NEW YORK ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL LINE-UP 2006

NEW YORK ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL
June 16 – July 1, 2006
at the Anthology Film Archives and the ImaginAsian Theater

The New York Asian Film Festival is five years old and we’re still broke, still doing this by the seat of our pants, still armed with nothing but a love for good movies and our credit cards. Come celebrate five years of fun with us by watching the latest and best movies from Asia, hand-selected for your viewing pleasure. No arthouse cynicism. No trendy gloom and doom. Just futuristic motion picture entertainment set on hyperdrive and mainlined directly into your brain.

We’re still waiting to hear back from a lot of folks (especially the Korean and Hong Kong companies) and we’ll be announcing new titles for the next couple of weeks, but this is what we’ve got so far and we’ll keep you posted on the news. Also, keep your eye on www.nyaff.org for updates.

Click onwards to read about all the titles confirmed so far, including films from Japan, China, Thailand and Malaysia. Films include: ART OF THE DEVIL 2, BEETLE THE HORN KING, CROMARTIE HIGH SCHOOL, DUELIST, FUNKY FOREST: THE FIRST CONTACT, GANGSTER, THE GREAT YOKAI WAR, IT’S ONLY TALK, LINDA, LINDA, LINDA, OH! MY ZOMBIE MERMAID, PACCHIGI (WE SHALL OVERCOME SOMEDAY), PEACOCK, SHINOBI, SKI JUMPING PAIRS: ROAD TO TORINO 2006 and several films from Ram Gopal Varma including the world premiere of SHIVA.

ART OF THE DEVIL 2 (Thailand, 2005, 100 minutes) Directed by The Ronin Team
US Premiere
Forget every Japanese horror movie you’ve ever seen, full of dead, wet, grumpy girls with bad haircuts. ART OF THE DEVIL 2 (no familiarity with ART OF THE DEVIL 1 required) only owes a sideways debt of paternity to Takashi Miike’s torture/dating film, AUDITION. A hit at the Thai box office, and winner of numerous Audience and technical awards, this slick, sick flick is all about teachers and students and black magic. Eye-searingly beautiful Ms. Panor, a teacher in the countryside, has six wonderful students. The wonderful students play a nasty prank on Ms. Panor and her reputation is ruined. Then they all go away to college. When they return to their hometown they discover that Ms. Panor seems happy, and even more beautiful than before. What they don’t know is that Ms. Panor has spent a lot of time learning black magic and summoning demons. What they don’t know is that she is a good teacher who still has lots to teach them. She wants to teach them about pain. She wants them to learn about suffering. She wants to help them open their third eye with a power drill. Directed by a team of seven filmmakers known as the Ronin Team, ART OF THE DEVIL 2 will remind you of your special time in high school. That is, if you attended high school in hell.

BEETLE, THE HORN KING (Japan, 2005, 65 minutes) Directed by Minoru Kawasaki
US Premiere
In Japan there is a wrestler. His name is legendary. His sombrero is enormous. His mask is cool. His name is BEETLE, THE HORN KING. A masked wrestler with his own theme song and the strength and agility of the mighty king beetle, he fights for truth, justice and fairness in wrestling around the world with his homies, the International Masked Wrestler Association. But alien wrestlers based on lesser insects have invaded the planet and must be laid low with Helicopter Kicks. Like a bizarro broadcast of MIGHTY MORPHIN’ POWER RANGERS filtered through Jack Black’s NACHO LIBRE this is the ultimate collision of masked Mexican wrestlers, Japanese sci fi, and bug-loving weirdness. As a wise man once said, “Watch BEETLE, THE HORN KING and discover the peace inside yourself.”

CROMARTIE HIGH SCHOOL (Japan, 2005, 85 minutes) Directed by Yudai Yamaguchi
NEW YORK PREMIERE
Cromartie High! An at-risk school controlled by gangs where no one comes to class and anything goes. Cromartie High! A school with entrance exams so lousy that they’ve even enrolled a gorilla and Freddie Mercury. Cromartie High! The school where upright student Kamiyama, enrolled by mistake, must battle robots, demonic possession, masked wrestlers, the dangers of smoking and mind-controlled Shaolin monks to recover Cromartie’s school spirit and defeat an alien armada of Space Monkeys.

