256. Tag (2015)

Country: Japan
Directed by Son Siono

Watching the film you often feel that it's a rather failed movie as it never touched it's ceiling and it's full potential, at the end though you gonna appreciate once more the bizzare, gore and poetic world of Son Siono, in this feminist, with a captivating B-movie style, allegory. Talking about the ideological part is quite interesting how he plays with the stereotypes and the ways of objectification of the women's bodies in the Japanese collective subconscious and the movie industry, forming an ironic destruction of his male view on them, an ironic negation of the exploitative nature of the film itself that depicts the patriarchical aesthetic and symbolic world to benefit from it, but in a contradiction, to fight against it as well!

255. Chanthaly (2012)

Country: Laos
Directed by Mattie Do

Maybe it seems humble but Chanthaly is a milestone of Laotian cinema. It's the first Laotian horror (rather psychological one) film, the first Laotian film made by a woman director, one of the very few Laotian films that found their way to international audience. Produced with almost zero budget, it doesn't have any amazing visual effects or any impressive aesthetics but instead it gives you a solid sense of realism that is quite rare for the genre. Moreover, 'Chanthaly' has a strong sociopolitical side: exploring, with very delicate and tender way, the life and the emotional world of it's main young female character, reflects a lot of issues related with the position of women in Lao society. Of course you could get a bit disappointed but the turn the film takes, when you realize that is not a feminist manifesto as you thought at first, but you have to keep in mind the heavy cencorship that is imposed at every Lao movie by the authorities

You can watch the full movie here:
https://youtu.be/oYTUlMKd_BI