6th Annual San Diego Asian Film Festival Spring Showcase Program Booklet

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A WEEK-LONG PRESENTATION OF

ASIAN CINEMAwww.pacarts.org

APRIL 28 - MAY 5, 2016

6TH ANNUALSAN DIEGO ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL

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visions from the Beijing Independent Film Festival see the light of day in the “China Now” series.

And let music and film bring the world together! Yo-Yo Ma and friends riff on homeland in THE MUSIC OF STRANGERS. Classic pop songs bring warmth to family in Singapore’s 3688.

For the sixth edition of the San Diego Asian Film Festival Spring Showcase, we celebrate the power of film to orchestrate our emotions and give us a rare moment to find harmony amongst strangers in the dark. So enjoy this eight-day program, our ode to the films and filmmakers that let us see and hear the world anew, and to our audiences, who inspire us year after year to ensure that Asian cinema has a home in San Diego.

THE ORCHESTRA IS TUNEd, the conductor’s baton is ready, and the audience is at attention. Pacific Arts Movement’s rite of spring commences…now!

Cue the drama! Romance is stretched to its emotional limits in Japan’s acclaimed THREE SEASONS OF LOVE. A Ponzi scheme collapses in Erik Matti’s gripping HONOR THY FATHER.

Now pluck those heart strings! An insomniac graphic designer falls in love with his dermatologist in HEART ATTACK. Dreams are tested in the rollicking BORN TO dANCE.

Now a few solos from veterans and brilliant new voices. Déjà vu strikes again in Hong Sang-soo’s latest spin on awkward encounters, RIGHT THEN, WRONG NOW. Suppressed

WeLcoMe to sPRIng shoWcAse 2016 fILM scheduLe

tIcKet detAILs

Tickets are now available at festival.sdaff.org and at the UltraStar Mission Valley box office starting April 22.

All screenings at UltraStar Mission Valley 7510 Hazard Center Dr. #100, San Diego, CA 92108

fRee scReenIngsMay 1 screening of A FILMLESS FESTIVAL is free for Pac Arts members.

ALL-Access PAssExclusively available to Pac Arts Members. At only $65, the All-Access Pass is the best deal, providing front-of-line access to all films. Contact [email protected] for more information.

tIcKet tYPe oPenIng nIght: THE MUSIC OF STRANGERS

non-oPenIng nIght scReenIngs

GENERAL $15 $12

MEMBER $12 $9

STUDENT/SENIOR/MILITARY

-- $9.50

GROUP 10+ $12/ticket $9/ticket

THE MUSIC OF STRANGERS

Thursday, April 28 7:00p The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble (USA)

Friday, April 29 5:30p Born to Dance (New Zealand) 7:35p Honor Thy Father (Philippines)

Saturday, April 30 1:00p 3688 (Singapore) 3:15p Born to Dance (New Zealand) 5:25p The Lost Arcade (USA) 7:45p Heart Attack (Thailand)

Sunday, May 1 1:00p A Filmless Festival (China) 3:00p Animated Shorts Program (China) 5:10p Spark (China) 7:20p The River of Life (China)

Monday, May 2 5:25p Heart Attack (Thailand) 8:00p Three Stories of Love (Japan)

Tuesday, May 3 5:10p 3688 (Singapore) 7:20p Right Then, Wrong Now (S. Korea) 9:45p Mystery Kung Fu Theater

Wednesday, May 4 5:00p Honor Thy Father (Philippines) 7:25p Right Then, Wrong Now (S. Korea)

Thursday, May 5 6:45p Sweet 20 (Vietnam) 7:30p Sweet 20 (Vietnam)

Periodical Statement

San Diego Asian Film Festival Spring Showcase, April 28 - May 5, 2016, Issue No. 1.

Published annually

Address: Pacific Arts Movement 2508 Historic Decatur Road #140 San Diego, CA 92106

(619) 400-5911 // [email protected]

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oPenIng nIght PResentAtIon cLosIng nIght PResentAtIon

Thurs, April 28, 7:00pdirector: Morgan NevilleUSA | 95 min | 2015

Thurs, May 5, 6:45p Thurs, May 5, 7:30p

director: Phan Gia Nhat LinhVietnam | 127 min | 2015

THE MUSIC OF STRANGERS: YO-YO MA AND THE SILK ROAD ENSEMBLE

SWEET 20

Underwritten by

BECOMING A MUSICIAN was never the plan for the young Yo-Yo Ma. And surely becoming one of the world’s pre-eminent celebrities of classical music was even more unthinkable. And so it’s most poignant that Ma had such clarion purpose when it came to assembling the Silk Road Ensemble, a collective of musicians from countries along the fabled trade route. For Ma, no currency or commodity is as powerful as music, and no trader as attuned to cross-cultural exchange than instrumentalists like Iran’s Kayhan Kalhor, China’s Wu Man, or Spain’s Cristina Pato. For over a decade, the ensemble has traveled the world as a microcosm of the global but also as a bold, utopic grazing away of borders.