A send-up of Japan’s popular juvenile delinquent movies, CROMARTIE HIGH SCHOOL was a runaway anime and manga hit before it reached the silver screen. Turning stupidity into a high-level martial art, CROMARTIE HIGH SCHOOL demonstrates a surprisingly sophisticated comedic sensibility. Why not deal with the drug problem by shipping all the drugs to the world’s neediest children? Stupid earthlings! Never give up! As long as there is hope…nothing is hopeless.

DUELIST (Korea, 2005, 108 minutes) Directed by Lee Myung-Se
NEW YORK PREMIERE
Korean director Lee Myung-Se’s return to filmmaking after 6 years is a whirlwind of movement, a ballet of bloodshed and a candy-colored carnival of clashing characters but it is most definitely not an action film: it's a romance. Set in the Joseon Dynasty, it’s the story of a female cop and the assassin she pursues through chaotic marketplaces, winter snowstorms, and elaborate birthday parties, but when they cross swords you can’t tell if they’re fighting or dancing. A mutagenic masterpiece that rejects every convention of filmmaking and insists on rebuilding the language of cinema from the ground up, there are barely 10 pages of dialogue in the whole film, but every shift in emotion, mood, and thought is conveyed visually, zapped into your brain via your eyes at 24 frames per second. The flick starts as a chaotic Korean action comedy full of kooky kineticism but slowly the film peels the protective shells off its characters revealing just how screwed up you have to be if you’re running after thieves or running from the cops all your life. How do you fall in love when violence is all you know? What kind of adult comes from a kid who was given weapons for toys? As expected, the movie ends in tragedy but Lee Myung-se uses his directorial prerogative to wrest a happy ending out of the jaws of defeat and allow his characters a final, spectral pas de deux, before the credits roll and their world ends. It's the kindest moment in movies this year, and for a director who thinks that Korean cinema is too obsessed with violence and brutality, it feels like a third alternative, and maybe even a manifesto for a return to romance.

FUNKY FOREST: THE FIRST CONTACT (Japan, 2005, 150 minutes) Directed by Katsuhito Ishii
NEW YORK PREMIERE
Not since David Lynch crept onto the scene with ERASERHEAD has a more singular vision broken out of one man’s skull and run riot across the silver screen seducing audiences with its sugary strangeness. But FUNKY FOREST: FIRST CONTACT is a hermetically sealed, fifth dimensional artifact from Planet Japan beaming into our galaxy through your eyes. The only movie with an A side and a B side this is a full-on invasion of three-dimensional earth brains by twelfth dimensional alien consciousnesses.

From the director and cast who brought you last year’s Audience Award Winner THE TASTE OF TEA, this flick invites you to drink the Kool Aid, take the red pill, show us your dancing and break the chains of reason and logic that bind your brain. Director Katsuhito Ishii (who directed the animation in KILL BILL VOL 1) and a crew of ace comedic actors (including Tadanobu Asano as the laconic Guitar Brother) have made a movie featuring TV’s made of giant buttholes, powered by navel-generated energy and capable of producing slime coated, miniature sushi chefs. This is not for everyone - as the Shorty Trio says, “Some days people laugh, some days…they don’t.” With its shoe obsession, fixation on Snickers bars, and its firm belief that the secrets of the universe can be unlocked by dancing, FUNKY FOREST: THE FIRST CONTACT strips everyday life of meaning, turns mundane tasks into bizarre rituals, and makes surrealist hay out of our most sacred ideas. This is not a movie. This is an invitation to join a dancing army of holy fools and travel across time and space to Planet Piko Riko.

