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17th Asian Film Awards Preview: The Nominated Films

Written by YumCha! Editorial Team Tell a Friend

The Asian Film Awards (AFA), an annual film event celebrating excellence in Asian cinema, enters its 17th edition in 2024. The 17th Asian Film Awards ceremony will be held on March 10, 2024, at the Xiqu Centre in Hong Kong.

This year, 35 films from 24 regions are nominated in 16 award categories. Korean film 12.12: The Day and Japanese film Evil Does Not Exist lead with six nominations each. Japanese auteur Kurosawa Kiyoshi, director of AFA Best Film winners Wife of a Spy and Tokyo Sonata, serves as the Jury President.

Korean actress Lee Young Ae and Japanese actor Suzuki Ryohei have been announced as the recipients of this year's Excellence in Asian Cinema Award. Chinese actress Zhao Liying and Thai actor Win Metawin Opas-iamkajorn have been selected for the AFA Rising Star Award.

Read on for a quick primer on all the nominated films!

Updated March 10, 2024: * indicates winner.

12:12 The Day (South Korea)

Nominations: Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor*, Best Editing*, Best Cinematography

"12:12" refers to December 12, 1979, the day Chun Doo Hwan launched a military coup and seized power to eventually become the fifth president of South Korea. Kim Sung Su's historical blockbuster dramatizes the events surrounding this fateful date of modern Korean history. Names are changed in the film but the references are clear. Hwang Jung Min earns a Best Actor nod for his larger-than-life performance as would-be dictator Chun Doo Gwang, while Jung Woo Sung is the stalwart Capital Garrison Commander fighting against him as the coup unfolds. Park Hoon is nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his role as a colonel who supports Chun.

Evil Does Not Exist (Japan)

Nominations: Best Film*, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Editing, Best Cinematography, Best Original Music*

Hamaguchi Ryusuke's Drive My Car took the top prize at last year's AFA. The Japanese director returns this year with Evil Does Not Exist, which won the Grand Jury Prize and FIPRESCI Award at the 80th Venice Film Festival. In this enigmatic eco-drama parable, the residents of a small town in the forest are faced with the proposition to build a glamping tourist site in their vicinity. The tight-knit rural community is concerned about the project's impact on the natural surroundings and their simple way of life, while the frustrated agency reps are just trying to do their soulless jobs. Environmental themes and existential questions come together in quiet manner until a late-act reveal upturns all that came before.

12:12 The Day

Paradise (Sri Lanka, India)

Nominations: Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Editing

Pioneering Sri Lankan filmmaker Prasanna Vithanage co-writes and directs the Sri Lanka-India co-production Paradise which follows an Indian couple's anniversary vacation in Sri Lanka during a time of tumult. Keshav (Roshan Mathew) and Amritha (Darshana Rajendran) are on a tour of the Ramayana Trail linked to Hindu mythology, but the former is more concerned with work than his surroundings. As Sri Lanka's economic crisis takes a turn for the worse, so too does the couple's trip. Paradise made its world premiere at the 28th Busan International Film Festival where it won the Kim Jeseok Award.

Perfect Days (Japan)

Nominations: Best Film, Best Actor*

German auteur Wim Wenders directs the Japanese-language production Perfect Days which has been nominated for Best International Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards. A tranquil composite of the simple days of a Tokyo public toilet cleaner, Perfect Days won the Ecumenical Jury Prize and the Best Actor Award for Yakusho Koji at the 76th Cannes Film Festival. AFA regular Yakusho receives his fifth-ever Best Actor nomination for his remarkable portrayal of a taciturn man who finds peace, purpose and fulfillment in his humble, solitary life. The legendary Japanese actor previously won the Best Actor prize in 2019 for The Blood of Wolves, as well as the Excellence In Asian Cinema Award.

Snow Leopard (Mainland China)

Nominations: Best Film, Best Screenplay*, Best Cinematography*, Best Production Design

Pioneering Tibetan filmmaker Pema Tseden passed away in 2023, leaving behind a staggering legacy as the first and greatest director of Tibetan-language cinema. Released posthumously, Pema Tseden's Snow Leopard is an allegorical tale about the conflict and mediation between man and nature, tradition and modernity, on the Tibetan Plateau. A herder family has captured a snow leopard that killed their sheep, and disagreement arises between family members on whether to release or retaliate against the protected animal. When authorities arrive to deal with the matter, tensions flare further but the issue seems no closer to getting resolved.

