San Francisco International Film Festival wrote:
Director Tan Chui Mui returned to her birthplace, a quiet and remote Malaysian fishing village, to film Year Without a Summer, a story of boyhood friends who reunite after a long separation. Steeped in the rhythms of the sea, their story develops slowly and mysteriously, in a meditative tone that illuminates the poetry and emotion of their lives. Beginning with the arrival of Azam, now an adult on the tail end of a successful singing career in Kuala Lumpur, the film weaves together flashbacks to reveal the circumstances of their relationship, as Ali and his wife take Azam on a nighttime boat trip to an uninhabited island. Immersed in the hypnotic natural beauty of his formative years, Azam lets his melancholy slowly rise to the surface. From where comes the great sense of despair and longing that haunts him? A wonderful fisherman’s myth about why crabs sift through sand one grain at a time provides an allegorical clue. A humorous story about a reversed mermaid—head of a fish and legs of a woman—plays a role. An absent mother and father, a taciturn grandfather, an inherited natural restlessness—all could have contributed. But these memories arise and vanish like ripples, and though they leave emotional traces, no real cause can be found. The true origin and meaning of Azam’s sorrow are as enigmatic as the ocean tides, and like the fisherman in his myth, he longs to return to the deep heartbeat of the beautiful and mysterious sea.

Year Without a Summer.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 30 min
Size: 	1.42 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1280x720 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	2 105 kb/s
BPP: 	0.095
Audio
#1:  	2.0ch AAC LC @ 147 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/F27C2CA14C85971/Year_Without_a_Summer.mkv

Language(s):Malay
Subtitles:Chinese, English (hardcoded)

The post Tan Chui Mui – Wu zhi xia nian AKA Year Without a Summer (2010) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Divorced and exhausted, retired actress Moon Lee is offered the chance of a comeback as the lead of a do-your-own stunts martial arts film.

Barbarian.Invasion.2021.1080p.NF.WEB-DL.DDP5.1.x264-PTerWEB.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 45 min
Size: 	6.31 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1920x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	7 939 kb/s
BPP: 	0.160
Audio
#1:  	Chinese 5.1ch E-AC-3 @ 640 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/A29965D6ED94198/Barbarian.Invasion.2021.1080p.NF.WEB-DL.DDP5.1.x264-PTerWEB.mkv

Language(s):Chinese
Subtitles:English, Indonesian, Malay, Chinese (Simplified)

The post Chui Mui Tan – Barbarian Invasion (2021) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Zi Kien and his mother Ah Lin have only each other in their life until one day Ah Lin has a new boyfriend. Zi Kien feels that his place in Ah Lin’s life is threatened, and he starts to change himself.

Sometime.Sometime.2020.SUBBED.720p.WEB.x264-gooz.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 46 min
Size: 	1.69 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1280x720 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 200 kb/s
BPP: 	0.099
Audio
#1:  	Chinese 2.0ch AAC LC @ 128 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/443C639F76A9F17/Sometime.Sometime.2020.SUBBED.720p.WEB.x264-gooz.mkv

Language(s):Chinese
Subtitles:English (hardcoded)

The post Jacky Yeap – Yi Shi Yi Shi De AKA Sometime, Sometime (2020) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Like that famous saying, Tan Chui Mui speaks softly, but she carries a big stick. Her films are quiet little affairs, but boy, do they pack an emotional wallop. She has a knack for easing you into a situation, and getting you deeply involved with her characters. I liken it to Nabokov, who can say a thousand things in one sentence. Tan can create such emotional push-and-pull between her characters without them saying much. It’s all in the doing, not the uttering. Show, not tell. And she does it beautifully.

That skill is very evident in her debut feature, Love Conquers All, in which the lead character, Ah Ping (Coral Ong) travels from a small town to the big city and meets a rather shady fella named John (Stephen Chua), who may or may not be a pimp.

Ah Ping comes to live with, and work for, her aunt, a food stall owner in a restaurant. She bonds with her little cousin (Leong Jiun Jiun) and unwittingly strikes up a friendship with John, who goes all out to court her. At first, Ah Ping is hesitant about going any further with John, because she already has a boyfriend back home, whom she often phones. But the two eventually become intimate, even when Ah Ping still professes her love to her boyfriend (in John’s presence).

One day, John simply disappears, and it seems like something he had told her earlier on in their relationship might be coming true. Or might it?

From thereon, the story seems to be moving into an area at which it had only hinted in its first half. Tan’s strengths as a director come into full force in the first half of the film, where a tender love story unfolds, where quiet emotions and unspoken feelings emerge, and where the suspense of a love encounter is underpinned by invisible tension. Tan imbues the dialogue with such carefully chosen words that at times dual meanings arise, and the intentions of the speaker become ambiguous. It’s a beautiful dance of courtship, with brilliant performances from the two leads, but it’s also an open-ended one that could go in any direction at any time.

But when the second half of the film comes around, together with a so-called “twist,” Tan seems to abandon the earlier method and begins to tell the rest of the story through an assembly of cuts and images that are at times too vague. The subplot of the little cousin’s infatuation with a pen-pal, although well-intended, becomes too much of a troublesome third arm and ends on a vague note as well. But some rhyming instances help to perpetuate a sense of unwanted change, that situations may not be the same anymore, but some things such as love, remain the same.

The story too, starts to reveal itself as a rather closed-in affair, with Tan affording her audience nary a perspective of their own, with the conclusion being more of an imposing statement than food for thought. Her treatment of her lead character could be construed as a little mean-spirited. Rather than ask us “Would you do anything for love?”, she gives us an answer, and a pointer towards this direction earlier in the film. But although the whole seems less than the sum of its parts, Tan’s honesty holds the film together more than it should.

Despite not rising above the trappings of a cautionary tale, Love Conquers All is still an impressive debut feature.

Love.Conquers.All.2006.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 30mn
Size:	1.51 GiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Met
Video
Codec:	x264
Resolution:	698x574 ~> 743x574
Aspect ratio:	1.296
Frame rate:	25.000 fps
Bit rate:	2 193 kb/s
Audio
Malay 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/0E392D2FA414A71/Love.Conquers.All.2006.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):Malay
Subtitles:English, Dutch

The post Chui Mui Tan – Love Conquers All (2006) first appeared on Cinema of the World.