Film Diary

Ten years of Asian film recommendations. A 2026 edit.

I started writing about films in 2010 because I was an actress who wasn’t always on set.

Watching was how I practiced. Not passively… I was studying. The way someone delivered a line in a scene I’d never get to play. How a director chose to cut away before the crying started, or didn’t. What a body does when the dialogue stops.

For ten years that became its own thing. A real archive of how I was thinking, what I was paying attention to, who I was at every stage of it.

Then it wasn’t.

Life moved. I moved. The posts stopped, the site sat, and I kept watching films without writing a single word about them.

Coming back to this in 2026 was strange. I found posts I’d forgotten I’d written… researched properly, argued honestly, published, long before you could ask an AI to do it in thirty seconds now. It hurt more than I expected to delete them. Not because they were all good (some were, some weren’t) but because they were real. Time and attention and a version of me that existed fully then.

I’ve come to understand that change isn’t erasure. Letting go of who I was in 2010 as a Communications and New Media undergraduate, or 2016, or even 2021, doesn’t mean losing what those years built. It just means I’m honest enough to admit I’m no longer that person.

I kept what I’d still stand behind. Some for the writing. Some because they still sit somewhere in my chest. And some because I read them completely differently now — I co-founded Sandbox Training Ground, a stunt and action performance facility in 2021, and watching a fight scene is not the same thing it used to be. Changing lenses to see from a stunt performer’s eye on physicality, choreography, and the gap between what a body does on screen and what it actually takes to get there. Or maybe as a mum of two.

This is a decade of Asian film recommendations, cut down to what I’d still mean. Korean crime. Japanese arthouse. Hong Kong action. Singapore productions. The occasional film that stopped belonging to any single category. Or the ones that crossed genres entirely.

Browse. Start anywhere.