Chinese Malaysian director Lim Kah Wai describes himself as “a cinema drifter.” He has filmed far and wide, including two projects set in the Balkans, but has called Osaka his base for nearly two decades. And, as his latest feature “Come and Go” shows, he is intimately acquainted with the lives of Asian migrants and visitors in his adopted home.
This sprawling ensemble drama, which completes an Osaka trilogy that includes previous films “New World” (2011) and “Fly Me to Minami” (2013), features characters of nine different nationalities, from a Taiwanese tourist (Lee Kang-sheng) who frequents adult video stores to a Vietnamese print shop worker (Lien Binh Phat) who is desperate to return home to his ailing mother. Scripted by Lim and shot in 2019, it depicts a pre-pandemic world that now seems strangely distant.
“The situation has completely changed because no more travelers are coming to Japan,” Lim says in an interview in October at the Shibuya office of his distributor, Really Like Films. “Also, most of the students and technical trainees had to return to their own countries, probably from the beginning of 2020. And now they can’t enter Japan because the border is closed.” [The Japan government has since relaxed border restrictions, announcing on Nov. 5 that it would begin accepting foreign nationals coming to the country for business trips, study abroad or technical training.]