The Ones Who Found the Side Entrance

A few weeks ago, a film called Obsession started generating serious attention — not just because of its low budget (650%+ ROI!) or its fresh cast, but because of where it came from. Curry Barker was a young YouTuber uploading short films on his channel. Then one of his shorts blew up, he pitched an idea he had to the studios, shot this movie in 2 weeks, and it became one of the most successful independent films in history. 

It's not a new story. The official path into filmmaking (i.e. film school, assistant directing, industry connections) has always coexisted with a less official one. Music videos. TV commercials. Short films screened at festivals. YouTube. The directors who came through these routes arrived with a unique style and that difference is often recognizable in their works.

Asia has produced some extraordinary examples of this. A Japanese director who spent years making music videos and commercials before one film made him a household name across East Asia. A Korean director whose short film won prizes at festivals before he made a Netflix thriller that landed in 190 countries. An Indian director who made R.E.M.'s most celebrated music video and then spent four years building a feature film across 28 countries with no CGI and no studio backing. Three different routes, three very different films, one thing in common: they somehow found the side entrance.

— Yubin

Shunji Iwai graduated from art school in the late 1980s and found the Japanese film industry not welcoming to him. The studio system ran on hierarchy and connection; there was no obvious way in for someone without either. So he made music videos and television commercials, learned to work quickly and visually, and developed a particular sensibility (that later was so palpable in his movies).

In 1995, he made Love Letter. A woman writes a letter to the address of her dead fiancé's childhood home, not expecting a reply, and then receives one from a woman with the same name who attended school with him. The film became one of the most beloved Japanese films of the decade, broke down post-war barriers to Japanese films being shown in South Korea when it circulated there on bootleg VHS (I was right there), and established Iwai's visual language as something entirely his own.

Last Letter, released 25 years later, returns to almost exactly the same premise. Yuri attends her older sister's funeral and is mistaken for the deceased at a school reunion. Rather than correct the misunderstanding, she begins writing letters to her sister's first love, a novelist named Kyoshiro, who then writes back. The letters travel between the past and the present, between the woman writing them and the sister she is pretending to be. 

Last Letter is not as formally daring as Love Letter, and some critics found it a bit too sentimental compared to its predecessor. But it is a carefully crafted film made by a director who explored the letters and memories as a theme for a long time. Iwai adapted the same story as a Chinese-language film in 2018 before making this Japanese version, which gives Last Letter an unusual quality of being a remake of itself — the same material seen from a different angle, in a different language, with a different light.

Stream on YouTube TV, Viki and Roku (Trailer)

The Call (콜) — Lee Chung-hyun (Korea, 2020)

Lee Chung-hyun studied art in high school, started making short films, and entered Bargain into a competition in 2015 — a short film that won the Jury Prize at the Busan International Short Film Festival and Best Short Film at the Paris Korean Film Festival. A producer at Yong Film saw it, took him under his wing, and spent years developing projects with him. The Call was the result: a thriller in which two women living in the same house 20 years apart discover they can communicate across time by a phone. Park Shin-hye and Jeon Jong-seo play the two women, each trying to change her past at the cost of the other's future. Released globally on Netflix across 190 countries simultaneously in 2020, it found immediate audiences in Southeast Asia and beyond. The short film that started it is still online. It's worth watching alongside The Call to understand what was already there.

Stream on Netflix (Trailer)

The Fall — Tarsem Singh (India, 2006)

In 1991, Tarsem Singh directed R.E.M.'s Losing My Religion music video, which won six MTV Video Music Awards including Video of the Year. He spent the following decade making Pepsi campaigns with Beyoncé, Britney Spears, and Pink, and Nike ads that aired during the Super Bowl. Then he began making The Fall. The film took four years to complete, was shot across 28 countries using 18 locations simultaneously, featured no CGI, and was partially self-financed after studios passed on it. At its center is a simple story: a stuntman recovering in a 1920s Los Angeles hospital tells an elaborate fantasy tale to a young Romanian girl with a broken arm, and the film moves between his hospital room and the increasingly spectacular world of his story. The visual imagination on display is directly traceable to the music video work with every frame composed very uniquely. Tarsem spent years making 30-second films that had to be perfect. He succeeded with a 117-minute film too.

Stream on Prime Video, MUBI, YouTube TV (Trailer)

This summer, UK garage, afro house, and jazz-inflected electronic music made their way back into the conversation globally. Asia has been building its own version of electronic music for years — developing something adjacent and arriving from a completely different place.

Kathy Yaeji Lee grew up between Seoul and New York, moving repeatedly as a child, never quite fully at home in either place. She started making music in her bedroom in Brooklyn, releasing tracks that blended whispered Korean and English lyrics over house and electronic beats, and built a following before anyone had properly categorized what she was doing. By the time XL Recordings signed her, there was still no particular name for her category.

With a Hammer, her debut studio album, processes anger. The album emerged from a childhood spent self-censoring between Seoul and New York, and the isolation felt during the pandemic. The anger it processes is not the usual, loud kind, but more subtle. What's surprising is how the music carries the message. The beats are house, trip-hop and techno, clean and deliberate; the vocals flow between Korean and English, often seamlessly within the same line. The anger doesn't necessarily make the music aggressive. Yaeji knows exactly what she wants to say and how she wants to say it, and that you can clearly hear it from her music.

