Tag: New York Asian Film Festival 2023

A Woman (孔秀, Wang Chao, 2022)

July 22, 2023by Hayley Scanlon

Adapted from Zhang Xinzhen’s autobiographical novel Dream, Wang Chao’s A Woman (孔秀, Kǒng Xiù) charts an ordinary factory worker’s path through the Cultural Revolution and gradual disillusionment with Maoism before eventually achieving her goals of becoming a novelist amid the social transformations of the 1980s. In some ways a victim of her times, Kong Xiu is ironically an “ironclad” woman overcoming all hardship but it seems unable to escape the patriarchal oppressions of a conservative society.

Opening in 1967, Xue (Shen Shiyu) is told by her mother that at almost 19 she is old not to be married and dutifully becomes the wife of a local man, Hanzhang (Wang Xuedong), whom she quite likes because he is an intellectual even though that is quite a problematic thing to be in the early days of the Cultural Revolution. Xue had once been told that she was the best writer in her class and gifted a book of Grimm’s Fairytales by her proud father, but partly because she is a woman and partly because of the times she is not permitted to finish school and begins working in a textiles factory. Nevertheless she feels proud to be a “worker” and seems to have bought into the Maoist ideology she is regularly required to chant out before work which insists that they serve the only god that matters in the Chinese people through the practice of their productivity.

Chanting about feudalism and imperialism, Xiu is blind to the ways in which it is only the author of her exploitation that has changed for it is still others that profit from her labour giving little back with false promises of social good. She finds herself torn between two worlds, rejecting the feudalistic values of the peasant village where she grew up for the shining modernity of the city. Five years into her marriage, Xiu has two children and has moved into the factory women’s dorm while her relationship with the weak-willed Hanzhong flounders amid their obviously different desires. Hanzhong’s mother objects to Xiu’s modern womanhood, merely sneering when she explains that she’s a “worker” and viewing her as a failed wife who shirks her duties to their family by not returning on Sundays, her only day off, to help out on the farm.

Meanwhile, she’s grown tired of Hanzhong’s sexual demands especially as he becomes Indignant on being asked to wear a condom and she wants no more children. She has already had more than one abortion and is warned by the doctor that she may be endangering her long term health if she carries on doing so with the same frequency. After divorcing Hanzhong she marries another man and has another son but almost dies in childbirth while her second husband, Yang (Zhu Dongqing), does not even bother to return until after the child is born. Dong, her first son, had been considered part of her husband’s family and so she lost him in the divorce, while Yang begins to reject her daughter, Xue, once his own child is born leading her to live with her widowed aunt, Jun, who explains that she wasn’t all that broken up about her husband’s death. He was a nice enough chap but the marriage was arranged by the Party and they were never really man and wife.

A teenage Xue who’s taken to listening to cassette tapes of Teresa Teng songs in the park with a local boy throws back at her mother that she has no right to speak because she has never known love, something the film suggests that both Xiu and her sister have ben robbed of because of the oppressively patriarchal social codes of the feudal village and the Communist Party respectively. Xiu’s second marriage is worse than her first as Yang is violent, strangling or smothering her during sex she otherwise rejects, but she feels she cannot leave him once he becomes ill and is physically disabled. Meanwhile, her pride in her role as a “worker” at the factory begins to weaken as she sees through the cult-like chants and is tacitly accused of being a counter revolutionary for her lack of commitment having been betrayed by both her husband and someone she thought a friend who report her for having said out loud that the factory’s productivity drive was just PR fluff and lies knowing that they produce shoddy goods and cut corners just to look good on paper.