GANGSTER (Malaysia, 2005, 90 minutes) Directed by Badaruddin Azmi
US PREMIERE
A nihilistic blood bath from Malaysia, GANGSTER is a slab of 1980’s Hong Kong criminal cool, carved off the bone and served hot. Seething with desperation, it was the number one movie in Malaysia last year by a landslide. But who knows why Malaysians flocked to a movie about illegal street racing, gutter-crawling losers ripping off their dealer and fleeing the country, nightclub assassinations and prostitutes with lethal pimps? Maybe every now and then you have to bathe your brain in bleakness to stay sane. Telling three overlapping stories about three desperate losers who’ve hit bottom and are running out of air, GANGSTER follows a hooker who plans to rip off her boyfriend, a food stall owner who’s borrowed too much money and doesn’t know how to pay it back, and an illegal car racer, as monomaniacal as Captain Ahab, who’s willing to turn pedestrians into grease spots if that means he can beat the top ranked driver. With three roles played by Malaysia’s popular actor, Rosyam Nor, this flick takes every convention from film noir movies, throws them out on the streets of Kuala Lumpor, and picks them up the next morning after a grueling, hellish night on the town.

THE GREAT YOKAI WAR (Japan, 2005, 124 minutes) Directed by Takashi Miike
NEW YORK PREMIERE

A LORD OF THE RINGS-sized epic from Takashi Miike, Japan’s Evil Genius, this rowdy deranged monster movie returns Miike to the front ranks of Japanese directors after years of disappointments. Billed as a family film it kicks off with a nightmare vision of a devastated Tokyo, moves on to a slinky female demoness with a beehive and a short, short skirt wielding a whip, then stops off at the birth of a goo-covered, flayed, talking cow fetus who prophesizes the apocalypse. It’s a wonder kids in Japan can sleep at all if this is the kind of movie they get.

A young boy has to go on a quest to Goblin Mountain to retrieve a magic sword, and stop a mega-sized battle royale between the forces of technology and the lovable, creepy, long-necked, giant-nosed, hairy-faced, wall-shaped, creeping, hopping, flying, gerning, pogoing demons (yokai) of Japanese folklore. Delivering massive battles, non-stop special effects and a story that’s as tight as a drum, Miike makes a masterpiece out of suspect materials. But he also delivers the kind of truth that Peter Jackson shied away from in THE LORD OF THE RINGS: every quest has an ending and no childhood lasts forever. Amidst the burning fusion of ridiculous ideas at the heart of this movie take a moment and be very still and quiet. That sound you hear is a child's heart breaking.

IT’S ONLY TALK (Japan, 2005, 126 minutes) Directed by Ryuichi Hiroki
US PREMIERE
From the director and star of VIBRATOR (which was in the 2003 NYAFF, where Time Out New York called it “Probably the best Japanese movie of 2003”) comes this intimate portrait of sex, suburban life and manic depression. Yuko (Shinobu Terajima, VIBRATOR) is a thirty something woman living an aimless life supported by the insurance settlement from her parents' death. A manic depressive, she picks up stakes and moves to the decidedly un-chic burb of Kamada, a downscale little hood on the fringes of Tokyo, and begins to hook up with people she meets in a manic depression chat room. Her cousin, newly separated from his wife, comes to town just in time for her to hit a low in her cycle and he has to nurse her back to health.

Hardly a slice of grand drama, this poignant, empathetic, and ultimately human film is a tiny little essay about living. Yuko will never “get better”, she’ll always spin from high to low no matter how much medication she’s on, and if one wants to be tough about it then she’s a waste of time. But she’s also a person and for director Ryuichi Hiroki that means she’s entitled to some respect. A movie about how we find meaning in our lives by bumping up against other people, leaning on them, pulling them down, and lifting them up, IT’S ONLY TALK asks for nothing more than your patience and an open mind. In exchange, it will show you one human life in all its messed up glory. And sometimes that’s worth the entire world.

LINDA, LINDA, LINDA (Japan, 2005, 114 minutes) Directed by Nobuhiro Yamashita
NEW YORK PREMIERE
This flick sneaks up on you like an affectionate cat and slowly rubs against you until it begins to purr. Its leisurely pace, laid back attitude and near plotless narrative may test your patience in the early going, but by the end you’ll be completely and mysteriously hooked. It’s a film of awkward conversations, listless moments and shy glances, but when Bae Doo-Na finally breaks exultantly into “Linda Linda Linda” it is completely cathartic and when she turns and smiles radiantly afterwards the world could end and it would be perfect.

