RIFLE RANGE BOY

Vina - Sebelum 7 Hari. (Indonesian, 2024) Director:  Anggy Umbara Thanks to Saravanan Decodes , my latest indulgence, for highlighting many solved and unsolved mysteries worldwide. He has 700-over YouTube presentations of some of the most puzzling and heinous murders and tries to decode them. Two exciting cases piqued my interest. It was in how these seemingly dead-ended cases saw living daylight through unconventional methods. The first case happened in Cirebon, West Java. A 16-year-old Vina Dewi Arsita, a student, was reported to have died after getting involved in a road traffic accident while travelling with her boyfriend, Edy, in the thick of the night in 2016. The death certificate was released as death due to Motor Vehicle Accident. There were some uncertainties about whether police did not come forward with more information about the ongoing investigations or whether their investigation was shoddy. Her boyfriend, too, perished in the accident. Burial was done. On the sevent...

Past Lives (Korean/English; 2023) Director: Celine Song One thing that created the rift between two men who dared to venture into the crypt of our mind and try to explain why we act and react the way we do remains unresolved.  Sigmund Freud posited, in simpler terms, that our learnt experiences, together with unresolved pervasive sexual desires, are the main reasons for actions, inaction and maladies. His mentee, Karl Jung, thought some external events and forces might manifest as meaningful coincidences. The question is whether we have only one life, just here and now and then we die, or we come here again and again. The film is selling the Korean Buddhist idea of 'In Yun'. We are all somehow connected cosmologically through reincarnation. When we meet people and feel we know them, we may do. There may be some unsettled business that needed to be settled, left from our previous encounters, god knows when. This could be our umpteenth trans-birth meet. Or it could be a ruse to g...