Earlier this Summer Lucky Star published a lengthy piece by our editor Jhon Hernandez on his experience programming a festival, focused on Latin American cinema. This week, as the New York Film Festival winds down and the Morelia Film Festival begins, we published a companion of sorts, in which he attends, as an audience member with a press badge, nearly every single film screened at this year’s Asian Film Festival of Dallas, a lonely specter haunting the local Angelika theater, pausing only to eat yakisoba and reflect. Do these two pieces of writing help to create a landscape? The piece ends with Soi Cheang’s Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, a movie whose New York Asian Film Festival I skipped and instead watched at a chain theater in a mall in Flushing Queens, with the happiest audience I’ve had the pleasure to sit with this year. Jhon’s piece talks at length about Twilight of the Warriors and that should be an extra incentive to read the piece if you haven’t already.
A cultural, rather than aesthetic, question: If you draw a landscape of cinema in 2024, do you place Twilight of the Warriors at the center, or at the margins, or somewhere in between? It’s an unanswerable question by design, more than a little childish in its literal mindedness, but it becomes interesting when you sit down to watch something like Berlin, a mid to low budget Hindi streaming original, in the notoriously low quality of the zee5 streaming platform, which has only recently expanded to the US market. It is a small movie, with an ingenious set-up – In 1993, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the End of History, an unassuming sign language teacher is recruited by the Intelligence Bureau to aid in the interrogation of a young deaf mute man, accused of being a foreign spy. The agency asks the questions, the questions are transformed into sign language, the answers are signed, the signed answers are translated back into speech. The Berlin of the title is a cafe in the heart of the Indian capital, where the deaf mute young man has been hired as one of many hearing impaired employees, who are asked to pose as human props filling tables, unable to overhear the trading of state secrets. He becomes involved in the business of these agencies out of an abstract need, or a set of abstract needs – the need to be closer to this power that he has been kept at the margins of, and to be more than a prop, to prove himself as a figure who can act. His success is a mockery of the agencies themselves, devolving into interline corruption and blackmail once they are no longer needed as pawns in the Cold War struggle of the Great Powers. We are proudly in the world of the teleplay here – these central encounters in the interrogation room never move into the realm of the metaphysics as they would in the work of a Phil Karlson or a Joseph Losey. But it is not television either – not the airport paperback action figures of the perfectly enjoyable Slow Horses, to pick a contemporary example. The scale of the B movie holds its own power, this rejection and desire of the margins is allowed to seethe; are we able to notice these virtues, without the patina of age, the imprimatur of earlier generations of cinephilia? The writer/director, Atul Sagarhawal, seems like a classic subject for further research, whose credits stretch from the early days of Ram Gopal Varma produced multiplex “B” movies to upmarket Yash Raj Films new Masala to the golden days of the streaming boom to Hindi cinema’s current crisis (a curious matter which deserves a discussion of its own). For now the his film gets a cautious 3 on our grid, a polite rating, signaling interest without the confidence of argument. It would be nice to believe that placing a marker, however tentatively, on this ridiculous imaginary landscape is doing something of value; hopefully we can do more in the weeks to come.
Lucky Star 
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