For this weeks #BCM320 screening, we watched the Japanese anime series ‘Hi Score Girl’. The Netflix show is based off a literary manga series, which was created in 2010 by Rensuke Oshikiri. This 90s arcade romantic comedy follows Haruo Yaguchi, an obsessive gamer who meets his match Akira Ono, a silent yet strong rival with a tendency to resort to violence. Throughout the show, the two almost juxtaposing characters start to develop a bond over their love for gaming and we start to see a beautiful friendship blossom.

While I don’t consider myself an anime fan by any means at all, finding out what our screening was this week did make me remember all of the anime that I have consumed in my life. Growing up I was exposed to a range of popular Westsern style animes including Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Beyblade, Naruto, Dragon Ball Z and Avatar The Last Airbender…

For this week’s #BCM320 Digital Asia screening we watched the 2018 Pakistani film Cake, a touching story centred around an often dysfunctional yet forgiving family. Throughout this film, we are presented with different ideas of Pakistani culture, mainly patriarchy, etiquette and responsibility. From my experience watching this film, I felt like I was presented with a family which is transitioning between generations. While the main characters in this movie are faced with the most difficult periods in their lives, they learn to grow into a more modern and diverse family.

One of the most recurring themes in this film is responsibility. This mostly relates to the eldest sister Zareen, who at the beginning of the story is the main caretaker for her parents and helps…

Something that I quickly noticed watching this weeks #BCM320 film, Furie, was how easy I found it to become fully immersed and invested into a story that I had little cultural connection to. Having never travelled to Vietnam or engaged in any type of Vietnamese content before, I was surprised by my experience during this movie. I felt a sense of familiarity with Hai’s story not necessarily because it related to me culturally but because of how it was presented.

One of the reasons I believe I found this film so accessible was because of its genre as an action movie along with the simple plot. The film has the typical Hollywood style (possibly because it’s a…

Like many other students in this subject, Love for Sale (2018) was one of my first experiences watching an Indonesian film. In fact, the most involved I have been in any type of content from an Asian country is either watching Naruto as a kid or sitting through Filipino soap operas in a Manila hotel. To be honest, I would usually avoid non-english speaking films, like this one, simply because I’m too lazy to read subtitles, however I quickly found myself along for the touching and often infuriating journey of Richard.

To better articulate what I took away from Love for Sale I will be taking an auto-ethnographic approach, drawing from my personal experience, i.e. live tweeting, to analyse my cultural experience of watching the film. I will incorporate some of those tweets where I recorded the relational practices, common…