The film begins to open up in the late 1970s once Mao is gone and the Cultural Revolution ended, Xiu remembering a love of literature while there is a sense of exuberant freedom now that you can read Rousseau out loud in the market square. The universities have reopened and even those of Xiu’s generation who missed out consider applying to make up for lost time, but then again attending a book party with sympathetic colleague Comrade Wu (Yu Qingbin) who has long carried a torch for her their brief moment of courtship is abruptly cut short when a patrol passes by and they have to turn out the lights for fear of being caught dancing. When Xiu eventually achieves her dreams and has a story published in the Workers’ Daily, the factory suddenly decides she’s a good role model after all and an embodiment of the spirit of the times even recruiting her to give a speech and displaying her manuscripts for the other workers to read.

“It’s the past, don’t let it trouble you,” Xiu remarks on receiving a long overdue apology and in many ways it seems to be the way she lives her life which has been filled with hardship and heartbreak from the broken relationship with her eldest son who declines to return her letters to her seeming loneliness once again returning to the village a new woman but one also who stands astride the contradictions of a new China. Each step of her life is accompanied by the sound of a train, heralding her path towards “modernity” if coloured by a sense of loss in the persistent memory of what it once took from her. A poignant examination of the destructive social codes not only of the feudal era, but the false promises of equality under Maoism and the terrors of the Cultural Revolution, Wang’s drama may subversively suggest that it isn’t all sunshine and roses in an unseen contemporary China but nevertheless ironically hails its heroine’s “ironclad” resilience in the face of persistent social oppression.

A Woman screens July 23 as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Mad Fate (命案, Soi Cheang, 2023)

July 21, 2023by Hayley Scanlon

“No one can stray from the path paved by fate.” a policewoman gasps while interrogating The Master (Gordon Lam Ka-Tung), a man whose mind was already strained even before he walked in on the murder of a woman he’d been trying to save only to end up losing to destiny. A noticeably lighter affair than his previous film Limbo, Mad Fate (命案) sees Soi Cheang (AKA Cheang Pou-soi) step into the Milky Way orbit directing a screenplay by Yau Nai-hoi produced by Johnnie To and very much bound up with the kinds of cosmic coincidences the studio is known for.

It’s Fate or maybe God that The Master is resisting, though what the difference between the two might be is never quite clear save for the implication that it’s God who is master of Fate which is otherwise without will. The Master insists that “Fate can be changed,” but he resolutely fails to do so. In the opening sequence, he’s in the middle of burying a woman, May, alive as part of a ritual to stave off a forthcoming “calamity” only he’s unable to complete it in part because of the woman’s understandable anxiety that it’s The Master who’s going to end up killing her, and in part because it starts raining which puts out the paper clothing that should have been burnt to change her fate. May runs off and climbs in a taxi home where she is accosted by a serial killer who has been targeting sex workers. The Master follows her but arrives just too late while the police later chase the killer but are unable to catch him.

The Master sees his attempts frustrated but also does not consider that the rain itself was a manifestation of Fate or sign that in the end nothing can be changed. In an effort to atone for his inability to save May, The Master ends up taking under his wing a strange young man who also stumbled on the murder by coincidence while working as a delivery driver but is fascinated rather than repulsed by the bloody scene. Obsessed with knives and killing, Siu-tung (Lokman Yeung) is already known to the policeman investigating (Berg Ng Ting-Yip) because he arrested him for killing a cat in his teens. According to The Master’s reading of his fate, Siu-tung will eventually kill someone and end up in prison for 20 years. He doesn’t much like the sound of that so he ends up going along with The Master’s zany plans to make him a nicer person and save two lives in the process.

Ironically most of The Master’s suggestions still involve Siu-tung being imprisoned in some way. To get him out of his “unlucky” flat, he rents him another place that very much feels like a prison cell and later does actually lock him up inside a shed fearing that he’s about to kill. As he explains, it can help to preemptively accept your fate so moving in somewhere that is “like” a prison can stop you going there for real, but it doesn’t do much to alleviate Siu-tung’s desire to kill and most particularly to kill the policeman who has been following him most of his life because he’s “sure” that he’s going to commit a serious crime. Repeatedly describing him as “vermin”, the policeman has no confidence that Siu-tung could “change” and thinks he’s already past redemption while The Master quite reasonably asks if it’s fair to persecute him in this way just because he happened to be born different.

