Movies We Adore: Asian Heritage Month

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Our movie recommendations to celebrate Asian Heritage Month

Some stories don't just deserve to be told - they need to be heard, felt, and watched. Stories that carry the weight of memory, migration, identity, and belonging. Stories that have existed for generations in living rooms, in languages the mainstream hasn't bothered to learn, in faces that rarely see themselves reflected on a big screen.

It is a living, breathing tapestry of art, cinema, food, fashion, and language that has shaped our world in ways we often don't stop to acknowledge. 

This Asian Heritage Month, we wanted to do more than just celebrate — we wanted to honour. So, we curated a watchlist of films made by Asian artists, helmed by Asian directors, and rooted in Asian experiences.  
No outsider gaze. No exoticisation. Just honest, fearless, extraordinary filmmaking. These are films that will make you feel, think, and see differently. And that's exactly the point.  

1. Homebound

What does dignity cost? And who gets to afford it? Neeraj Ghaywan's Homebound follows two young men from a North Indian village chasing a shared dream: to become police officers, to matter, to be seen. As the system closes in, that dream begins to fracture, and so does everything they thought they could hold onto. 

Ghaywan doesn't preach. He simply places his characters inside a world that was never built for people like them and lets you watch. Co-written with Sumit Roy and with Martin Scorsese as Executive Producer, the film premiered at Cannes' Un Certain Regard section to a nine-minute standing ovation before being selected as India's official Oscar entry. Empathetic, restrained, and quietly devastating. This movie stays lodged in your chest long after it ends. 

2. Past Lives  

Past Lives is a romantic drama written and directed by Celine Song in her feature directorial debut. It follows two childhood friends over the course of 24 years while they contemplate the nature of their relationship as they grow apart and live different lives. The plot is semi-autobiographical and inspired by real events from Song's own life. At its heart, it's a film about the lives we leave behind when we leave a country, and whether those lives ever truly let us go.

Song introduces the Korean concept of In-Yun - the universe's way of reuniting souls who shared a past to Western viewers, weaving it into a story that is achingly restrained, told through glances, silences, and conversations that carry the weight of decades. One of the most quietly devastating films of recent years. 

3. No Other Choice 

In his diabolical new thriller, Park Chan-wook crafts a dark fable about the cutthroat nature of contemporary work culture and the domestic desperation for material comfort. Based on Donald Westlake's novel The Ax, the film follows Man-soo, a devoted family man who is abruptly laid off from the paper manufacturing company to which he has dedicated decades of his life. After an extended and increasingly worrisome period of unemployment, he begins to take merciless measures toward solidifying his standing with a potential new employer — leading to wild and ever more absurd acts of violence, crafted by Park in his inimitable, extravagant pitch-black comic style.  

I personally think that the director retells the story for an era dominated by conversations about workforce shrinkage in the age of AI, and it doesn't seem coincidental that Park has made a film about a man who attempts to remove all his competition at a time when stories about the extinction of the human worker make new headlines every week. A great thought-provoking watch in my opinion!

4. How To Make Millions Before Grandma Dies

Don't let the title fool you! This Thai film is as emotionally devastating as it is funny. At its core, it's a story about a grandson who moves in with his dying grandmother, partly out of love and partly out of hope of being included in her will. 

What unfolds is something far more profound: a meditation on family, guilt, caregiving, and what it really means to show up for someone. It will make you want to call your grandparents. It will also make you cry in a way you didn't see coming. 

5. Riceboy Sleeps 

Riceboy Sleeps is a 2022 Canadian drama film written, produced, edited, and directed by Anthony Shim. Based in part on his own childhood, the film centres on So-Young, a Korean immigrant single mother who wants to give her teenage son a better life by moving to Canada. It's a familiar immigrant song sung in such an elegant, sincere voice that it feels like a whole new arrangement - a drifting, dreamed quality that captures the cost of assimilation across two generations.  

I love how this film uses changing aspect ratios and film stocks to mirror the emotional journey, from intimate and claustrophobic in Canada, and then wide and open when they return to Korea. A quiet, profound love letter from a son to his mother, and to the country they left behind. 

6. Didi

Set in 2008, during the last month of summer before high school begins, Didi follows an impressionable 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy learning what his family can't teach him: how to skate, how to flirt, and how to grow up.  

A semi-autobiographical love letter to teenage angst that's also slyly self-critical, Didi is a deeply moving personal statement by writer-director Sean Wang. Shot in the actual Fremont, California neighbourhood where Wang grew up with his real grandmother in the cast, the film captures with brutal honesty the experience of being between cultures at an age when belonging is everything. It's funny, it's cringe-worthy, and by the end, it will make you want to call your mum. 

7. Perfect Days

Perfect Days is a drama directed by Wim Wenders, following the routine life of Hirayama, a public toilet cleaner in Tokyo. It premiered at the 76th Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Best Actor Award for Kōji Yakusho. Every morning, the same cassette tape. The same vending machine coffee. The same trees are being photographed at lunch.

And yet, when I watched the repetition through Wenders' hands, it became a kind of philosophy! A gentle, radical argument that a small life, lived with full attention, is a rich one. The film introduces the Japanese word komorebi - “the shimmering of light and shadow created by leaves swaying in the wind - something that only exists once, at that moment." Perfect Days is cinema as mindfulness. You'll leave it wanting to notice more.

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And that’s a wrap! Hope you feel inspired to watch some of these films, and if you have a movie you would add, tell us in the comments!

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