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Mipo O strikes a chord with every new production. Since her debut “The Sakai’s Happiness” the Korean-Japanese director has won the hearts of many Japanese and international film juries. For her ninth film “How Dare You?” she teams up with screenwriter and producer Ryo Takada who already worked on “The Light Shines Only There” (2014). In this love story between two elementary school students, a boy joins an environmental protest to impress his crush.

How Dare You? is screening at New York Asian Film Festival

Yuishi Ueda is a rather introverted student with a fable for insects and dry humor. When Kokoa holds a presentation in class about the harmful impact of rising CO2 levels, he is captivated by her confidence and tries to find a way to get her attention. Following the example of Greta Thunberg, Kokoa starts a climate protest to raise awareness of her concerns. This marks...

Award

Paramount+ and Tving‘s Korean series “Bargain” has won the critics’ choice award at the Seriencamp Festival in Cologne. In April, “Bargain” became the first-ever Korean series to win best screenplay at the Canneseries Festival in France.

The series stars actors Jun Jong-seo (“Money Heist: Korea”) and Jin Seon-kyu (“Extreme Job”) and is an adaptation of director Lee Chung-hyun’s 2015 short film of the same name. Director Jun Woo-sung, who was part of the production team of the short, picked up the story and developed it into a six-part series. “Bargain” revolves around a group of strangers who gather at a remote motel with ulterior motives – seeking to bargain. Unlike the original film, the series follows the characters after an unexpected earthquake traps them inside the building. With no one to trust, they must find a way to survive.

“Bargain” is developed by Paramount+ and Tving, out of Paramount...

Stan Refreshes Lionsgate Output Deal

Australian streamer Stan has refreshed its output deal with Lionsgate. The new agreement means Stan lands the local first-run of shows including the upcoming CIA thriller series Gray, starring Patricia Clarkson, Lydia West and Rupert Everett. Also on the menu are Son of a Critch, Welcome to Flatch and Steven K. Knight’s Spartacus sequel series. Theatrical features include White Bird, Alice and Darling. Stan will remain the Aussie home of the Power franchise, The Serpent Queen, Minx, Bmf, Gaslit and Hightown and also picks up Lionsgate catalog titles such as Mad Men, Weeds, The Spanish Princess, Black Sails, La La Land and Twilight.

Indigenous Canadian Stand-Up Show Readied

Exclusive: Canada’s Aboriginal Peoples Television Network and the Canada Media Fund are among the backers of a comedy TV series billed as the first all-Canadian and Indigenous stand-up show. They have signed on to develop...

Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2022 Venice Film Festival. Oscilloscope releases the film in select theaters on Friday, August 11.

An enormously poignant melodrama told at the volume of a broken whisper, Kōji Fukada’s “Love Life” represents a major breakthrough for a filmmaker who’s found the perfect story for his probing but distant style. In that light, it doesn’t seem incidental that “Love Life” is a story about distance — specifically the distance between people who reach for each other in the wake of a tragedy that strands them far away from themselves.

Inspired by the plaintive 1991 Akiko Yano song of the same name, “Love Life” introduces us to a domestic idyll that it disrupts with a deceptive casualness typical of Fukada’s work. The bloom comes off the rose slowly at first, and then all at once in a single moment of everyday awfulness.