The Master’s question provokes another about free will and responsibility and if anything is really anyone’s fault if it’s all down to Fate in which case the role of the policeman becomes almost moot. He is also resisting his own fate in his intense fear of mental illness which he worries he will inherit from his parents each of whom suffered from some kind of mental distress. This fear has caused him retreat from life and it seems may have contributed another’s suicide while his divination has an otherwise manic quality as he finds himself constantly trying to outwit Fate. The two men soon find themselves in a battle with the skies, remarking that God is striking back every time they make a move to try and change their destiny.

Eventually The Master rationalises that a plant must wither before it fruits, allowing himself to slip into “madness” as means of rejecting his fate. His strategies become wilder and finally seem as if they might lead him to kill which would certainly be one way of altering Siu-tung’s destiny if ironically, while conversely something does indeed seem to change for Siu-tung who is understandably concerned by The Master’s increasingly erratic behaviour but has escaped his desire to kill. Then again, could this all not be Fate too, how would you know if you’d overcome it? As The Master comes to accept, the path maybe set but the way you walk it is up to you. Only by accepting his Fate can he free himself from it. There may be a more subversive reading to found in Cheang’s depiction of Hong Kong as a rain-soaked prison in which lives are largely defined by forces outside of their control, but he does at least suggest that his heroes have more power than they think even if it relies on a contradiction in the active choice to embrace one’s fate.

Mad Fate screens July 22 as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Images: © MakerVille Company Limited and Noble Castle Asia Limited

Geylang (芽籠, Boi Kwong, 2022)

July 20, 2023by Hayley Scanlon

Close to the end of Boi Kwong’s Geylang (芽籠), a young woman compares herself to a butterfly whose wings have begun to disintegrate, trapping in her in the environs of the famous red light district along with several others who all seem to have been the victim of cruel coincidence one rainy night. The world is indeed shades of grey, each of them having “good” reasons for behaving the way they do but also perhaps also selfish, or greedy, or merely afraid and seeking escape.

The strangest thing about this night in Geylang is that in the morning before it the body of a sex worker, Xiao Ling, was discovered near a remote stretch of road, only pretty much everyone seems to have forgotten about her and she is both incredibly central and an incidental detail in this karmic whirlpool of greed and desperation. Meanwhile, another sex worker, Shangri-La, is kidnapped by a crazed doctor trying to find a kidney donor for his seriously ill little girl. Shangri-La had also been in the middle of a blackmail plot against a politician running in the local election over a compromising video assisted by her pimp, Fatty, who is busy trying to care for his elderly father who has dementia. Meanwhile, activist lawyer Celine argues with her husband who is standing for office on a platform of cleaning up Geylang and is therefore unsupportive of her desire to continue to protect sex workers from violence and exploitation.

What looks like simple greed turns out to be desperation born out of love and despair which nevertheless leads to little more than self-destruction. In a sense they are all seeking escape from Geylang, Fatty quite literally trying to run to Indonesia after his father ends up stabbing a loanshark to death, save perhaps Celine who may be seeking escape inside it in detailing her traumatic past and marriage to an abusive husband whom she no longer loves. The quest to retrieve the compromising video turns out to have a different purpose than we first thought, exposing another kind of prejudice that leads to shame and repression but also heartbreak and the hurt of betrayal. Love doesn’t have much currency in Geylang save perhaps the parental in the wholesome relationship between Fatty and his dad even if it is to an extent inverted in the mad doctor’s unethical determination to steal Shangri-La’s kidney.

Even so, the election’s hypocrisy hangs over the rest of the action as a politician makes speeches about wanting to clean up the area as if the people who live there were just rubbish to swept away. Celine who runs Project Angel protecting vulnerable women working in the red light district feels differently but even she eventually reflects that the best way to protect herself is by gaining political power in addition to that granted to her by social position and wealth. She gives as good as she gets protecting a transgender sex worker from harrassment by a pair of obnoxious men but is also herself a victim of the ingrained misogyny of the world around her in which women’s bodies have been commodified yet have little value. Everyone seems to have forgotten Xiao Ling already, though there is quite a lot going on this particular night, as they scrabble for an exit.

