quietearth [Film Festival 06.02.12]
Running from June 29th to July 15th is one of my favorite film festivals. Not that I've ever personally attended, but their lineup is always top notch. They'll be hosting the North American premiers for Doomsday Book and Rabbit Horror 3D among others. For more info and tickets go to the NYAFF official website.
Opening Night Selection – North American Premiere
VULGARIA (2012) 90min
Director: Pang Ho-cheung
Country: Hong Kong
Pang Ho-cheung's outrageous comedy stars Chapman To as a hapless movie producer trying to get a skin flick off the ground, and he'll do anything to finance it, including auctioning off visitation rights to the daughter he adores, sucking up to gangsters named Brother Tyrannosaurus, and even making not-so-sweet love to a mule.
Director Pang Ho-cheung will attend the screening.
Centerpiece Presentation – North American Premiere
DOOMSDAY BOOK (2012) 115min
Directors: Kim Ji-Woon, Yim Pil-Sung
Country: South Korea
A three-part hard science fiction omnibus film from directors Kim Ji-Woon (A BITTERSWEET LIFE, I SAW THE DEVIL) and Yim Pil-Sung (HANSEL & GRETEL) it's visually stunning and, at times, very unhinged.
Centerpiece Presentation – North American Premiere
GUNS AND ROSES (2012) 108min
Director: Ning Hao
Country: China
Director Ning Hao's savagely funny action flick chronicles a gold heist in 1930's Japanese-occupied Mongolia. With action by Yang Kil-Young (OLDBOY), his cast of regular comedy character actors (including Huang Bo), and a blackly, bleakly comic view of human struggles.
Closing Night Selection – North American Premiere
POTECHI (CHIPS) (2012) 68min
Director: Yoshihiro Nakamura
Country: Japan
Yoshihiro Nakamura, director of FISH STORY, GOLDEN SLUMBERS and NYAFF 2011 Audience Award winner, A BOY AND HIS SAMURAI presents a film about petty thieves, potato chips, the 2011 Japanese earthquake, baseball stars, and the meaning of life.
Additional 2012 New York Asian Film Festival films include:
New York Premiere
10 + 10 (2011) 114min
Directors: Various
Country: Taiwan
A series of short films by directors from Hou Hsian-hsien, to Sylvia Chang, starring actors like Jack Gao and Shu Qi, 10 + 10 presents a multitude of viewpoints on Taiwan from violent thrillers, to documentaries, to comedies about censorship.
New York Premiere
ACE ATTORNEY (2012) 135min
Director: Takashi Miike
Country: Japan
Takashi Miike, brings one of the world's most popular Gameboy and Nintendo DS games to the big screen in an incredibly faithful version of the blockbuster game about the adventures of a rookie defense attorney, only with Miike's inimitable stamp. The music is the 8-bit chirping, given a full orchestral treatment and the costumes, hairstyles, names - even the basic plot are all taken right off the tiny screen.
Co-presented with Japan Cuts: The New York Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema.
North American Premiere
ALL ABOUT MY WIFE (2012) 120min
Director: Min Kyu-Dong
Country: South Korea
The latest romantic comedy from Korea is a sleek blockbuster with an all-star cast. Depressed by his marriage, a wimpy husband hires a rental Casanova to seduce his wife so he can get a divorce. A riff on Taming of the Shrew, it schools Hollywood in how rom coms should be made.
North American Premiere
ASURA (2012) 78min
Director: Kei'ichi Sato
Country: Japan
A lushly animated feature about a child cannibal in famine-wracked feudal Japan whose taste for human flesh has turned him into a demon. Based on George Wakiyama's banned manga.
Co-presented with Japan Cuts: The New York Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema
North American Premiere
THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION: LET'S MAKE THE TEACHER HAVE A MISCARRIAGE CLUB, HENGE, THE BIG GUN (2012) 145min
Directors: Eisake Naito, Hajime Ohata
Country: Japan
Trio of short films includes; LET'S MAKE THE TEACHER HAVE A MISCARRIAGE CLUB is a sensitive and sometimes shocking exploration of schoolgirls gone bad, HENGE is a take on Kafka's The Metamorphsis mixed with J-horror and kaiju tropes, and THE BIG GUN is the same director's early film about a steel factory worker extorted by the yakuza into making guns. Unfortunately for them, he starts a side project making, well, the Big Gun.