In three days Shiba High is holding their annual Holly Festival complete with a musical talent show, but trouble is brewing in a girl’s rock band when the lead guitarist, Moe, injures her finger and has to bow out. One of the co-founders, Rinko, tries to bring in a male replacement but this doesn’t sit well with the three other members and they decide to form their own band with Kyoko (Aki Maeda – BATTLE ROYALE) on drums, Nozumi (Shiori Sekine from the real life band “Base Ball Bear”) on bass and Kei (Yu Kashii – the very cool looking secret weapon in LORELEI) switching from keyboards to guitar. And finally there’s the shy Korean exchange student they randomly decide will be their singer (Bae Doo-Na, SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE). They plan to cover three songs from the 1980’s band “Blue Hearts” – “My Right Hand”, “Endless Song” and their biggest hit “Linda, Linda Linda”.  And that’s the movie. But the longer you stare at it the more perfect you realize it is.

A word of warning – you will have a hard time getting the “Linda, Linda, Linda” tune out of your head as it ricochets around in there like a crazed bee. The Blue Hearts were a popular Clash-esque band from the mid-80’s till their breakup in the 90’s and whenever the girls are asked what they are playing, they respond “The Blue Hearts” and everyone just nods their head and says “cool” and so they are. The soundtrack is from James Iha of the "Smashing Pumpkins" who keeps things tight and simple until the finale. A quiet, mesmerizing ode to rock and roll, it's hard to hate on the summery, easy charms of LINDA LINDA LINDA.

OH! MY ZOMBIE MERMAID (Japan, 2004, 99 minutes) Directed by Naoki Kudo
US PREMIERE
Like a musical production of SPLASH, mashed-up with Bruce Lee’s GAME OF DEATH, performed by flamboyant fighters from the World Wrestling Federation, OH! MY ZOMBIE MERMAID works as an over-the-edge action film and an over-the-top send-up of disease-of-the-week Lifetime movies. Real-life wrestler Shinya Hashimoto plays Shishio, a wrestler who builds a perfect home for his demure and pretty wife, only to have it destroyed in an off-the-ropes wrestling throwdown when his rival, Ichijoh (deliciously evil Westerner and real life K-1 fighter, Nicholas Pettas) shows up and starts throwing elbows. Shishio’s wife is hospitalized and is infected by the Mermaid Bacteria, causing her to grow fins and scales. Hoping that a new house will cure her, but weighed down by debt, Shishio accepts the offer of a fine new home from a slezy TV producer. The only catch? He has to clear the house of a team of horror movie wrestling opponents including a zombie and an Amazon before he can take possession.

Will you like this movie? It’s hard to tell so rate yourself on this continuum. Dick Cheney would probably hate this over-the-top wrestlemania goof. But George Bush would probably love it.

Note: sadly, star Shinya Hashimoto died in 2005 of a brain hemorrhage.

PACCHIGI (WE SHALL OVERCOME SOMEDAY) (Japan, 2004, 118 minutes) Directed by Kazuyuki Izutsu
US PREMIERE
Awarded the top spot in Japan’s prestigious 2005 Kinema Junpo critic’s poll, this film doles out equal amounts of tender romance and bottle breaking brawling in a raucous retelling of Romeo and Juliet set amidst warring clans of Japanese and Korean students in 1960’s Kyoto. The Korean immigrants who live in Japan and the Japanese who regard them as interlopers bang heads one afternoon in 1968 when a couple of insolent Japanese high school students wander into the Korean part of town on a school outing and mess with a few neighborhood girls. This brings down the wrath of the nearby Korean high school and the Japanese students are taught a lesson when they are beaten and then for good measure their school bus is tipped over. It’s on between the two schools but amidst all the busted skulls and breaking bottles young Kosuke (Shun Shioya) gets a glimpse of Kyung-ja (Erika Sawajiri, SHINOBI) and falls in love. They begin to shyly date, but the fighting between the Koreans and Japanese escalates with Kyung-ja’s tough brother Ang Son (Sosuke Takaoka) leading the Korean forces. There seems little chance for the couple to seal their love among such bitterness until Kosuke plays the Korean song he learned – "The Imjin River" - on the radio one night and in a finale that will send shivers down your spine the melancholy song wafts over the city at night as two large forces break into a fight on the river bank, a friend is put to rest, a baby is born into the world and a young woman runs to the man she loves.

