion, ceramics, and architecture. This is not a marketing exercise. It is a statement that the everyday is worth taking seriously — that the place you stop at midnight for a rice ball and a canned coffee is, in its own way, a cultural artifact.

Pharrell Williams, a longtime collaborator of NIGO's, once called FamilyMart "the best candy and snack oasis ever." He meant it as a compliment, but he was underselling it.

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