James Balmont

For the thousands of passengers piling into Tokyo’s subway network on Monday, March 20, 1995, it should have been a commute like any other. The air was cool, the skies outside were clear, and the looming Spring Equinox – a national holiday in Japan –promised respite from the country’s high-pressure work culture the next day. But unbeknown to the rush-hour crowds, among them were extremist followers of a doomsday cult about to enact Japan’s deadliest domestic terror attack.
At around 08:00 tha...

Ancient cave paintings in Kona, Hawaii will tell you that early Polynesians invented surfing over 1,000 years ago. By the mid-20th century, it had become a vibrant subculture in hotspots like California and Western Australia, and soon youngsters the world over were falling in love with the image of toned, tanned dudes and dudettes repeatedly tumbling into the sea.
You’d expect most of these places to be vaguely compatible with such a lifestyle. Yet even though the country is known for its fre...

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Following a month-long retrospective in March of one of the movement’s most beloved filmmakers –Cannes 2000 Best Director winner Edward Yang (Yi Yi) – the BFI continues its deep dive into one of East Asian cinema’s most remarkable filmmaking movements this April with Myriad Voices: Reframing Taiwan New Cinema.
Spearheaded in the early 80s by young directors like Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien, the Taiwan New Cinema movement found a new generation of filmmakers striving to tell authentic t...

(Image credit: Courtesy of studio)
By James Balmont
published yesterday
in Features
It’s been five years since Bong Joon Ho made Oscars history in 2020 with Parasite – a contemporary classic of social satire, and only the second film in history to win both the Cannes Palme d’Or and the Academy Award for Best Picture. Now, the wait for a follow-up is finally over as the long-delayed sci-fi romp Mickey 17 hits the big screen in the UK (7 March 2025).
To mark the occasion, the BFI invited the Ko...

Japan is famous for the way its cultural artefacts seem to evolve separately from the rest of the world. Travel to Tokyo and you can find fax machines that have continued to develop new bells and whistles long after their use in the west began its terminal decline in the 1990s.
Shokuhin sanpuru (literally: food samples), ubiquitous in restaurants and cafes across Japan, are another such Japan-centric creation, accepted as a part of daily culture from Hokkaido to Kyushu but rarely seen elsewhe...

Wake up! While you were yawning at the naffness of this year’s Oscars nominations and snoozing your way through the multiplexes’ blockbuster discards in ​“dump month” January, one of the country’s most dynamic film festivals pulled up to the doorstep with an arsenal from the far reaches of the Pacific.
The (deep breath) Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme kicks off today. Its the biggest event celebrating Japanese cinema in the whole of Blighty, and it offers a bumper package of features ...

Cosmo Jarvis and Hiroyuki Sanada star in the new hit Hulu/FX/Disney+ series Shōgun, which brings to life Japan's violent feudal past in all its terrifying glory.
There's a stomach-churning moment in the debut episode of FX/Disney+'s Shōgun that sets the standard for the kind of brutality surely to follow. Having endured starvation, scurvy, and a captain's suicide aboard a ravaged Dutch trade ship, pilot major John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) and his surviving crew are shipwrecked off the coast...

When Alex Ayuli coined the term “dream pop” in the late 80s, it was to distinguish the otherworldly sounds of 4AD bands like Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil and A.R. Kane from the more grounded “indie” groups of the era. These bands’ songs “sounded as though they’d been recorded in a flotation tank,” said Richard King in his alt-pop musical history book How Soon is Now? – the descriptor fit the music perfectly.
But fast-forward some 35 years, and a new wave of women from Denmark are channelli...

In a nightmarish institution in industrial neo-Tokyo, a cybernetic sex slave is subjected to a power-drill lobotomy after failing to satisfy two handlers during an orgy. Abandoned at the edge of the city, the hapless android is adopted by a feral street urchin named Himiko, who teaches him to speak and to love in her subterranean sewer bedsit. But as Himiko’s mental state fractures and Pinocchio’s mad creator sets out to reclaim him, the fragile, spike-haired cyborg is thrust into a bustling ...

At the end of the 20th century, Japan’s ambient scene blossomed thanks to corporate sponsorship and a strong economy. Now the music is more popular than ever.
The newfound popularity of Japan’s ambient, new age kankyō ongaku (literally: “environmental music”) over the past decade is a fascinating trend. Its initial re-emergence, after all, was not the result of any real will or intent.
A quirk in the YouTube algorithm was to blame for the widespread phenomenon of users in the mid-to-late 2010...

Indie sleaze, rockstars and beer-soaked chaos: take a trip back to the legendary Vice-owned pub's 00s heyday
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There was a point in time, in the early ‘00s, when the Old Blue Last was quite literally the centre of London for kids like me.
The rowdy Shoreditch boozer — on the crossroads connecting Great Eastern Street with Curtain Road — was then a bastion of unhindered fun, lying almost exactly at the midpoint between the vintage clothes stores of Brick Lan...

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In our latest guest blog featuring Liverpool-supporting musicians, James Balmont from Swim Deep recounts his love story with the Reds...
It’s February 2014, and Swim Deep are in Hong Kong for the last show of our first-ever tour of Asia. It’s a moment none of us want to forget.
After a year of promoting our debut album ‘Where the Heaven Are We’, we’ve made it to one of the most striking cities on earth, where we’re surrounded by jungle, sea and skyscrapers.
We’re in one of the most bizarre ...

One of the most tragic aspects of Mark Lanegan’s passing back at the start of 2022 was that it had seemed like, after a career spanning more than three decades, the hard-worn and weary singer was finally on the cusp of achieving greater recognition for his storied body of work. His harrowing memoir Sing Backwards and Weep had been a best-seller upon its release in 2020, shining a light on Lanegan’s central role in the Seattle grunge scene as the formidable frontman of Screaming Trees, and on ...

The Brian Jonestown Massacre once seemed destined to become footnotes in rock history. Sure, the West Coast psych-rock troupe were beloved by vinyl lovers and bowl-cut enthusiasts in the 1990s, but their attempts to break into the mainstream had been repeatedly thwarted – usually through self-sabotage by their frontman Anton Newcombe – leaving their stoner anthems languishing in obscurity by the dawn of the new millennium.
Then came Dig!. The cult documentary catapulted the band to notoriety ...

The director of the cult classic Korean wave sci-fi comedy reflects on his wild debut two decades on, and the forthcoming remake from Yorgos Lanthimos.
It was in early 2005 that I first stumbled across the unlikely image of a costumed Korean man lassoing planets in a fit of giddy mania in my local HMV. The DVD in question had ‘Tartan Asia Extreme’ plastered on the header, and since I’d already shat my pants watching Japanese children be put to slaughter in Battle Royale and Sadako crawl out o...