Shot with noirish flair, the film surprises in its frankness amid the otherwise conservative Singapore painting a vivid picture of the other side of the underworld peopled by ordinary men and women just trying to by often in quite difficult circumstances. The irony is that the reason the video was so important wasn’t in its salacious content, but what it captured by mistake long after most had already stopped watching once again rendering its subject forgotten, a random after thought or loose end destined to remain untied. Dark moments of nihilistic humour hint at the sense of despair along with the cosmic irony that has drawn each of these people together united by their desire for a better life for themselves or others and their willingness to do whatever it takes to acquire it while seeking a way out of the neon-lit hell of Geylang only to realise that their tattered wings may no longer be able to carry them.

Geylang screens July 21 as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Everyphone Everywhere (全個世界都有電話, Amos Why, 2023)

July 19, 2023by Hayley Scanlon

Have we become too dependent on our phones, allowing them to divide rather than connect us? For those at the centre of Amos Why’s zeitgeisty comedy Everyphone Everywhere (全個世界都有電話), they do seem to have become a double-edged sword. Yet in the end, it’s a series of handsets that reconnect them with their youth if only to remind them of the disappointed hopes of a defeated middle-age given additional an weight by subtle hints of post-Handover despair.

Asked why he’s decided to move to the UK, Raymond (Peter Chan Charm-Man) replies that everybody’s doing it even if he resented being sent away to study in Aberdeen, Scotland as a teenager in the wake of the Handover. The real reason is that he’s got himself involved in a lot of shady stuff and has just had his phone hacked so he fears blackmail or arrest. He’s organised a farewell dinner with old high school friends Chit (Endy Chow Kwok-Yin) and An (Rosa Maria Velasco), but nothing quite goes to plan in the curious ways the lives of three former friends remain entwined even if they’ve all been in some sense corrupted by the changes in their society. “All is well as long as we never change” reads a teenage message to a future self, but of course it’s a promise that can’t be kept even if in the end, “life must go on anyway.”

Still, the society itself is fairly corrupt given the prevalence of scams many of them connected to our phones. Raymond failed to get his hacked phone fixed and opted for a new number instead, but Ana in particular keeps getting weird calls from him she later realises must be an attempt to scam her out of money by someone posing as Raymond and explaining that he needs money desperately. But Ana is also the victim of another “scam” in the form of Chit’s new business strategy of getting a “monthly fee” from clients rather than be reliant on work for hire arrangements. Even the restaurant itself along with its “Japanese” chef seems to be fraudulent, while An remains preoccupied with her husband’s womanising and Raymond ironically with his series of bad decisions that culminate in tax fraud. Meanwhile Raymond’s daughter Yanki (Amy Tang Lai-Ying) is also indulging in a kind of scamming selling intimate pictures to nerdy guys via telegram and smartphone apps and ironically remarking that she doesn’t want to get scammed again when discussing ever increasing payment options with her hapless targets.

Yet as Chit discovers when he leaves his phone at home, everything seems inconvenient when you’re phoneless. In a running gag, he repeatedly tries to borrow someone’s landline but is refused leaving him wandering around the city looking for a “restaurant” in one of three very similarly named redeveloped blocks. His wife’s is the only number he remembers by heart, but she remains resentful of his meeting up with Ana, his first love, whom he previously described as a “gullible” auntie and is on some level “scamming” by convincing her to keep him on a monthly retainer. Raymond’s phone threatens to expose him, Ana uses hers to spy on her husband and stepson, and Chit’s in a sense incapacitates him, leaving him alone and disorientated in his own city no longer certain how to travel around it amid the rapidly changing landscape and seemingly identical redevelopment projects.

