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Live Action Movies Shorts

Afternoon Clouds

Director – Payal Kapadia – 2017 – India – 13m

*****

An old woman, her home and her cat interact in the former’s coastal flat – Kapadia’s first short evidences a sensibility which will inform her debut feature All We Imagine as Light – on the UK Blu-ray/DVD (Dual Format Edition) of All We Imagine as Light, released Monday, March 3rd

A room with two windows looking out on the sea. The constant sound of its roar, the net curtains stir in the breeze. An elderly woman (Usha Naik) holds a bowl of milk as she calls out for, “Koshu”. Elsewhere in the house, a younger woman (Trimala Adhikari) sits, dozing, on a bench, until she hears the older woman calling her name, “Malti”. She opens her eyes.

The older and younger women stand in a room, staring, the elder explaining to the younger that the plant will last two days. As the ginger cat Koshu feeds contentedly, the younger woman Malti limps back to her room. Preparing food in the kitchen, the younger tells the older that three chillis are too much for her. The older protests.

The conversation turns to the older’s medication, the next life, and why not get a plant that lasts longer, asks the younger.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Chilli Laugh Story
(He Jia La,
闔家辣)

Director – Coba Cheng – 2022 – Hong Kong – Cert. 12a – 94m

****

A young man successfully markets his mother’s chilli sauce in the pandemic lockdown until the lucrative business it unexpectedly generates is taken off him– out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, July 15th and in the US and Canada on Friday, July 22nd

This starts off with a very sweet – no, make that spicy – memory of 2002 when Coba Cheng (Edan Lui Cheuk-On) was a small boy of five and visited his mum’s village where he tried her chilli sauce for the first time. It burned his mouth, but was always a part of his life from then on.

Jump to mid-2020. Hong Kong, like everywhere else, is in the middle of the pandemic. Coba is now working his job from home, and he and his parents are struggling to live with each other in the same enforced space. His dad Alan (Ronald Cheng) is engaged in a no-way forward argument with a delivery man in a surgical mask who won’t tell him what the unknown package is until dad has paid the delivery fee, which dad won’t do until he knows what it is, which Mr.… Read the rest