Co-presented with Japan Cuts: The New York Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema.
North American Premiere
BLOODY FIGHT IN IRON-ROCK VALLEY (2011) 89min
Director: Ji Ha Jean
Country: South Korea
One lone stranger rides into a town ruled by an out-of-control construction cartel, ready to settle old scores with his two fists in this modern day spaghetti western.
New York Premiere
BLOOD LETTER (2012) 90min
Director: Victor Vu
Country: Vietnam
A Vietnamese martial arts movie full of flying swordsmen, weapon-wielding woman warriors, and wu xia passion.
Special Midnight Movie Screening
BOXER'S OMEN (1983) 105min
Director: Chih-Hung Kuei
Country: Hong Kong
A black magic martial arts movie that looks like the last 10 minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey if you replaced the flashing colors and swirling stars with writhing maggots and bright green pus.
New York Premiere
COUPLES (2011) 110min
Director: Jeong Yong-Ki
Country: South Korea
A remake of the NYAFF hit, A STRANGER OF MINE, this time-looping, multiple-POV Korean romance is about finding true love in the midst of an economic meltdown.
CRYING FIST (2005) 134min
Director: Ryoo Seung-Wan
Country: South Korea
Choi Min-Sik is a middle-aged boxer reduced to renting himself out as a human punching bag for frustrated salarymen. Ryoo Seung-Beom is a self-destructive punk who discovers the power of boxing in juvie lock-up. An amateur prizefight with a fat purse offers a chance for redemption, but there can be only one winner.
Star, Choi Min-Sik, will attend the screening.
Special Midnight Movie Screening – North American Premiere
DEAD BITE (2011) 94min
Director: Joey Boy
Country: Thailand
A crazy zombie flick that is all blood, bikinis, B-boys, enthusiastic gore, and surreal humor.
North American Premiere
DIN TAO: LEADER OF THE PARADE (2012) 123min
Director: Kai Feng
Country: Taiwan
Based on a true story, this hit film tracks a rundown Din Tao (drumming ceremony) group that came back from the dead. Din Tao itself had been dismissed as a quaint cultural embarrassment, with many troupes made up of homeless kids, who would fill the ranks for a buck. The film became a remarkable word-of-mouth success story, earning over NT$300 million and sparking a revival of Din Tao pride across Taiwan.
New York Premiere
DRAGON (WU XIA) (2011) 110min
Director: Peter Chan
Country: Hong Kong/China
Donnie Yen plays a ferocious kung fu fighter hiding under a fake name in a small village after renouncing violence. Takeshi Kaneshiro (CHUNGKING EXPRESS) is the investigator assigned to figure out exactly who he is. Also featuring old school Shaw Brothers heroes, Jimmy Wang Yu and Kara Hui, this is one of the expensive, elegant, and electrifying (literally) martial arts movies to come along in years.
Star and fight choreographer, Donnie Yen will attend the screening.
North American Premiere
EAST MEETS WEST 2011 (2011) 99min
Director: Jeff Lau
Country: Hong Kong
Wong Kar-wai's longtime collaborator, Jeff Lau, delivers an exhausting and exhilarating comedy about reincarnated superheroes and failed pop stars that includes musical numbers, animated sequences, giant battles, stupid jokes, mile-a-minute parodies and some genuine heartbreak.
FAILAN (2001) 116min
Director: Song Hae-Sung
Country: South Korea
Choi Min-Sik teams up with Hong Kong's superstar, Cecilia Cheung, in this film about a third-rate gangster who'll do anything for a buck and a Chinese immigrant who needs a marriage for business reasons. Mutual need draws them together, but fate keeps them apart.
Star, Choi Min-Sik, will attend the screening.
Special Midnight Movie Screening
GOKE, BODYSNATCHER FROM HELL (1968) 84min
Director: Hajime Sato
Country: Japan
A dreamy, surrealist horror film that has taken on legendary status. Survivors of a plane crash are attacked by a blob-like alien creatures that turn its victims into blood thirsty vampires.
