#non-western

The bridal nature of this uchikake robe is shown through the symbolism of its decoration: it is painted with pale phoenixes with streaming tails, which mean prosperity and long life, and with branches, leaves, and flowers of pawlonia, the "princess tree" historically planted on the birth of a female child, then cut down when she married to be made into items for her dowry and a chest to put them in.

India's answer to The Hunt for Red October: Our review of The Ghazi Attack

Western audiences tend to give short shrift to Indian cinema. When we think of films from the country, we imagine massive Bollywood extravaganzas with strangely written romances and oddly placed songs (by our standards, of course; India has different norms than we do). But Indian film is far more diverse. Submarine buffs will be interested in the 2017 war movie The Ghazi Attack, directed by…

David Diop puts the often-overlooked black soldiers of World War I center stage: Our review of "At Night All Blood Is Black"

Our image of the First World War is dominated by Europeans and their descendants. Trench warfare, as portrayed in books like All Quiet on the Western Front, is shown as fought by Americans, British, French and Germans. Those European countries, however, were also imperial powers, with many subject peoples made to contribute thousands of men to the war effort. One recent novel does not overlook…

Guan Hu directs a World War II spectacle that only falls short in its characters: Our review of The Eight Hundred

Few may have expected that the second-highest grossing film of 2020 (and the highest-grossing live-action film; the first was an anime from Japan) would be Chinese. The Chinese market is so enormous that its filmmakers can focus on their domestic audience and still make good money. The COVID-19 pandemic’s shuttering of so much of Hollywood gave The Eight Hundred a global boost. Does the film…

Kang Je-gyu fashions humanity out of the absurdities of World War II in "My Way"

Even in a world of bomber fleets and atomic weapons, legends have their way of enthralling us. In South Korea, there is the mythical survivor Yang Kyoungjong, a hero in an ancient sense, whose main achievement is simply surviving World War II in service to three different armies. The story is that he started in the Imperial Japanese Army, was captured and pressed into service by the Red Army,…

Our review of Jang Hoon's 2017 film A Taxi Driver

There was a time when the Korean Peninsula was divided into two dictatorships. One was communist and endures to this day. The other was capitalist and went through a tumultuous latter half of the twentieth century. Jang Hoon’s 2017 film A Taxi Driver deals with one of South Korea’s deadliest postwar upheavals: the 1980 Gwangju Uprising. What is striking about the coming of the dictatorship,…

Miguel Miranda brings the poorly remembered American-Filipino war to life in Hostile Participants

It is not obvious from my name, I am a Filipino-American. My father is white, of Scots-Irish, German, English and French descent. My mother was born in Manila. Since I was young, I was told stories of my ancestors who fought the Japanese. At times, I regret how little I read about the country, given how much I read in absolute terms. So when I was offered Miguel Miranda’s novel Hostile…