亞洲視野競賽

Filmed over five years, this film follows three generations of Hazara women in Afghanistan. Forced into marriage as a child, Hawa learns to read at 52 and starts a textile business, while her daughter Najiba and granddaughter Zahra seek independence. The Taliban’s return in 2021 shatters their fragile progress, forcing separation, exile and renewed struggle. Najiba Noori: ‘War, violence, forced marriage, and lack of access to education have plagued and victimised countless Afghan women for decades. My mother’s dreams were stolen.

The webcam witnesses it all. Living in Berlin, the director records ten years of drifting online conversations with parents in Isfahan and a cousin in Vienna. Much remains unsaid. Text fragments and VHS images evoke longing, distance and the ache of wanting to be understood.

Faraz Fesharaki: ‘My mother wanted to know why I was recording our Skype conversations. I told her these recordings were like my diaries. [In writing,] I would never have been able to capture the essence of those moments with such detail and fidelity.

This hybrid documentary weaves stories from Isan, Thailand’s largest yet poorest region. Through Mor Lam, a popular folk music with Lao roots, it traces political uprisings before and after the Cold War. Questioning why Isan seems cursed by misfortune, the film reveals resilience, humour and joy persisting amid a landscape shaped by bloodshed and loss.

After losing mental and physical balance at 34, the filmmaker trains at a Zen temple. Through Zen, she reconsiders eating, sleeping and breathing, seeing body and mind as a ‘bag of flesh’. Inspired by Noguchi Taiso, she imagines the body as fluid — organs and bones floating, expanding and contracting freely.

Neang, an Indigenous woman in northeastern Cambodia, watches her village disappear beneath a hydroelectric dam. As industrial and state forces pressure families to leave ancestral lands, she struggles to hold her community together while her children’s futures drift away from traditional ways of life. 

Polen Ly: ‘The experience of filming Until the Orchid Blooms over six years went beyond filmmaking; it became a journey that allowed me to form a deep emotional bond with Neang’s family and her Indigenous community.