New York Premiere
GOLDEN SLUMBERS (2011) 98min
Director: Davy Chou
Country: Cambodia
Documentary focuses on Cambodia's lost cinema, following the effects and actions of the Khmer Rouge in 1975 via the memories of the filmmakers and stars who survived the genocide in this moving oral history.
Director, Davy Chou will attend the screening.
New York Premiere
GYO (2012) 70min
Director: Takayuki Hirao
Country: Japan
Adapted from Junji Ito's fan-favorite horror manga, this animated film is about stinking killer fish with legs who attack Japan. It is much weirder than it sounds.
Co-presented with Japan Cuts: The New York Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema
New York Premiere
HARD ROMANTICKER (2011) 108min
Director: Gu Suyeon
Country: Japan
the Korean-Japanese director, Gu Suyeon, delivers a two-fisted, breakneck story of growing up in Japan's Korean slums which is a throwback to Toei's old school youth gang films of the 60's and 70's.
Presented with Japan Cuts: Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema
New York Premiere
HONEY PUPU (2011) 103min
Director: Hung-I Chen
Country: Taiwan
Hung-I Chen directs a musically supercharged meditation on things that have gone missing. A radio DJ looking for her missing boyfriend, and she finds a group of kids making online memorials for everything from missing buildings to missing pets, and discovers an alternate earth. Trippy sci-fi at its best.
INFERNAL AFFAIRS 1 & 2 - Tenth Anniversary Screening (2002/2003) 101/119min
Director: Wai-Keung Lau, Alan Mak
Country: Hong Kong
INFERNAL AFFAIRS 1 & 2 are two movies that comprise Asia's richest, most complex crime epic. IA 1 is familiar to most viewers, but IA 2 ups the stakes, going back in time and showing how the heroes of the first movie are really the villains, and the villains are really the heroes.
The screening will be preceded by a panel with the creators of the Square Enix's Sleeping Dogs video game, due to be released August 14, which is inspired in part on the INFERNAL AFFAIRS movies.
KILLZONE (SPL: SHA PO LANG) (2005) 93min
Director: Wilson Yip
Country: Hong Kong
The classic action film which features Donnie Yen, elder kung fu statesman Sammo Hung, Simon Yam, and Wu Jing in the story of a senior detective nearing the end of his career, engaged in an all-out final attempt to take down a crime lord.
Star and fight choreographer Donnie Yen, will attend the screening.
KING BOXER (FIVE FINGERS OF DEATH) (1972) 98min
Director: Chung Chang-Wha
Country: Hong Kong
Two martial arts schools prepare for an important tournament in one of the most influential and important kung fu movies of all time. FIVE FINGERS OF DEATH launched the kung fu craze in the West, and paved the way for Bruce Lee's success.
Director, Chung Chang-Wha will attend the screening.
New York Premiere
THE KING OF PIGS (2012) 97min
Director: Yeun Sang-HO
Country: South Korea
Fresh outta Cannes, this animated drama is about two adults trying to remember what exactly happened to them as kids when they attended a nightmarish high school where the kids were divided into the bullies ("Dogs") and the bullied ("Pigs").
Director, Yeun Sang-Ho will attend the screenings.
Korean Short Film Madness (2010 - 2012) 90min
Directors: Park Chan-Wook, and more
Country: South Korea
Featuring NIGHTFISHING, a short film directed by Park Chan-Wook (OLDBOY) and his brother, as well as new shorts from Korea's MSFF genre film festival, these movies move fast and hit hard.
New York Premiere
THE LOST BLADESMAN (2011), 107min
Directors: Felix Chong, Alan Mak
Country: Hong Kong/China
Directed by the writers of the INFERNAL AFFAIRS films, this mighty martial arts spectacular tells the story of China's legendary warrior, General Guan. Played, of course, by Donnie Yen.
Star and fight choreographer, Donnie Yen will attend the screening.
LOVE IN THE BUFF (2012) 106min
Director: Pang Ho-cheung
Country: Hong Kong
A romantic comedy that feels like an update of the classic Hepburn-Tracy movies, it stars Shawn Yue as a self-centered advertising exec and Miriam Yeung as his lazy girlfriend, who split up and try to move on, but keep meeting up, ripping off each other's clothes, and making the same mistakes all over again.
