No Subtitles Needed

This week, Lee Chang-dong's first film in eight years (Possible Love) was selected as South Korea's official entry for the Academy Awards. It stars Jeon Do-yeon, Sul Kyung-gu, Zo In-sung, and Cho Yeo-jeong. It premieres at Venice on September 6, streams globally on Netflix from November 6. It hasn't been released yet, and it's already one of the most anticipated films of the awards season.

The Korean Oscar story is worth looking into. South Korea submitted films for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film for 56 years before making the shortlist for the first time — Lee Chang-dong's Burning in 2018. Two years later, Bong Joon-ho's Parasite won Best International Feature and Best Picture, the first non-English-language film to do so. Park Chan-wook's Decision to Leave and No Other Choice both made the shortlist in the years that followed. And now Possible Love, from the same director who started the run, closes a circle that took nearly six decades to complete.

This issue looks at three Asian films that were nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, each one worth watching regardless of the results. Three female musicians from Southeast Asia whose music is traveling globally. A photographer who documented Hong Kong that no longer looks the same. And a film festival in Hong Kong that is happening right now and showing the breadth and depth of Asian cinema.

— Yubin

Drive My Car earned four nominations total and won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film at the 2022 ceremony. It is a three-hour long Japanese film adapted from a Murakami Haruki short story, and for many viewers including myself, a film that leaves a strong impression without explaining itself very clearly.

Yusuke Kafuku, the main character, is an actor and stage director whose wife dies suddenly, leaving behind an unfinished story she had been telling him each night. Two years later, Kafuku travels to Hiroshima to direct a multilingual production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, assigned a young driver named Watari to drive him around in his red Saab 900. The long drives become the space where the two characters tell each other things they cannot say anywhere else. Hamaguchi, the director, said: "What I found fascinating was how the intimacy is brought into the car through the long conversations between the characters."

The film draws not just from the Murakami short story but from two other stories in the same collection. The actors in the play perform in Japanese, Cantonese, Korean, and Korean Sign Language. Chekhov's dialogue about people who cannot act on what they feel becomes a mirror for Kafuku's own situation. The film doesn’t resolve its grief cleanly, and its characters don't overcome their losses. They just find ways to continue alongside them.

The opening credits don't appear until 40 minutes in. The Tokyo International Film Festival's programming director noted that American critics were "taken by the novelty" of Hamaguchi's style because he was entirely unknown in the US before this film. Drive My Car is a film that demands your patience, but for a good reason.

Stream on Apple TV and Prime Video (Trailer)

Lagaan (लगान) — Ashutosh Gowariker (India, 2001)

Set in 1893 in a village in colonial India, Lagaan opens with a bet. Captain Russell, a British officer stationed in the region, proposes that if the villagers can beat his team at cricket, a game none of them have played, their land tax will be cancelled for three years. If they lose, the tax will triple. Bhuvan, played by Aamir Khan, accepts the challenge. What follows across three hours and forty minutes is one of the most purely entertaining films to come out of modern Indian cinema — a sports epic that is also a story about colonialism, community, and the pleasure of watching an underdog team learn to believe in itself. A.R. Rahman composed the score. The film received India's first Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film in over a decade, the third in the country's history at that time. 

Stream on Netflix (Trailer)

Hero (英雄) — Zhang Yimou (China, 2002)

Hero received its Academy Award nomination in 2003 while still unreleased in the United States. The film arrived in American theaters more than a year after its Chinese release, after Harvey Weinstein acquired it. By then, it had already become the highest-grossing film in Chinese history. Zhang Yimou, working with cinematographer Christopher Doyle and composer Tan Dun, made a film that uses color as strong visual language: each version of the story Nameless (the main character) tells the King of Qin is shot in a different palette (red, blue, white, green) with the color encoding the emotions of what is being said. The cast is extraordinary: Jet Li, Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung, Zhang Ziyi, and Donnie Yen. The choreography is among the most beautiful action filmmaking ever seen on screen. The King of Qin who unifies China through conquest is presented with a level of complexity rather than simple villainy, and that complexity is part of what makes it worth watching.

Stream on Fandango (Trailer)

Nicole Zefanya grew up in Jakarta listening to Destiny's Child, Boyz II Men, TLC, and Aaliyah. She started posting songs to YouTube as a teenager under her full name, accompanying herself on acoustic guitar, and opened for Taylor Swift's Red Tour in Jakarta at just fifteen. By 2017 she had signed to 88rising in Los Angeles, relocated there, and started building the career she has now: three studio albums, 3.3 billion Spotify streams, the first Indonesian solo artist to perform at Coachella.

Nicole, her second album, is where she fully bloomed. The album revisits songs from her deleted YouTube channel — tracks she had made as a teenager and quietly been re-recording in Los Angeles. It is an unusual premise for an album: returning to the material of your past with different eyes, seeing what it meant that you couldn't see at the time.

