All Under the Moon

Sai’s breakthrough film, voted Best Japanese Film of 1993 by critics in the magazine Kinema Junpo, builds a tragi-comic fresco of Asian-immigrant experience in Tokyo: the rip-offs and pitfalls, the infinite varieties of subtle Japanese racism, the constant threat of deportation. Laid-back Korean-Japanese taxi driver Chung Nam (Kishitani Goro) takes the everyday racism of his colleagues and customers in his stride; the one thing that animates him is his passion for Filipina bar-girl Connie (Rita Moreno), who works in his mother’s ‘hostess pub’. But Connie has ambitions of her own, Mum disapproves of Chung dating a non-Korean, and then Chung’s social-climbing Korean boss goes bankrupt.… No previous film had ever got ‘down’n dirty’ with Japan’s working-class immigrants in the way that this one does, complete with words and phrases never before heard on a Japanese soundtrack. Sai shines a searchlight on the dark side of Japanese politesse.

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