Dwelling by the West Lake (Mainland China)

Nominations: Best Director, Best Actress*, Best Original Music

Director Gu Xiaogang follows up his acclaimed painting-inspired debut film Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains with Dwelling by the West Lake, evoking another iconic Hangzhou landmark for a mother-son drama. This modern reimagining of the classic "Mulian Rescues His Mother" tale stars Leo Wu as son Mulian, a young man who moves to Hangzhou in search of his missing father. He must rescue his mother, played by Jiang Qinqin, who gets duped into a fraud scheme. Japanese composer Umebayashi Shigeru, known for his work on In the Mood for Love and The Grandmaster, created the original music for the film.

Monster

Monster (Japan)

Nominations: Best Director*, Best Screenplay, Best Production Design

Kore-eda Hirokazu, last year's Best Director winner, is up for the prize again with Monster, which won Best Screenplay and the Queer Palm at the 76th Cannes Film Festival. In a rare move, Kore-eda did not write the film himself, and instead collaborated with renowned screenwriter Sakamoto Yuji. The story begins with a mother's worry that her son is being mistreated at school, and gradually unfolds into a nuanced examination of how incomplete perspectives and judgments weave different truths and lies that hurt and haunt. Monster melds Sakamoto's nonlinear, multi-perspective storytelling with Kore-eda's deeply human themes and unrivalled ability to capture natural performances from child actors.

Abang Adik (Malaysia)

Nominations: Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor

Nominated for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor respectively, Wu Kang Ren and Jack Tan play undocumented orphan brothers Abang and Adik in Malaysian director Jin Ong's bleak neo-noir social drama. One resigned and one enraged, the brothers are doomed for struggle due to their lack of official identification. Golden Horse Best Actor winner Wu Kang Ren loses himself into the role of a deaf man who endeavors for goodness and normalcy, but the unforgiving circumstances of his identity, environment and upbringing make it hard to escape crime and poverty.

Full River Red (Mainland China)

Nominations: Best Actor

Zhang Yimou's historical comedy thriller garnered only one nomination for leading man Shen Teng, whose comedic talents solidify the satirical and farcical aspects of the unpredictable period blockbuster. Shen Teng and co-star Jackson Yee play soldiers who are tasked to find the truth behind the sudden death of an envoy at the compound of treasonous chancellor Qin Hui. With their lives on the line, they rush to investigate and manifest an appropriate explanation, unfurling a twisty battle of wits, lies and backstabbings in 12th-century China.

The Goldfinger (Hong Kong, Mainland China)

Nominations: Best Actor, Best Costume Design*, Best Production Design*

Tony Leung Chiu Wai, last year's Best Actor winner with Where the Wind Blows, is nominated again this year for his role in another nostalgic Hong Kong crime drama, Felix Chong's The Goldfinger. Tony plays an engineer who arrives in Hong Kong with nothing, and wills his way to massive wealth through bold risk-taking, sleight of hand and flagrant fraud and corruption, building a conglomerate of cards that eventually collapses. Based on the true story of Carrian Group founder George Tan, The Goldfinger evokes 1970s and 80s Hong Kong in romantic manner with production design by Eric Lam and costume design by Man Lim Chung.

Sleep

Sleep (South Korea)

Nominations: Best Actress, Best Screenplay

Writer-director Jason Yu's feature debut deftly blends black comedy, horror, suspense and relationship drama into an unexpected thriller that keeps you unsettled to the end. Screened in the Critics' Week section of the 76th Cannes Film Festival, Sleep stars Best Actress nominee Jung Yu Mi as a new wife and mother whose usually loving husband (Lee Sun Kyun) develops a strange and terrifying habit of walking and talking in his sleep. In the claustrophobic setting of the couple's apartment, his sleepwalking behavior becomes increasingly disturbing and dangerous, hinting of a more sinister presence.

The Breaking Ice (Mainland China, Singapore)

Nominations: Best Actress

Selected for the Un Certain Regard section of the 76th Cannes Film Festival, The Breaking Ice is Singapore writer-director Anthony Chen's first feature film shot in China. Set in the icy cold winter environs of Yanji, a border town in northeastern China near North Korea, the film depicts the brief connection of three young people lost in the gripping melancholy of loneliness and unfulfilled lives. Zhou Dongyu, who won Best Actress at the 14th AFA for Better Days, is nominated again for her performance as Nana, an unhappy tour guide who has cut off her past. She meets a depressed businessman (Liu Haoran) in town for a wedding and sets off on a trip with him and a friend (Qu Chuxiao) who is hopelessly in love with her.

