‘Yen and Ai-Lee’ wins Onmanorama Critics’ Choice of IFFK 2025

Taiwanese drama ‘Yen and Ai-Lee’, directed by Tom Shu-yu Lin, won the Onmanorama Critics’ Choice 2025 of the 30th International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) in Thiruvananthapuram. The selection follows seven days of deliberation by a three-member jury comprising Swathi P Ajith, Ayyappan R and Aswin J Kumar, who evaluated all 14 films in the competition section.

While ‘Yen and Ai-Lee’ secured the highest jury points, the final rankings reflected a closely contested field, with only a narrow margin separating films placed fifth through second. The top five selections span continents, cultures and cinematic forms, ranging from formally challenging works to emotionally resonant narratives that offer intimate and often unsettling insights into human experience.

Here are the Top Five Films chosen for Onmanorama Critics’ Choice 2025, presented in reverse order: 

5. Thanthaperu / Life of a Phallus

Set within the Cholanaikkan tribe, ‘Thanthaperu’ follows Nari, a young man coming of age in a world destabilised by the disappearance of women and rigid controls over marriage. When long-buried truths about his father emerge, everything Nari has accepted as tradition begins to unravel, forcing him to confront inherited beliefs shaped further by the lingering impact of the Indian Emergency.

As desire, fear and history collide, Nari’s journey becomes one of reckoning and self-definition. The film examines masculinity and power, how men perform authority in public while struggling to articulate emotion in private, alongside the quiet yet decisive ways women assert agency, even when it means defying social norms. Marking a significant cinematic milestone, the film is the first feature made in the Cholanaikka language, spoken by the region’s indigenous cave-dwelling community.

4. The Elysian Field / Ha Lyngkha Bneng

Set in the Khasi Hills in the year 2047, ‘The Elysian Field’ unfolds in a village slowly disappearing, with only six residents remaining after most have migrated to the city. As life around them changes, the villagers find solace in each other, sharing moments of loss, warmth and cautious hope.

The film closely observes the realities of those who stay behind, living without electricity, struggling even to bury their dead, and finding hope in small possibilities such as restoring power. Rather than imagining the future through technological progress, Pradip Kurbah focuses on what endures when a place is forgotten. Gentle and affirming, the film is less about despair and more about resilience, showing how people survive by holding on to one another.

3. Cuerpo Celeste

Set during the summer of 1990, as Chile approaches the end of its dictatorship, the film follows fifteen-year-old Celeste spending her holidays with her family on a secluded beach near the Atacama Desert. A sudden incident disrupts her youth and sends her mother into emotional decline, altering the rhythm of their lives.

When Celeste returns months later, drawn back by a rare solar eclipse, the place feels unfamiliar and changed. As the country stands on the threshold of a new era, Celeste must find her own way forward. Political unrest remains largely unspoken, yet it quietly shapes the atmosphere, mirroring her inner turmoil. The film captures a profound sense of uncertainty and isolation, allowing emotion to surface without explicit explanation.

2. Black Rabbit, White Rabbit

During the production of a remake of a classic Iranian film in Tajikistan, a studio armorer grows uneasy when he suspects that a gun intended for the shoot may be real. On set, a young woman arrives demanding an audition, while elsewhere in the city, Sara, recovering from a car accident, begins to believe the crash was part of a larger conspiracy.

What begins as separate narratives gradually converge. ‘Black Rabbit, White Rabbit’ builds tension through connections, letting one small decision bleed into the next. Life unfolds like a performance, with reality and acting seeping into each other. Resisting easy answers, the film rewards careful attention as unease quietly takes hold. With contemporary anxieties around on-set firearms directly acknowledged, the gun becomes less a prop and more an inevitable threat, turning Chekhov’s famous principle into something disturbingly real.

1. Yen and Ai-Lee

After spending eight years in prison, Yen returns to her Hakka village in Kaohsiung, carrying the silent weight of a past the community struggles to confront. Reuniting with her widowed mother is fraught with discomfort, and the arrival of Ai-Lee, a woman shaped by city life and steeped in mystery, unsettles the fragile balance Yen is trying to rebuild.

Having killed her abusive father, Yen comes home to a place that no longer knows how to receive her. Marked by suspicion and emotional distance, she finds it difficult to resume an ordinary life. Unable to exist fully as herself, she adopts another identity, taking her mother’s name, Ai-Lee, as a temporary refuge from memory and pain. The film treats Yen and Ai-Lee not as separate characters but as parallel emotional states, one rooted in trauma and guilt, the other in denial and survival, exploring how identity fractures under the weight of unresolved violence.

Other films in the competition category

1. If on a Winter’s Night / Khidki Gaav

2. Hiedra / The Ivy

3. The Settlement

4. The Currents / Las Corrientes

5. Kissing Bug / Vinchuca

6. Before the Body / Antes del Cuerpo

7. Two Seasons, Two Strangers

8. Shadowbox / Baksho Bondi

9. Cinema Jazireh