The directorial debut from Korean director Yoon Dan-Bi is a stunning, sensitive portrayal of a family in transition. Okju lives with her father and younger brother and we meet them as they are packing into their van and leaving their apartment in the city. The camera leads them out of their neighbourhood amidst streets cluttered with unwanted furniture and trash.

They are moving out to the countryside to care for their grandfather, who spends his days alone, watering his garden in silence. Okju and her brother learn to adjust to their new surroundings, while Okju struggles with the complications of growing into a woman without her estranged mother. Eventually Okju’s aunt joins the family for the summer and plans are made for what to do with Grandpa and his home. It becomes apparent to Okju that she won’t be returning to her home in the city after the summer, causing more strain on their tenuous family ties.

Full of lived-in, nostalgic detail, Moving On has drawn comparisons to some of the greatest Asian family dramas. Yoon is obviously a cinephile and she doesn’t shy away from visually referencing Yasujiro Ozu or Edward Yang. Often this can come off as empty homage, but Yoon backs these aesthetics up with the deep understanding and love for her characters and their interpersonal relationships that those masters were known for. It’s hard to ignore the connections to a film like Yi Yi, but that she can assimilate such a specific film language and make it all her own shows a level of restraint rarely seen from first time directors.

A heart wrenching study of intergenerational dynamics and the long term effects caused by the absence of a loved one. Moving On is filled with an immense sadness about the transient nature of life, but the specifics of a lived experience and the understanding that things can and do change for the better show us that even the most painful moments of life can be positive and essential experiences through the lens of hindsight.

There is a sequence in the final act that transcends the boundaries of everything that came before and asks us to question our own concepts of fantasy and reality. Yoon draws very little attention to this moment, but it is a masterstroke in what is undoubtedly one of my favourite films of the year and one of the best directorial debuts in recent memory.

Ray is a middle aged man down on his luck and struggling to take care of his younger brother who is suffering from a mysterious condition called “Omnia,” that leaves him fatigued and despondent. Desperate to make some money to pay for a questionable treatment, Ray takes on a job for a cabling company and sets out into a bizarro, sci-fi version of the modern day gig economy.

Armed with GPS “Medallions” and carts loaded with cable, hundreds of people crisscross through a forest, laying cable between large metal boxes that run the quantum computing network. With their handheld device, routes are bid on, a pace is set and breaks are handed out infrequently. Ray discovers is he able to make decent money, despite the strenuous work and seems to fall in with the rest of the cabling community, mostly young people setting up camps and sharing conspiracy theories.

Eventually the circumstances through which Ray acquires his medallion come back to haunt him and he finds himself part of a grassroots organization to fight back against the CBLR corporation. I’ll admit that the film starts to lose it’s way in the final act, and perhaps the message is a bit on the nose, but the central performance by Dean Imperial grounds the film and helps to maintain the absurd, DIY tone. The relationship between the fantastic and realistic is really important here and as you grow accustomed to the strange rules of this not-so-distant future you realize that the world we live in is essentially the same.

The social commentary of Ken Loach through the lens of a slacker-indie film like Joel Potrykus’ Buzzard, with a surprisingly effective low-budget science fiction approach; Lapsis is a fun and promising debut and I look forward to whatever Noah Hutton comes up with next.