Archive for November, 2015
Check The Rhime: International Southeast Asian Film Festival and China Now: Independent Visions
Kosal Khiev speechifying, Cambodian Son, 2014
San Francisco will see an abundance of riches this weekend in invigorating Asian and Asian American films. The inaugural International Southeast Asian Film Festival (I-SEA) opens this Friday, Nov. 20 and runs through Nov. 22 at Artists Television Access in the Mission District and at New People Cinema in Japantown. And on Sun. Nov. 22 the San Francisco Cinematheque is hosting China Now: Independent Visions, a three-part series at the Victoria Theater, the Center for Asian American Media, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
Notable in the China Now program is Ai Weiwei’s feature length documentary Ping’An Yueqing, which investigates governmental malfeasance in the controversial 2010 death of Zhejiang province land-rights activist Qian Yunhui, who was run over by a truck after years of speaking out against the local government’s confiscation of villagers’ property without compensation. Part thriller, part procedural, the documentary utilizes interviews of concerned parties, reenactments, surveillance videos, and media reports to look at the human cost of globalization and development and the political suppression of dissent in China.
Abandoned, Yumen, 2013
Also worthwhile is the series’ closing program, which includes three animated films and a feature documentary/narrative hybrid. Zhong Su’s 3-D animated shor Perfect Congugal Bliss packs a plethora of visual signifiers into its five-minute running time. Astronauts, insects, soup dumplings, moon cakes, demolished buildings, instant noodle packages, and statues of the Buddha float across the scrolling filmic landscape, suggesting the temporal transience of China’s changing cultural landscape. Zhang Yipin’s How includes some beautiful ink-on-glass animation that illustrates a young girl’s thoughts on life in a high-rise building. Ding Shiwei’s Double Act combines a percussive score to with evocative black-and-white visual elements including wilted flowers, bodies in transparent coffins, anonymous figures in suits and ties, and headless statues to make an unsettling statement about life under a restrictive regime. Following these shorts is Yumen, Huang Xiang, Xu Ruotao, and JP Sniadecki’s experimental fiction/documentary set in the western Gansu province city of Yumen, which throughout its history has experienced a series of booms and busts including a surge after the discovery of oil nearby in the 1930s. The filmmakers, who shot on 16mm, travel through Yumen’s empty buildings and desolate landscapes and stage performances, poetry reading, dance and other curious events in the mostly-abandoned city, creating a strange elegy to the wasteland of China’s recent history of industrialization and modernization.
Included in the International Southeast Asian (I-SEA) film festival is Masahiro Sugano’s Cambodian Son, a loosely structured, jazzy documentary that follows Kosal Khiev, a Cambodian American poet and spoken word artist now living in Cambodia. Khiev belongs to the Khmer-in-exile community in Phnom Penh—like his fellow exiles he was deported from the US after serving a prison sentence for a felony conviction. The film looks at the circumstances leading to Khiev’s deportation as well as those of several other Khmer exiles, recounting the hard-knock life of many Cambodian refugees in the US. Cambodian Son makes use of several of Khiev’s spoken word performances as it recounts his struggle to recover from imprisonment and to adapt to life in exile. The film is an unsentimental look at one person’s attempt to reimagine his existence after trauma and loss.
Khmer Rouge and victim, The Killing Fields of Dr. Haing S. Ngor, 2014
The I-SEA festival opens on Fri. Nov. 20 with Ways of Seeing, a live interactive presentation curated by Ina Adele Ray and co-presented by Stephen Gong that includes family home movies, moving and still images from the French colonial era, Hollywood films, and declassified CIA propaganda. Also on the I-SEA program is Arthur Dong’s feature documentary, The Killing Fields of Dr. Haing S. Ngor, which explores the life and death of the Cambodian doctor made famous after winning an Oscar for his starring role in The Killing Fields, the Roland Jaffe film that explored the 1970s Khmer Rouge atrocities and genocide in Cambodia.