Life hasn’t turned out the way any of them thought it would, recalling their carefree days 25 years previously in pre-Handover Hong Kong. Banners advertise a “New Era”, but the trio are trapped in the past with which they are eventually reconnected thanks to the retro handsets that unlike the technology of today still work and contain a series of time capsule messages to their future selves. History in a sense repeats itself as Raymond prepares to leave, but each is able to come to terms with their unfinished business and begin making concrete decisions about their futures. Suddenly “can we meet on Saturday?” takes on a new sense of poignancy when everyone seems to be leaving but then again, perhaps our phones really do connect us even if they sometimes connect us to scammers or people we don’t really want to talk to. Subtly hinting a sense of disappointment which runs a little deeper than middle-age malaise, Why looks back to the carefree days of 1997 allying the broken dreams of youth with the “New Era” of today but nevertheless grants his heroes a sense of new sense of possibility even the face of their despair.

Everyphone Everywhere screens July 20 as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Dream (드림, Lee Byeong-heon, 2023)

July 16, 2023by Hayley Scanlon

A disgraced football player gets a shot at redemption after agreeing to coach a team hoping to take part in the Homeless Olympics in Lee Byeong-heon’s sporting drama, Dream (드림). The Homeless Olympics was founded in order to advocate for the end of homelessness while combatting discrimination and stigma and takes place annually with teams of homeless people from all over the world taking part. Set in 2010 and inspired by the first Korean delegation to participate, the film is essentially an underdog sports drama in which the act of scoring a single goal is the same as an overall victory.

It is also, meanwhile, heavily critical of celebrity and sensationalist media each of which have a habit of latching onto popular causes in order to further their own careers. Hong-dae (Park Seo-jun) was a popular footballer insecure in his talents, but gained notoriety after poking an obnoxious reporter in the eyes when he repeatedly brought up the topic of his mother who happens to be a fugitive from justice. Deciding to retire from the game, Hong-dae is picked up by a talent agency who want to make him a star and is convinced to become the coach of the homeless football team in order to improve his personal brand while documentarian So-min (Lee Ji-eun) hopes to do something much the same by producing a semi-scripted reality show following the team’s fortunes.

Accordingly, So-min instructs Hong-dae to let her “cast” the key players on the basis of their touching backstories rather than their sporting ability. She comes up with a selection of people who have each for various reasons ended up on the streets but are looking for a way to turn their lives around and repair fractured relationships with family members. One man turned to booze and women while riding high but found himself out of luck when the Asian Financial Crisis ruined his business, while another claims that he’s not really homeless just lying low for a while, and a third was scammed by a friend and saddened by the impending exit of his ex-wife and daughter who will shortly be moving to Australia with her new husband. The film strays into more interesting territory in exploring the story of 44-year-old Beom-su (Jung Seung-gil) who ended up on the streets after a workplace accident left him with a chronic illness he did not have the money to treat, but otherwise falls into the same trap as So-min’s documentary in taking a fairly superficial view of homelessness. By the end of the film many of the players have thankfully moved into stable accommodation but do so largely without explanation aside from having apparently managed to save up for a deposit.

Positioning their battle for sporting success as a means of reclaiming their self-esteem might also uncomfortably suggest that the reason they’re on the streets is a matter of mental attitude while ignoring other systemic issues that led them there or prevented them from moving on (assuming that they wish to do so). Aligning their struggles with Hong-dae’s and to a lesser extent So-min’s might do something similar while they too are also battling cynicism and self-esteem issues, Hong-dae continuing to blame his mother for his problems complaining that he was born to be second place because she never put him first. As Hong-dae later points out, So-min is also to an extent exploiting the homeless in trying to create an inspirational narrative for her TV show before she like everyone else realises there are other ways to win besides the literal.

