beyondasiaphilia

Check The Rhime: International Southeast Asian Film Festival and China Now: Independent Visions

November 18, 2015 at 8:27 pm Leave a comment

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

Entry filed under: Uncategorized.