Director, Pang Ho-cheung, will attend the screening.
North American Premiere
LOVE STRIKES! (2011) 118min
Director: Hitoshi Ohne
Country: Japan
Masami Nagasawa won a Japanese Academy Award for "Best Supporting Actress" for her role in this blockbuster, musical romantic comedy about a nerd who becomes irresistibly attractive to women.
Star, Masami Nagasawa, will attend the screening.
Co-presented with Japan Cuts: The New York Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema
North American Premiere
MAKE UP (2011) 107min
Director: Lien Yi-chi
Country: Taiwan
A mortician finds a new "customer" on her slab: the woman she loved in high school. What follows is a gorgeously detailed, emotionally brutal investigation into how the love of her life wound up dying.
Special Midnight Movie Screening
THE MIAMI CONNECTION (1987) 83min
Directors: Grandmaster Y.K. Kim,
Country: USA
The director of LA STREETFIGHTERS (NYAFF 2010), delivers this hallucinatory tale of ninjas, a tae kwon do rock band known as Dragon Sound, Miami drug dealers, bad dubbing, and strange costumes. Thanks to the efforts of Drafthouse Films, THE MIAMI CONNECTION will return to cinemas, home video and debut on digital platforms in the fourth quarter of 2012.
Co-director/writer/producer and star Grandmaster Y.K. Kim will attend the screening.
US Premiere
MONSTERS CLUB (2011) 72min
Director: Toshiaki Toyoda
Country: Japan
Sympathy for the Unabomber in Japan's visionary director, Toshiaki Toyoda's retelling of the Ted Kaczynski story, only with added transsexual monsters and ghosts.
Director, Toshiaki Toyoda will attend the screening.
Co-presented with Japan Cuts: The New York Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema Cinema
NAMELESS GANGSTER (2012) 133min
Director: Yun Jong-Bin
Country: South Korea
Set in the 80's, Choi Min-Sik plays a corrupt customs inspector whose knowledge of how to leverage personal connections and family relationships turns him into a criminal on the rise. But he's not really a gangster, just a smart hick with a gift of the gab, and when the government begins instituting reforms the world he lives in turns into a cage of crazed predators, eating one another alive.
Star, Choi Min-Sik, will attend the screening.
North American Premiere
NASI LEMAK 2.0 (2011) 108min
Director: Namewee
Country: Malaysia
A food movie, directed by a rapper who has been investigated for sedition, that feels like delirious early Stephen Chow, that was a massive hit, sparked protests, and features a hip hop street vendor battle.
Producer Fred Chong will attend the screening
OLDBOY (2003) 120min
Director: Park Chan-Wook
Country: South Korea
A Jury Prize winner at the Cannes Film Festival, it might just be the most iconic movie of the New Korean Cinema. Choi Min-Sik is at his hammer-wielding best as a man mysteriously imprisoned for 15 years and then released. Hell-bent on revenge, he wants to know why.
Stars, Choi Min-Sik and Yoon Jin-Seo, will attend the screening.
North American Premiere
Pang Ho-cheung's First Attempt 50min
Director: Pang Ho-cheung
Country: Hong Kong
Pang Ho-cheung screens the shot-on-video shorts he made when he was 14 year old, providing live commentary. The shorts include THE FIRST ADVENTURES OF THREE GANGSTA BEARS.
Director, Pang Ho-cheung, will attend the screening.
North American Premiere
RED VACANCE, BLACK WEDDING (2011) 86min
Director: Kim Tae-Sik, Park Cheol-Su
Country: South Korea
This two-part film about adultery, is a sexy, funny, over-the-top exploration of why we cheat.
New York Premiere
SACRIFICE (2010) 123min
Director: Chen Kaige
Country: China
Chen Kaige (FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE) employs an all-star cast in this searing drama about a doctor who must sacrifice his own son to protect the child of a disgraced court official.
North American Premiere
SCABBARD SAMURAI (2011) 103min
Director: Hitoshi Matsumoto
Country: Japan
From the popular comedian (and director of SYMBOL and BIG MAN JAPAN) comes this deadpan comedy about a disgraced samurai who has 30 days to make a dejected boy prince laugh, or he has to kill himself.