The final message is more one of never giving up as the team finally travel to the Olympics and find themselves out of their depth before deciding to give it everything they have even if it’s very unlikely they will win. There had indeed been discrimination in Korea, a sponsor pulling out describing the homeless as “smelly and disgusting” and expressing a degree of squeamishness about involving them with their brand, but at the Olympics they become the most popular team despite their lack of skill purely because of their charismatic perseverance. One player’s late in the game announcement that he is gay but has now come to accept himself in the knowledge that the problem lies with the world that will not accept him also makes the case for a greater equality if perhaps clumsily conflating two different issues. Nevertheless, IU’s lively performance and the film’s warmhearted tone help to overcome any mild sense of discomfort in its otherwise genial tale of never giving up and regaining your self-esteem even if you feel as if the world has already abandoned you.

Dream screens July 17 as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

New York Asian Film Festival Confirms 2023 Lineup

July 13, 2023by Hayley Scanlon

New York Asian Film Festival returns for its 22nd edition with another packed programme of recent East Asian cinema hits screening at Lincoln Center & Barrymore Film Center July 14 – 30. This year the festival will pay tribute to director Zhang Wei, while Junji Sakamoto will receive the Screen International Star Asia Lifetime Achievement Award, Ryohei Suzuki the Screen International Rising Star Asia Award, and Louis Koo the Extraordinary Star Asia Award.

China

Art College 1994 – A collection of art students mull over the big questions while floundering in the complicated mid-90s society in Liu Jian’s nostalgic animation. Review.
The Cord of Life – a folktronica musician embarks on a roadtrip with his mother after learning she has Alzheimer’s.
Flaming Cloud – whimsical romantic fantasy in which a young man is cursed causing all who kiss him to fall into a deep sleep.
A Woman – dramatisation of Zhang Xiuzhen’s semi-autobiographical novel charting a woman’s life through the cultural revolution into the new China of the 1980s.

Filmmaker in Focus: Zhang Wei

Empty Nest – drama in which an elderly woman bonds with a young man selling healthcare products.
Factory Boss – drama following the owner of a toy factory contending with economic crisis.
Redemption with Life – drama from Zhang Wei in which the friendship between three bikers is tested by a series of get-rich-quick schemes.
The Rib (Director’s Cut) – drama in which a transwoman contends with her conservative father whose signature she needs in order to get confirmation surgery. Review.

Hong Kong

A Light Never Goes Out – a mother and a daughter take very different paths in trying to come to terms with grief in Anastasia Tsang’s poignant drama. Review.
Back Home – folk horror in which a young man returns from Canada when his estranged mother falls into a coma.
Everyphone Everywhere – zeitesty drama in which three middle-aged friends reunite 25 years after high school as one prepares to go abroad.
In Broad Daylight – drama in which an investigative journalist goes undercover at a home for the disabled.
Mad Fate – mad cap supernatural noir in which a fortune teller and “born psychopath” team up to solve a murder.
Nomad – Heavily censored on its release, Patrick Tam’s 1982 classic stars a young Leslie Cheung as an aimless young man from a wealthy family who spends his time hanging out with friends at the beach until his cousin’s romance with a fugitive from the Japanese Red Army threatens to upset their idle days. Review.
The Sunny Side of the Street – An embittered taxi driver is forced to reflect on his prejudices and relationships after getting into a vendetta with a refugee in Lau Kok-rui’s melancholy drama. Review.
Vital Signs – drama starring Louis Koo as an earnest paramedic.
The White Storm 3: Heaven or Hell – the third installment in Herman Yau’s thematic series starring Louis Koo, Aaron Kwok, and Lau Ching-Wan.