Amusing at times, wrenching at others, the film is fueled by winning performances, a heady whiff of nostalgia and an underlying human element that speaks volumes to the fact that with all of our differences we are all still just people trying to do the best we can for our family, our friends and ourselves.

PEACOCK (China, 2005, 142 minutes) Directed by Gu Changwei
NEW YORK PREMIERE
Whereas most Chinese arthouse movies do actual medical damage to viewers with their chic nihilism and long boring shots of people riding around in trucks, PEACOCK is a balm for your soul. A two-hour plus movie about a family making their way in the world after the Cultural Revolution sounds deadly, but in the hands of Gu Changwei (Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige’s cinematographer) it becomes essential viewing for the dejected, downtrodden and just plain weary. This is a film that traffics in the belief that it doesn’t matter how bad today gets because as long as we’re alive there’s always the hope for a better tomorrow.

SHINOBI (Japan, 2005, 101 minutes) Directed by Ten Shimoyama
NEW YORK PREMIERE
Not the ninja movie you’d expect, SHINOBI is more like what you'd get if the X-MEN teamed up with BATMAN and took on the Justice League who were led by SPIDER-MAN, and the whole thing was directed by Michael Bay who had just gotten a total blood transfusion from Tim Burton and the script was written by Stan Lee. It’s a nuclear popcorn movie with a Romeo and Juliet core where ninjas don’t just fly and leap and kill but shoot their fingers out, stretch, run faster than the Flash, steal your face, shoot lethal eye beams, and breathe poison clouds.

In the early Tokugawa, ninjas are super-bad weapons of mass destruction and the two coolest ninja clans have been exiled to two remote mountain villages where they won’t be able to leap around in public and freak everyone out. Gennosuke (screen idol, Jo Odagiri) lives in the Koga clan’s ninja village and their mortal enemies, the Iga clan, live around the mountain. But one day Gennosuke bumps into Iga gal, Oboro (Nakama Yukie) and they fall for each other. But their forbidden love comes to an abrupt halt when the Shogun, a paranoid recluse, is convinced that he needs to wipe out the ninjas for his own safety. He holds a contest pitting a team of the top Iga ninjas against the top Koga ninjas and sits back to watch these problematic ninjas destroy each other. And destroy they do. Each one gifted with a different super-power, and trained from birth to hate their rival clan for no good reason except it keeps them weak and divided, the ninjas are only too happy to shred each other into CGI blood mist, dancing on the Shogun’s strings. Slowly darkening into real tragedy as the kill crazy, manufactured war escalates, SHINOBI was a critical and commercial hit in Japan when it was released last year and is being prepared for a US release. Truly, this is the ninjapocalypse.

SKI JUMPING PAIRS: ROAD TO TORINO 2006 (Japan, 2005, 82 minutes)
Directed by Riichiro Mashima & Masaki Kobayashi
US PREMIERE
If you watched the Torino Olympics it’s likely you missed the most beautiful tribute to human endeavor and scientific progress ever to grace the games, but it was there: Ski Jumping Pairs. It’s like the ski jump except the skis hold two – TWO! – top athletes who must strike acrobatic poses in the air and stick their landing. Based on an obscure branch of physics known as Rendezvous Theory, which posits that at low temperatures, objects in flight duplicate themselves in order to provide greater stability, Ski Jumping Pairs is the brainchild of physicist Professor Harada and his twin sons. And now, finally, there’s a documentary that follows this sport from its brave beginnings in an laboratory to its greatest triumphs and tragedies (including the painful “Bermuda Incident”) and, finally, its inclusion in the Torino Olympics.

