WELCOME TO MUBI

Wielding a sharp pair of gleaming scissors, Han Okhi mounts a revolution out of jagged, fragmentary images in this intrepid short. Beautifully restored, this watershed work of Korean feminist cinema slashes at the pretence of censorship, laying bare the patriarchal control behind arbitrary dogmas.

Inspired by Qiu Miaojin’s eponymous cult novel, Daphne Xu’s enigmatic travelogue hypnotizes with its whirl of visual impressions, steeped in queer melancholy. Blending languid natural landscapes with cacophonous construction sites, this meditation on belonging plumbs the depths of loss and grief.

Bo Wang’s category-defying supernatural docufiction follows the tangled strands of the Cold War to the wig factories of British-occupied ’60s Hong Kong. Haunting the liminal space between East and West, capitalism and communism, this mischievous short unearths imperial specters with eerie humor.

In P.S. Vinothraj’s blistering debut feature, breakdowns of climate and family converge on the drought-ridden plains of Tamil Nadu. A vast landscape becomes the arid stage for a foreboding drama of absences, in which emotional and physical limits yield starkly beautiful visual poetry.

Desire is torture (literally) in Sek Kei’s astonishingly modern mood piece, a transgressive dissection of fraught queerness written by—and starring!—a young John Woo. Immersively filmed in throbbing 16mm, and soundtracked to yearning flamenco twangs, Dead Knot broods with tormented passion.

Tending to still-open wounds left by the Vietnam War, Minh Quý Trương’s transfixing and redolent film excavates spectral histories, once buried under the sands of time. Lighting up the darkest pits of the earth, coruscating touches between furtive lovers burn with the fieriness of queer passions.