Japan

#Manhole – a salaryman’s moment of triumph is disrupted when he falls down a manhole the night before his wedding in Kazuyoshi Kumakiri’s unhinged B-movie thriller. Review.
December – Bereaved parents are confronted by the unresolved past when the woman who killed their daughter appeals her sentence in Anshul Chauhan’s empathetic courtroom drama. Review.
Egoist – a fashion editor reflects on the nature of love after falling for a personal trainer in Daishi Matsunaga’s deeply moving romantic drama. Review.
A Hundred Flowers – An expectant father finds himself confronted with paternal anxiety and past trauma on learning that his mother has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in Genki Kawamura’s adaptation of his own novel. Review.
In Her Room – eerie drama in which a shy dentist falls for a mysterious woman.
Mayhem Girls – pandemic-era drama in which a group of high school girls suddenly develop superpowers.
Motherhood – Ryuichi Hiroki adapts the Kanae Minato novel revolving around the complicated relationship between a mother and a daughter.
Mountain Woman – a young woman walks into the mountains to die but unexpectedly discovers what it is to feel truly human in Takeshi Fukunaga’s bleak folk tale. Review.
Okiku and the World – a samurai’s daughter falls for a lowly manure man in a city on the brink of change in Junji Sakamoto’s touching dramedy. Review.

Malaysia

Abang Adik – drama centring on the relationship between two orphaned young men.

Philippines

12 Weeks – drama in which a woman attempts to secure a safe abortion in a fiercely pro-life culture.
I Love You, Beksman – a flamboyant hairdresser scandalises his family when he comes out as straight after falling for a beauty queen in Percival M. Intalan’s ironic comedy. Review.
Where Is the Lie? – drama in which a transwoman is targeted by cyberbullies.

South Korea

Bear Man – surreal comedy in which two bears managed by the North Korean Institute of Technology disappear one day.
Dream – inspiration sporting drama in which a washed up footballer agrees to coach a team of homeless men.
Extreme Festival – the CEO of a small events planning firm finds herself in the firing line after agreeing to organise the local cultural festival.
Greenhouse – gritty drama starring Kim Seo-hyung as a woman pushed to impossible extremes.
Hail to Hell – black comedy in which a young couple planning to take their own lives decide to get revenge on their bully instead.
The Host – Bong Joon Ho’s classic monster movie.
Killing Romance – madcap comedy in which a former star (Lee Ha-nee) teams up with a student (Gong Myoung) to kill her husband (Lee Sun-kyun).
Phantom – Colonial Era spy thriller meets drawing room mystery in this masterful drama from Lee Hae-young.
Rebound – inspirational sporting drama in which a moribund high school basketball team make their way towards championship glory.
A Tour Guide – a North Korean defector becomes a guide for Chinese tourists in the South while searching for her missing brother.

Singapore

Geylang – crime drama in which a series of cosmic coincidences conspire against residents of Singapore’s red light district.

Taiwan

The Abandoned – horror in which a grieving policewoman investigates a series of murders of migrant workers.
Bad Education – a night of post-graduation celebration goes awry when teenage boys unwisely assault a gangster in the directorial debut from actor Kai Ko.
Gaga – an indigenous family finds its relationships strained when the oldest son decides to run for mayor in Laha Mebow’s warmhearted dramedy. Review.
Eye of the Storm – a doctor investigates a mysterious virus.
Marry My Dead Body – a police officer discovers a red wedding envelope but soon realises the proposal comes from the other side and it is the ghost of a murdered man who wants to marry him!
Miss Shampoo – quirky rom-com from Giddens Ko in which a gangster falls for a hairstylist after she hides him from bad guys.

Thailand

Faces of Anne – existential drama in which a woman wakes up on a weird island where her face changes every few minutes.
Kitty the Killer – comic book action comedy in which a rookie teams up with a band of female assassins to take revenge for their mentor’s death.
You & Me & Me – millennial drama in which the relationship between a pair of twins is disrupted when they fall for the same boy.

Vietnam

Glorious Ashes – poetic drama focussing on the lives of three of three women in a poor coastal village.

The New York Asian Film Festival runs from 14th June to 30th July. Full details for all the films are available via the official website where you can also find screening times and ticketing information. You can also keep up with all the latest festival news via the official Facebook Page and Twitter account.