Trouble Girl (Taiwan)

Nominations: Best Actress

Audrey Lin set a record as the youngest-ever Best Actress winner at the Golden Horse Awards for her performance as a 5th-grade student with mild ADHD in Taiwan director Chin Hia Hua's Trouble Girl. The 12-year-old phenom, who has drawn great praise since debuting in 2021's American Girl, plays the titular Xiao Xiao, whose differentness leads to her being ostracized and bullied at school. At home, she has a tense relationship with her stressed mother (Ivy Chen), who feels equally helpless about the situation. Xiao Xiao's homeroom teacher (Terrance Lau) reaches out to help mother and daughter communicate, but that brings about changes and troubles for the young girl and her family.

Yoko

Yoko (Japan)

Nominations: Best Actress

Kikuchi Rinko plays the eponymous heroine of director Kumakiri Kazuyoshi's 658km, Yoko no Tabi about a troubled woman's long journey home. Kikuchi Rinko shines in a subtle performance as a shut-in who has given up on her life and dreams. When her estranged father passes away, she sets out on the long trip from Tokyo to her hometown in Aomori for the funeral, but gets left behind at a rest stop. Yoko decides to hitchhike the rest of the way, encountering various people along the way including a vision of her father in his youth.

Smugglers (South Korea)
Nominations: Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Costume Design

Ryoo Seung Wan's rip-roaring crime action caper about female-divers-turned-smugglers in 1970s Korea scored a nod for its flamboyant era-appropriate fashion and acting noms for Park Jung Min and Go Min Si, the youngest members of the smuggling operation.

Time Still Turns the Pages (Hong Kong)
Nominations: Best Supporting Actor, Best New Director*

Winner of Best New Director at the 60th Golden Horse Awards, Nick Cheuk recalls a painful childhood wrought by academic pressure and domestic violence in his poignant debut feature. Child actor Sean Wong gives a heartbreaking performance as a young boy who yearns for family love and approval.

Godzilla Minus One (Japan)
Nominations: Best Supporting Actress, Best Visual Effects*, Best Sound*

Godzilla rises in VFX master Yamazaki Takashi's reboot reimagining the origin of the iconic kaiju in postwar Japan with stunning visual effects that have also garnered an Oscar nomination. New-generation star Hamabe Minami receives her first ever AFA nod for Best Supporting Actress.

Kubi

Kubi (Japan)
Nominations: Best Supporting Actor, Best Costume Design

Kitano Takeshi writes, directs and stars in the brutal and queer samurai drama Kubi about the Honno-ji incident during the Sengoku era. Out of the big cast of famous actors playing famous historical figures, Nakamura Shido receives a Best Supporting Actor nomination.

In Broad Daylight (Hong Kong)
Nominations: Best Supporting Actress*

Lawrence Kan's social realism drama is based on true events of shocking abuse at a residential care home for persons with disabilities. Rachel Leung received Best Supporting Actress noms at the Golden Horse and Hong Kong Film Awards for her heartrending role as a resident who falls victim to sexual abuse.

Last Shadow at First Light (Singapore, Japan)
Nominations: Best Supporting Actress, Best Newcomer

Singaporean director Nicole Midori Woodford's feature-length debut stars newcomer Shirata Mihaya as a teenage girl who is haunted by dreams and apparitions while she journeys from Singapore to Japan in search of her late mother, played by Tsutsui Mariko.

Snow in Midsummer (Malaysia, Taiwan)
Nominations: Best Supporting Actress, Best Costume Design, Best Sound

Malaysian filmmaker Chong Keat Aun's historical drama spans two eras, beginning in Kuala Lumpur with the tragic race riots of May 13, 1969, that tear apart a family. Veteran Taiwan artist Wan Fang plays a middle-aged woman still haunted by the losses of that day, nearly half a century later.