The music is folk-pop and alternative R&B, built around her unique voice. NIKI has said she refuses to have a relationship with the word genre: "to box myself in for the sake of being more understandable would be a disservice to my creativity." The album is the proof. Start with Every Summertime, the Marvel soundtrack single that first introduced her to a wider audience, and then come back to Nicole for everything she was doing before anyone was paying attention.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

Chapters — Yuna (Malaysia, 2016)

Yunalis Zarai grew up in Subang Jaya, taught herself guitar, started writing songs in law school, and was discovered through Myspace. By the time Chapters was released in 2016, she had already performed at Lollapalooza, and had a single produced by Pharrell Williams. Chapters is where she discovered her full R&B/Dream Pop sound. The lead single Crush, featuring Usher, peaked at number three on the US Billboard Adult R&B chart. The album reached number seven on Billboard's Best R&B Albums of 2016 Critics' Picks and was nominated for Rolling Stone's 20 Best R&B Albums of the year. Yuna was later nominated for a BET Award for Crush — the first Asian artist to receive that nomination. She achieved this by making music that sounds like it belongs wherever it's played, and that makes her music very approachable.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

ambiVert — Raisa (Indonesia, 2025)

Raisa Andriana is one of Indonesia's most celebrated singers — a vocalist whose influences run from Stevie Wonder and India.Arie to Joss Stone, and whose voice has a particular warmth that is instantly recognizable. Her fifth studio album, ambiVert, released in June 2025, is Soul and R&B across eleven tracks, entirely in Indonesian. She made history in 2023 as the first Indonesian woman to sell out Stadion Utama Gelora Bung Karno with 40,000 seats. Earlier this year, she released Heaven Knows, a duet with Korean ballad singer Sung Si-kyung, with both singers delivering Korean and English lyrics. Their cover of Endless Love on YouTube had already gone viral, with Lionel Richie himself praising the harmony publicly. For those who want to understand what the fuss is about, start with Heaven Knows, and then come back to ambiVert for the full voice.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

Fan Ho was born in Shanghai in 1931, moved to Hong Kong with his family in 1949, and spent the next two decades photographing the city as it transformed from a trading port into a metropolitan center. He was seventeen when he arrived. He used a Rolleiflex K4A throughout his career, developed his prints in the family bathtub, and taught himself the entire process. He won nearly 300 photography competitions over his lifetime before he died in 2016.

His photographs are immediately recognizable once you have seen them. He worked in the early morning and late afternoon, when the Hong Kong sun cast long shadows through narrow alleyways, and built his compositions around what that light did to the city's particular geometry — steep staircases, bamboo scaffolding, laundry hung across gaps between buildings, people caught mid-motion in full brightness while the rest of the frame disappears into black. He was also a film director, which explains the cinematic quality of his framing: each image feels like a still from a film, a decisive moment that implies an entire story around it.

His most celebrated works — Approaching Shadow (1954), On the Stage of Life (1954), Afternoon Chat (1959), Sun Rays (1959) — are from this period. They document ordinary life: street traders, children playing, pedestrians caught in light. He never intended to make a historic record. "I love Hong Kong and I love Hong Kong people," he said. "I only aim to capture the soul." What he captured was a city that no longer exists: the Hong Kong of the 1950s and 60s, before the towers went up and the alleyways disappeared.

He has frequently been called "the Cartier-Bresson of the East," which is quite accurate. Like Bresson, he was a humanist who sought the decisive moment, the instant when all the elements of a composition align into something that cannot be repeated. He was largely unknown in the West until late in his life, and is still deserving of more attention than he receives.

Follow his previous work on his website and IG @fanhophotography

The ASEAN Film Festival 2026 opened in Hong Kong on August 20 and runs through September 27. The festival presents over 30 films from all 11 ASEAN member countries, with free screenings across Hong Kong at venues including M+ and the Asia Society Hong Kong Center. For the first time, Timor-Leste, ASEAN's newest member country, is participating.

The festival's curatorial focus this year is on the role of music and sound in Southeast Asian storytelling. The opening film is Song of the Fireflies from the Philippines, inspired by the internationally renowned Loboc Children's Choir. The program also includes SuckSeed (Thailand), a coming-of-age comedy about a teenage rock band; 881 (Singapore), a musical drama celebrating the Getai stage tradition — the outdoor performance culture that accompanies the Ghost Festival and deity birthdays; and Vietnam's Sound Across the Ocean. Several post-screening sessions feature conversations between directors and Hong Kong filmmaking professionals on the intersection of music and cinema.

The festival is organized by the Hong Kong-ASEAN Foundation, now in its fourth year. Southeast Asian cinema has been producing extraordinary work for decades — folk horror from Indonesia and Malaysia, intimate dramas from Thailand and the Philippines, documentary traditions across Vietnam and Cambodia — without a sustained institutional home that could make that work visible to regional and international audiences simultaneously. The ASEAN Film Festival is building that infrastructure right now.

It is worth noting what that means in the context of the Korean Oscar story this issue opens with. Korea's international recognition took 56 years of submissions to a Western institution. Southeast Asian cinema is doing something different: creating its own stage, on its own terms, in its own region. The films playing in Hong Kong this month don't need a Western awards body to certify their existence. They are simply there, available for anyone who wants to look.

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