So Yo-hen’s Park (公園,2024; YIDFF 2025 International Competition) begins as a quiet experiment. Two Indonesian migrants, Asri and Hasan, meet in Tainan Park to recite poetry, exchange thoughts, and make a movie about it. Illuminated by the faint light of street lamps and their phones, the filmmaker friends frivolously carry only a microphone and an idea. At first, this minimal setup feels fresh and captivating. The park becomes a stage where fragments of friendship and language intertwine, telling the stories and shaping a community that doesn’t yet know it is one. The camera, patient and unintrusive, watches them with tenderness. For a while, the film feels still, bright, and pleasant.

But as time passes, the spell begins to dissolve. Park runs for over ninety minutes, and by its second half, the film starts to collapse under its own repetition. The images loop back on themselves; gestures, locations, and stories return with little variation. Even the characters notice this fatigue. At one point, they admit that everything “has been going round and round in circles,” that the film itself is “becoming more and more unclear.” They even joke that “there’s always a message to convey — in this movie, we don’t know what it is; maybe the audience will figure it out by themselves.” It’s a moment of brutal honesty that exposes both the film’s self-awareness and its problem. Park recognizes its own loop but chooses to stay inside it. What might have worked sharply as a forty-minute short stretches into a full-length experiment that tests not just patience, but purpose.

There is an irony at the core of the movie. It deliberately rejects narrative structure and resolution, yet this pursuit of total freedom becomes its own kind of constraint. The more the film insists on escaping norms, the more it traps itself in a loop of self-awareness. Repetition, at first poetic, turns mechanical. The rhythm slows until it resembles stillness. What remains is atmosphere without evolution — a film recycling its own motifs and relying on well-shot stills, almost as if to disguise the lack of purpose beneath its beauty.

Yet it would be unfair to dismiss Park. It is, at its core, an honest experiment — tenderly shot, quietly ambitious, and sustained by the magnetic presence of its two leading performers. The cinematography captures the humid stillness of parks’ nights with precision. When the film works, it finds fleeting moments of genuine beauty: a half-lit smile, a verse carried by the rain, a sense of companionship that feels both accidental and sacred. But those moments, however striking, remain scattered — diluted by the film’s unwillingness to shape them into something more. Park begins as a gesture of freedom and ends as a study in exhaustion. Its characters speak of things “going round and round in circles,” of everything “becoming more and more unclear,” and the film seems to absorb those words into its very form.

Lorena Sampaio