Directed by Panah Panahi, son of the acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, Hit the Road presents a tonally elusive but ultimately crowd-pleasing spin on the Iranian road-trip movie, swinging from comedy to tragedy as it tracks a family’s drive across the Iranian countryside. The vehicle’s passengers—two middle-aged parents, one reticent older son at the wheel, and a chatty, karaoke-belting six-year-old son in the back—form the film’s narrative and emotional core, riveting attention and winning hearts as the purpose of their journey is gradually revealed.

Chisato and Mahilo are two high school girls who are about to graduate. They also happen to both be highly skilled assassins. When the organization they work for orders them to share a room, the relationship between the pair quickly turns sour. However, when they find themselves targeted by the yakuza, the girls quickly realise that they will have to find a way to work together.

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Having just moved from Beijing, elderly tai chi master Mr. Chu (Sihung Lung) struggles to adjust to life in New York, living with his Americanized son Alex (Ye-tong Wang). Chu immediately butts heads with his put-upon white daughter-in-law, Martha (Deb Snyder), a writer who seems to blame him for her own paralyzing inability to focus. But when Chu begins teaching tai chi at a local school, his desire to make a meaningful connection comes to fruition in the most unexpected of ways.

Wearing radiant orange and a photogenic smile, our protagonist is a successful influencer promoting a product line called “Happiness”—an emotion supposedly guaranteed for the women consumers she is targeting. That said, blissfully composed exteriors belie a brutal reality of abuse, in not just her own home but that of her newlywed daughter. Winner of the Panorama Audience Award for Best Film at the Berlin International Film Festival, Askar Uzbayev’s searing, chilling portrait of domestic violence confronts viewers with the systemic misogyny in contemporary Kazakhstan.

Winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s Golden Eye award for best documentary, All That Breathes chronicles the story of two brothers who form a makeshift bird hospital to care for the thousands of black kite—the species of bird they have both fallen in love with—that drop daily due to New Delhi’s heavily polluted skies.

With a dragon tattoo blazoned across her left arm, Kim Hye-Yoon plays the headstrong heroine who, after her dad falls into a coma following a suspicious accident, doggedly seeks answers despite mounting resistance from a variety of corrupt forces. Faced with the additional pressures of tending to her father’s restaurant, taking care of her younger brother, and completing mandatory work training following a short prison stay, our heroine is forced to grow up fast.

Winner of three Golden Horse awards including Best Leading Actor for Mo Tzu-Yi, the film tells the story of Mr. Lin, an apartment tenant who tends to the daily needs of the elderly apartment owner and helps look after her orphaned nine-year-old grandson, whom he has legally adopted. When the boy’s uncle returns from overseas and charges him with using the adoption as pretext to secure the deeds to the apartment, a troubled past is brought to light.

Director Shô Miyake adapts a boxing memoir from Keiko Ogasawara— who turned professional despite the difficulties of lifelong deafness. “A highlight of the Encounters program at this year’s Berlinale,” (Variety), the film fictionalizes it’s subject as Keiko Ogawa, played with stern intensity by actor Yukino Kishii. The film from the structural trappings of the biopic, as it adopts a focused, in-the-moment approach to Keiko’s life and career: we see her struggles inside and outside of the ring.

A teenage delinquent befriends a surly magician who helps her navigate her inner demons and dysfunctional family with sleight of hand magic.

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The Japan Council of the University of Pittsburgh and SCREENSHOT: ASIA are pleased to announce the winner of the third biennial University of Pittsburgh Japan Documentary Film Award: Maelstrom, directed by Mizuko Yamaoka. The film will be screened with the filmmaker in attendance as part of the second SCREENSHOT: Asia Film Festival. The award ceremony will take place on September 29 at 7pm in the Seventh Floor Auditorium of Alumni Hall, immediately followed by the screening of the film.