‘Everything, Everywhere’: Contemplative drama speaks to lonely drifters

Japanese filmmakers have been shooting abroad for decades but typically on studio projects that use their foreign settings as exotic backdrops.

Kah Wai Lim, a Malaysian director who has long been based on Osaka, makes indie films that are the very definition of borderless, including his Balkan trilogy: “No Where, Now Here” (2018), “Somewhen, Somewhere” (2019) and his latest, “Everything, Everywhere.”

Shot with a skeleton crew and using local non-professionals to flesh out the cast, these films are a mix of drama, documentary and travelogue. Lim’s viewpoint is less that of a parachuted-in director, grabbing as much local color as he can, than an inquisitive backpacker and filmmaker who goes where he pleases and films as inspiration strikes him. Lim’s self-applied label: Cinema Drifter.