Co-presented with Japan Cuts: The New York Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema Cinema
North American Premiere
SECRET LOVE (2010) 111min
Director: Hoon-I Ryu
Country: South Korea
Yoon Jin-Seo plays a wife who meets her husband's identical twin brother and must choose between the two of them.
Star, Yoon Jin-Seo will attend the screening.
A SIMPLE LIFE (2011) 119min
Director: Ann Hui
Country: Hong Kong
The award winning drama about an elderly nanny (Deanie Ip) and the man she raised from childhood (Andy Lau), this film turns a compassionate, unblinking eye on aging and dying.
New York Premiere
SMUGGLER (2011) 114min
Director: Katsuhito Ishii
Country: Japan
From one of the directors of FUNKY FOREST: THE FIRST CONTACT comes this tale of a criminal underground staffed by debt-ridden losers who can't catch a break.
Co-presented with Japan Cuts: The New York Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema
New York Premiere
STARRY STARRY NIGHT (2011) 99mins
Director: Tom Lin
Country: Taiwan
A coming-of-age movie about a 13-year old girl coping with the reality of her parents' impending divorce. She copes by escaping into a fantasy world depicted onscreen as a beautiful carnival of origami animals, dragons, and hyper-real landscapes.
THE SWIFT KNIGHT (1971) 81min
Director: Chung Chang-Wha
Country: Hong Kong
Lifetime Achievement Award-winner, Chung Chang-Wha (FIVE FINGERS OF DEATH), counts this Shaw Brothers swordplay movie as his favorite of his own movies.
Director, Chung Chang-Wha will attend the screening.
New York Premiere
THE SWORD IDENTITY (2011) 110min
Director: Xu Haofeng
Country: China
The directorial debut by Xu Haofeng, the writer of Wong Kar-wai's upcoming THE GRANDMASTER, this is a deconstruction of the traditional swordplay movie. Exchanging flying sword slingers for a down-to-earth, reality-based fighting style, it punctures the pomposity of the traditional swaggering swordsman film with a bleak blast of black comedy.
New York Premiere
TOKYO PLAYBOY CLUB (2011) 97min
Director: Yosuke Okuda
Country: Japan
Japan's 25-year-old enfant terrible of yakuza films, directs this bloody-knuckled, highly stylized gangster film that put him on the map as the new king of the genre.
Co-presented with Japan Cuts: The New York Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema
New York Premiere
TORMENTED (2011) 83min
Director: Takashi Shimizu
Country: Japan
Better known as RABBIT HORROR, cinematographer Christopher Doyle teams up with director Takashi Shimizu (JU-ON, THE GRUDGE) to deliver this gothic fairytale about a murderous bunny.
Co-presented with Japan Cuts: The New York Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema
WAR OF THE ARROWS (2011) 122min
Director: Han-min Kim
Country: South Korea
Korea's surprise #1 blockbuster of 2011, this swashbuckling period action riff on Robin Hood won 14 major film awards.
New York Premiere
WARRIORS OF THE RAINBOW: SEEDIQ BALE 1 & 2 (2011) 274min
Director: Wei Te-Sheng
Country: Taiwan
Wei Te-Sheng's follow-up to CAPE No. 7 is the true, and previously untold, story of an indigenous uprising in 1930 as the Seediq tribes fought the occupying Japanese army to save themselves from extermination. The film has been released in the US in a 2-1/2 hour version, but this is the full, uncut, two-part, 4-1/2 hour epic screened as a double feature.
New York Premiere
YOU ARE THE APPLE OF MY EYE (2011) 109min
Director: Giddens Ko
Country: Taiwan
Based on a novel by first-time director Giddens Ko, YOU ARE THE APPLE OF MY EYE is a bittersweet movie about how nothing will ever live up to your first love. A huge hit in Taiwan, it is the highest grossing Mandarin-language movie ever released in Hong Kong and the highest-grossing Taiwanese movie released in China.
Director, Giddens Ko, and star, Michelle Chen, will attend the screenings.
North American Premiere
ZERO MAN VS. THE HALF VIRGIN (2012) 105min
Director: Sakichi Satô
Country: Japan
From the writer of ICHI THE KILLER and GOZU comes the tale of a cop who can see the number of times you've had sex written on your forehead whenever he plays with himself.