City of Wind (France, Mongolia)
Nominations: Best New Director, Best Newcomer*

Selected for the Venice and Toronto Film Festivals, writer-director Lkhagvadulam Purev-ochir's assured debut captures contemporary Mongolia through the coming-of-age experiences of a diligent 17-year-old student and shaman, played by Tergel Bold-erdene, who is awakened to new possibilities after meeting a girl.

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (Vietnam)
Nominations: Best New Director, Best Sound

Pham Tien An's directorial debut won the Caméra d'Or in the Directors' Fortnight section of the 76th Cannes Film Festival. A lyrical and contemplative exercise in slow cinema, the film follows a young man who suddenly becomes the guardian of his nephew. Together, they embark on a spiritual journey to find the boy's father.

Rapture

Rapture (India)
Nominations: Best New Director, Best Original Music

Drawing on childhood memories and village myths, Indian filmmaker Dominic Sangma explores the power and politics of fear in his sophomore effort. A 10-year-old boy with night blindness and his village community are gripped with fear of kidnappers, while the local church prophesizes the coming of darkness.

Tiger Stripes (Malaysia)
Nominations: Best New Director

A vivacious adolescent girl begins to undergo monstrous physical changes that alienate her from peers in Amanda Nell Eu's directorial debut about the horrors of puberty. Coming of age meets body horror in this Malay-language film, which won the Critics' Week Grand Prize at the 76th Cannes Film Festival.

Doi Boy

Doi Boy (Thailand, Cambodia)
Nominations: Best Newcomer

Director Nontawat Numbenchapol brings the sociopolitical themes of his documentaries into his first narrative feature depicting three young men on the margins of Thai society. Awat Ratanapintha plays an undocumented immigrant from Myanmar working as a sex worker in Chiang Mai.

Fly Me to the Moon (Hong Kong)
Nominations: Best Newcomer

A family chronicle spanning from 1997 to 2017, Sasha Chuk's semi-autobiographical feature debut follows two sisters who move from Hunan to Hong Kong in 1997, and carry the shadows of their troubled family into adulthood. Yoyo Tse, who plays the younger sister in the film's mid-section, won Best New Performer at the Golden Horse Awards.

Hidden Blade (Mainland China)
Nominations: Best Newcomer

Already one of China's biggest young stars, singer-actor Wang Yibo takes on his most high-profile film role as an enigmatic operative alongside Tony Leung in Cheng Er's period espionage thriller set in 1940s Shanghai.

Only the River Flows (Mainland China)
Nominations: Best Editing, Best Cinematography, Best Production Design

Selected for the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival, Wei Shujun's neo-noir drama is based on a novel by Yu Hua and stars Zhu Yilong as a police detective investigating a series of murders in 1990s rural China.

Qas

Qas (Kazakhstan)
Nominations: Best Cinematography, Best Original Music

A gravedigger travels through hellish, parched lands and nightmarish hallucinations in Aisultan Seitov's harrowing feature debut set during the 1930s Soviet famine that claimed over a million lives in Kazakhstan.

Road to Boston (South Korea)
Nominations: Best Original Music

Kang Je Gyu's biographical sports drama about the first Korean athletes to participate in the Boston Marathon in 1947 features music by veteran composer Lee Dong June, who scored the director's past works including Shiri, Taegukgi and My Way.

Creation of the Gods 1 (Mainland China)
Nominations: Best Costume Design, Best Visual Effects, Best Sound

The ancient Chinese mythology and history of Investiture of the Gods gets a stunning new silver-screen telling in Wuershan's blockbuster fantasy action epic, which won Best Picture at the 36th Golden Rooster Awards.

Concrete Utopia (South Korea)
Nominations: Best Production Design, Best Visual Effects, Best Sound

After a devastating earthquake hits Seoul, one apartment complex is left standing amid wasteland in Uhm Tae Hwa's disaster thriller where the lone Concrete Utopia derails into Lord of the Flies dystopia.

The Moon (South Korea)
Nominations: Best Visual Effects

Along with the Gods director Kim Yong Hwa and Dexter Studios bring another special effects breakthrough for Korean cinema with this space survival drama about an astronaut stranded on the moon.

The Wandering Earth 2

The Wandering Earth II (Mainland China)
Nominations: Best Visual Effects

Building on the groundbreaking achievements of the first film, Frant Gwo's second adaptation of Liu Cixin's novella is an epic sci-fi prequel detailing the start of the planetary migration project to save Earth and humanity.

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Published March 6, 2024

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