Chinatown Cowboy
2025 · 10m · USA
Directed by Jaafar Alnabi
Tones: contemplative, tense, theatrical
A debt-collecting cowboy chases a thief named Ming through lower Manhattan, the western genre transplanted onto sidewalk grit and dim sum signage. Shot on 16mm with Cantonese dialogue threading the noir.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A western that refuses the desert. That's the kind of formal mischief I want — take a genre off its assigned terrain and see whose grammar survives the move.
A straight-faced western in Cantonese on the wrong continent — Alnabi lets 16mm grain do the work of a desert sunset, and the Jarmusch-by-way-of-Wong gesture is precisely the right transplant. Genuinely promising.
A straight-faced Cantonese neo-noir western in lower Manhattan shot on 16mm — the dialect-genre-stock combo is doing all three jobs at once. That's a real signature, not a gimmick.