Mixed eclectic offerings for Asian American film festival
NEW YORK: The 40th Asian American International Film Festival (AAIFF) bows in today with a mixed plate of authentic Asian stories to fix your craving.
The festival was founded in the 1970s by a group of pioneering Asian filmmakers including Tsui Hark (Journey To The West: The Demons Strike Back), Christine Choy (Who Killed Vincent Chin?), and Thomas Tam, with a mission to promote Asian and Asian American film and video. Ang Lee and Joan Chen‘s early works were first introduced to US audiences throuigh this festival.
This year, over 80 films, including eight feature films from the Greater China region shall be presented.
Some of the notable entries follow. • Plastic China • (Director: Wang Jiuliang)
China is by far the world’s greatest plastic importer. Every year, developed countries from around the world send China ten million tons of plastic waste, and it’s only getting worse. Chinese filmmaker Wang Jiuliang tells the troubling tale of the working people whose lives revolve around this waste. • Absurd Accident • (Director: Li Yuhe)
Bouncing with nail-biting suspense and ingenious humour, young Chinese filmmaker Li Yuhe’s feature debut portrays a puzzling crime that happens in a rural small town, where greed, lust and wit, battle it out in one night with a sexually impotent motel owner, a hitman, a cheating wife, two blind daters, a robber, a policeman…and a strange dead body. • Taxi Stories • (Director: Doris Yeung)
In an increasingly economically polarised and 24/7 Asia, a poor Beijing taxi driver, a pregnant Hong Kong trophy wife and a Jakarta slum kid struggle to connect despite the constraints of their social class. • Class of 97: Shopping for • Fangs (Directors: Quentin • Lee and Justin Lin)
This is a show of four films by four talented Asian-American filmmakers, considered by cinema and Asian American studies scholars to be the Asian American New Wave. Before Justin Lin took his turn directing The Fast & the Furious, he co-directed Shopping for Fangs, a hip and funny thriller that centres on four very different Asian-Americans in their 20s whose lives unexpectedly intertwine. Phil is a payroll clerk who believes that he is turning into a werewolf because he has an unusual amount of body hair. Clarence is a homosexual student who spends most his time studying in the diner where the feisty, blond-wig wearing lesbian Trinh works. Katherine is married to a real meathead. She is terrified of lovemaking and is very forgetful due to occasional blackouts. • Free and Easy • (Director: Geng Jun)
Free and Easy, which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, tells the story of a travelling soap salesman arriving in a desolate Chinese town. When a crime occurs, the strange residents turn against each other with tragicomic results. In this absurdist comedy directed by Geng Jun, “it’s not your mouth but your mind that risks getting washed out by soap.” • Made in Hong Kong-4K • Restored Version • (Director: Fruit Chan)
Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong Kong was a film made at the time of the changeover in Hong Kong; the depiction of low-level triads attempting to carry out various small scale activities could be seen as a portrait of the ways in which so many business ventures tried to continue under the radar of governmental oversight which was expected to overtake Hong Kong. Yet the escalating explosions of violence provide the kind of visceral excitement which was a hallmark of Hong Kong cinema.