China Now: Independent Visions
November 22, 2015
Victoria Theatre
2961 16th Street (at Mission)
San Francisco CA 94103
International Southeast Asian Film Festival
Nov. 20-22, 2015
Artists Television Access and New People Cinema
San Francisco CA
Laissez les bons temps rouler: 2015 Hong Kong Cinema festival
Miriam Yeung and charges, Little Big Master, 2015
This year’s Hong Kong Cinema series sponsored by the San Francisco Film Society hosts a strong group of work that includes several of the past year’s box office hits from the former Crown Colony. The series opens on Nov. 14 with a 3-D version of Johnnie To’s recent musical extravaganza Office, starring Chow Yun-Fat, Sylvia Chang, Eason Chan, and Tang Wei, which sets the foibles of Hong Kong office workers to music (full review here). Also on the docket is the caper comedy Two Thumbs Up (full review here), the action/martial arts extravaganza SPL 2: A Time For Consequences, and Monster Hunt, the animated film that’s currently the highest grossing movie of all time in China.
The festival also includes Little Big Master, which was a huge hit in Hong Kong earlier this year and which reflects a more local flavor than Monster Hunt or SPL 2. Little Big Master (based on the real-life story of Lillian Lui) takes a soft-focus look at the state of educational equity in Hong Kong. After a particularly aggravating encounter with stressed-out kid and his driven parents, Lui Wai-hung resigns as the head of a fancy Hong Kong private school. Upon hearing about the plight of a tiny school on the outskirts of Hong Kong, Lui ends up taking a teaching job there despite the position’s minuscule salary and the school’s uncertain future. With a total enrollment of six, the school is destined to be closed if it can’t get more students, but Lui perseveres in her attempts to keep the school going.
Real life, Little Big Master, 2015
Hong Kong diva Miriam Yeung is outstanding as teacher Lui, gradually shedding both her cynicism and her smartly tailored wardrobe in favor of a renewed belief in the world and a pair comfortable shoes and khakis as she becomes closer to her students and the plights of their families. The kids in the movie are nicely non-cloying and have a great rapport with Yeung. Louis Koo plays Lui’s helpful and supportive husband and an array of famous Hong Kong performers including Richard Ng, Philip Keung Ho-Man, and Anna Ng appear as family members of the kids from the school. Notably, this is one of the few Hong Kong movies that I can recall that depicts the South Asian population of the city and one of the only ones (the other being Tactical Unit: Partners) to show that population as more than window dressing (I’m looking at you, ChungKing Express). The film isn’t afraid of the emotionalism of the story but it manages its teariness without devolving into melodrama. It also subtly critiques the class and ethnic divisions in Hong Kong without preachiness or polemics.
Eddie Eddie Eddie, To The Fore, 2015
Also included in the festival is To The Fore, Dante Lam’s latest masculinist exercise. The film follows a group of competitive bicycle racers, intertwining bromance, love triangles, innocence lost, and personal and professional strife. Eddie Peng plays Ming, a cocky and ambitious racer whose rivalry with teammates Ji-won (Choi Si-won), and Tian (Shawn Dou) forms the basis of the drama. While the bike racing scenes are outstanding and make great use of pretty scenery in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea, the rest of the film is somewhat underdeveloped, lacking the intensity of Lam’s best work (including his crime films The Stool Pigeon and The Beast Stalker, and his MMA film Unbeatable) despite lots of sweating and emoting. Still, the three male leads (there’s one female featured player who acts mostly as an accessory to the plot) are quite handsome and the movie is a pleasant and painless way to pass the time. Curiously, To The Fore is Hong Kong’s submission for Best Foreign Film in this year’s Oscar sweepstakes, which it doesn’t quite warrant. Maybe someone is hoping for a repeat of the surprise success of Breaking Away all those years ago–
Nov. 14-18, 2015
Vogue Theater
3290 Sacramento Street
San Francisco CA
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