The album came with a 111-page booklet containing a fictional story, paintings, and journal entries. Metacritic scored it 86. It is the kind of debut that introduces not just an artist but a whole new genre that is quite unique and cool.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

I Hope It Lasts Forever — Qrion (Japan, 2021)

Yuri Suzuki grew up in Sapporo, started making music in her bedroom as a teenager, and caught attention when a track called iPhone Bubbling, which looped the iPhone message alert tone into something genuinely musical, went viral on the internet. Forbes Japan named her in their 30 Under 30 list. She relocated to San Francisco, signed to Anjunadeep, and released I Hope It Lasts Forever as her debut full-length album in 2021. The album is melodic techno — dancefloor-oriented but emotional, built around chord progressions that carry more feeling than is usually heard in the genre. Billboard named it one of the 20 Best Dance Albums of 2021. She has since toured North America across 20 cities. The title is a wish rather than a statement, and the music seems to have earned it since the release.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

Nandodemo Atarashiku Umareru — Mondo Grosso (Japan, 2017)

Shinichi Osawa led a Japanese new wave rock band in the 1980s before dissolving it and turning to electronic music under the name Mondo Grosso. Through the 1990s and 2000s he built a catalog that ran from smooth jazz-influenced house to harder electronic work, collaborated with Kelis and Armand Van Helden, and established himself as one of Japan's most respected electronic producers. Then, for fourteen years, he made no Mondo Grosso album. Nandodemo Atarashiku Umareru (meaning "Reborn Again and Always Starting New") was his return in 2017, and it became his biggest commercial success. The album features all Japanese vocalists across its tracks, including Hikaru Utada, whose appearance on the opening track became one of the most-watched music videos in Japan that year. A veteran who came through rock before finding electronic music, disappeared for over a decade, and came back with the most commercially successful work of his career.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

Dimpy Bhalotia did not study photography. She grew up in Mumbai, completed a degree in Fashion Design Technology at the London College of Fashion, and worked in the creative industry. Photography was something she did alongside her main job.

She shoots on an iPhone. This is not incidental to her work, but more central to it. The iPhone is always in her hand, always ready, always there for the five seconds something interesting happens before her eyes. "It feels like I'm shooting with my palm," she said. The camera that most people would just use to document their food has become the instrument of some of the most widely published street photography of the last decade.

Flying Boys was shot in 2019 on a sweltering summer day in Varanasi. Three boys, caught mid-air as they leap from a concrete cliff into the Ganges River to escape the heat. It won the Grand Prize at the 2020 iPhone Photography Awards, and Bhalotia became the first Indian photographer to receive that honor. Apple CEO Tim Cook called the results "extraordinary" on Twitter. L'Officiel described Flying Boys as "the most famous photograph." The image has since appeared in the Washington Post, the Guardian, GQ, National Geographic, and BBC News, among dozens of other publications.

The photograph is a document of joy, of bodies in motion, of children who have found the best possible response to a hot afternoon. Bhalotia has spoken about what drew her to that moment: "They are the symbol of fearlessness and freedom." The simplicity of that description is accurate, and the image doesn't need interpretation.

Her broader practice spans street, portrait, and documentary photography across India, all shot on iPhone, all made with the same instinct for the decisive moment. She has won over 27 international awards, exhibited across more than 15 countries, and co-founded Pure Street Photography, a platform supporting street photographers globally.

Follow her work on her website and IG @dimpy.bhalotia

On May 19, 2026, at a ceremony in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London, the International Booker Prize was awarded to Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King. It was the first book translated from Mandarin Chinese to win the prize. The first Taiwanese author to win. The first Taiwanese-American translator to win. The £50,000 prize was split equally between them.

The novel, originally published in Taiwan in 2020, takes the form of a fictional translation of a rediscovered Japanese travel memoir from 1938. Its narrator is Aoyama Chizuko, a Japanese novelist who travels through Japanese-occupied Taiwan with a local interpreter, Ō Chizuru, documenting food and daily life. As the novel progresses, Chizuko draws closer to her interpreter, who keeps herself at a careful distance that Chizuko can't understand — until a separation makes clear the complexity of what has been happening between them. The book is a love story, a postcolonial novel, a meditation on what gets lost in translation, and a formal experiment in which the act of translation is itself part of the story.

The chair of the judges, author Natasha Brown, called it "captivating, slyly sophisticated" — a book that "succeeds as both a romance and an incisive postcolonial novel." Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, who also writes manga and video game scripts, said of researching the novel: "its central themes of travel and food changed my life in two obvious ways: my savings went down; my weight went up."

Before the Booker Prize win, the English translation had already won the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature in the United States. It was published in the UK by And Other Stories, a small Sheffield-based independent press, and in the US by Graywolf — small publishers who take risks on hidden creative work that larger houses often tend to neglect.

The Mandarin original was published six years before it won the world's most prestigious prize for translated fiction. It took a translator, a small press, and eventually a jury at the Tate Modern to bring it where it needed to be. That is, in its way, also a story about finding the side entrance.

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