Not since THIS IS SPINAL TAP has a movie made audiences question reality like this. Disguised as a po-faced Japanese television documentary (in three episodes) SKI JUMPING PAIRS is actually a comedy that hides its anarchic Monty Pythonisms beneath talking head interviews, dramatic recreations, and earnest actors pontificating about true Samurai spirit. Making its debut as a CGI graduation project from Riichiro Mashima a few years ago, the short film version of SKI JUMP PAIRS screened around the world at 40 festivals, picking up awards and acclaim along with way. Now it has burst onto the scene as this full-fledged CGI and live action faux-documentary (with the live action shot by Masaki Kobayashi). Prepare yourselves for the world’s most beautiful sport. You will cry. You will cheer. You will see The Koala.

NO SINGING. NO DANCING. NO MERCY: THE FILMS OF RAM GOPAL VARMA
Rejecting the formulaic musical romances of Bollywood for a slew of sleek, stylish horror and crime films, Ram Gopal Varma is India’s superstar director. Self-taught (he was a former video store owner), RGV burst onto the scene with his brutal college gangland movie, SHIVA, and after getting the musicals out of his system he began making intense crime dramas loosely based on real-life cops and criminals drawn from Mumbai’s seething underworld. These days he runs The Factory, where dozens of directors turn out movies that he produces and where he keeps his own productions under tight control. Unknown in the West, RGV is a brand name around the world and we’re proud to introduce his work to a New York audience, like a bullet to the head.

AB TAK CHHAPPAN - (2004, India) In Mumbai there are encounters – incidents between police and thieves where the bad guys wind up mysteriously dead and no witnesses can be found to say the cop pulled the trigger – and there are also encounter specialists: cops who work as hitmen for the department, rubbing out criminals who are too hard to round up. Produced by RGV, AB TAK CHHAPPAN, is the story of an encounter specialist whose days may be swiftly drawing to a close. Ruthlessly realistic, this is a movie where the gunfights take ten seconds, the good guys are murderers, and the only rich people are crooks. Nana Patekar, one of India’s greatest actors, anchors the film with the performance of a lifetime as the doomed encounter specialist, using his charisma to draw in bad guys and the audience alike until the entire world revolves around his corrupt, evil, big-hearted, larger-than-life dispenser of street corner justice.

COMPANY - (2002, India) As cold as the flicker of a cobra’s tongue, COMPANY is the epic saga of the rise and fall of a global criminal cartel and the men and women who built its marble halls on a mountain of corpses. Combining Francis Ford Coppola’s panoramic sweep and Martin Scorsese’s delicate touch with actors, Ram Gopal Varma delivers the greatest crime story to hit the screen since GOODFELLAS. Universally considered one of the best Bollywood movies ever made, this flick’s cast of movie-mad Muslims, hotheaded Sikhs, pacifist getaway drivers and Hindu women who are hopelessly in love with men who are hopelessly lost feel like the entire population of the world crammed into a crime flick that stretches from Mumbai, to Hong Kong to Africa, leaving a trail of blood and corruption wherever it goes.

EK HASINA THI - (2004, India) A gothic women’s revenge film, EK HASINA THI, starts like a heavenly romance and ends up in hell, making stops at all points in between. Longtime RGV actress, Urmila Matondkar, stars as a repressed office worker who falls in love with a cute guy who’s just mysterious enough to make her feel all sexy and special. By the time she’s taken the rap for his drug smuggling, been sent to prison, and is being beaten daily by the butch boss who runs Cell Block B a lot of that sexy specialness has worn off. What her boyfriend didn’t count on is that his pouting pretty girl has a screw loose and it’ll take more bullets and bodies than he can throw at her to stop her revenge. The highlights from every female action movie ever made are stitched together into this insane Frankenbeast of a film, produced by RGV, that comes screaming at you with blood under its nails and a mad, empty gleam in its eyes.

SHIVA - (2006, India)
WORLD PREMIERE
RGV remakes his ground-breaking first movie as SHIVA a big-budget action film about corrupt cops that is one of the most anticipated Bollywood movies of the year. Subway Cinema is honored that Ram Gopal Varma has chosen the New York Asian Film Festival to host the World Premiere of SHIVA. Don’t miss it.