SWEET 20 WAS FIRST known simply as the Vietnamese remake of the Korean film Miss Granny. But millions of fans and countless accolades later, it’s earned a spot of its own as a bona-fide sensation and the biggest hit of Vietnam in 2015. The story, also remade in China in 2015, has become the perfect fantasy-comedy of contemporary Confucianism: a grandmother neglected by her family becomes magically reborn as her 20-year-old self and wins back the hearts of her bratty descendants, a senior center suitor, and indeed an entire nation.

Beyond simply transplanting the story to Vietnam, director Phan Gia Nhat Linh gives it new soul, tapping emotionally into pre-1975

Directed by Oscar-winner Morgan Neville (Twenty Feet from Stardom), THE MUSIC OF STRANGERS glides and circles around the dizzying, tradition-defying virtuosos of the Silk Road Ensemble. Rich in history, politics, and of course wall-to-wall music, the documentary is an absolute dream. What better way to wander away from home only to find it again, than in the longing notes of the Kamancheh or the wayfaring drones of a Galician bagpipe? In zones of displacement, exile, and migration, THE MUSIC OF STRANGERS wondrously captures the ravishing ways unexpected connections sprout from unexpected harmonies.

nostalgia for pop songs and a version of pre-socialist commercialism that seems unrecognizable today. Still, even as it nods to the past, SWEET 20 looks forward to the bubbly possibilities of Vietnamese pop cinema to come. The USC-trained Linh directs the film with a nice balance of hijinks and feeling, and with a keen sense of how international stories can find meaning locally. But of all, we should embrace ourselves for singer-turned-actress Miu Le in a tour-de-force physical performance, conveying granny sass through any number of squats and facial contortions.

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FOR OVER A dECAdE, the Beijing Independent Film Festival has been one of the leading platforms for independent and underground film artists in China. During that time, it’s also been blocked, challenged, and even outright cancelled by the government. In 2015, a collective called Cinema on the Edge decided to bring selections from the festival to New York City, and in 2016, they are bringing those films out to the world. The SDAFF Spring Showcase is their San Diego stop.

“China Now: Independent Visions” celebrates the daring spirit and creative innovation of independent filmmakers and festival organizers in mainland China. These films do various things: intensely engaged meta-journalism, alternative history-making, genre-defying performance/documentary art hybridization, and visually playful experimentalism. Independent Chinese filmmakers are inventing new ways of mobilizing, adapting, and innovating film language under pressure from the incredibly rapid and fundamental changes Chinese society is undergoing.

Program notes by Shelly Kraicer, co-organizer of Cinema on the Edge

chInA noW: IndePendent vIsIons

This film documents the 11th Beijing Independent Film Festival in 2014, from the preparations before the opening ceremony to the process of its forced cancellation. The footage used for the film was captured by audience members, local artists, invited directors and special guests, festival volunteers and workers, as well as journalists and members of the media.

Screening free for Pac Arts members.

A FILMLESS FESTIVAL

Sun, May 1, 1:00p

Editor: Wang Wo

China | 80 min | 2015

Through styles as diverse as ink wash painting, Tibetan thangka, and 3D computer graphics, these six short animations breathtakingly imagine fable-like pasts and dystopian, surreal futures.

PERFECT CONJUGAL BLISS Zhong Su, 5 min, 2014

DOUBLE ACT Ding Shiwei, 5 min, 2013

THE HUNTER AND THE SKELETON Bai Bin, 26 min, 2012

AN APPLE TREE Bai Bin, 11 min, 2013

THE NEW BOOK OF MOUNTAINS & SEAS PART 2 Qiu Anxiong, 30 min, 2012

FAMILY REUNION Chen Li-hua, 18 min, 2012

SPARK was an underground magazine published in 1960 by four young intellectuals who wanted to expose the devastating famine caused by Mao’s Great Leap Forward, a horrendous period of national suffering that is still unmentioned in China’s history textbooks today. This is filmmaking as urgent historical investigation. His alternative oral history approach knits together courageous and frequently moving interviews with the magazine’s surviving supporters, who were ready to sacrifice themselves to alert their countrymen to unprecedented disaster.

Yang Pingdao is one of China’s most exciting emerging filmmakers. Using an innovative structure, based on the distinctive texture of family memory through space and time, Yang invents something poised delicately between fiction and documentary to capture crystallized moments in his family history, to recreate in cinematic form its emotional weight and variety, woven around the life and death of his grandmother, and the birth of his child. Opening film and prize winner of BIFF 2014.

ANIMATED SHORTS PROGRAM

Sun, May 1, 3:00p

95 min

SPARK

Sun, May 1, 5:10p

Director: Hu Jie

China | 101 min | 2014

THE RIVER OF LIFE

Sun, May 1, 7:20p

Director: Yang Pingdao

China | 101 min | 2014

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fILMs

3668

Sat, April 30, 1:00p / Tues, May 3, 5:10p

Director: Royston Tan

Singapore | 99 min | 2015

BORN TO DANCE

Fri, April 29, 5:30p / Sat, April 30, 3:15p

Director: Tammy Davis

New Zealand | 96 min | 2015

38-year-old Xia Fei Fei is a parking lot attendant, lurking by cars and waiting to issue tickets. But the sudden arrival of an old stage partner and the opportunity afforded by a TV singing competition awaken Fei Fei’s long-buried pop star dreams. Playing both to kitsch and to an earnest belief that classic songs can bring generations together, 3688 concocts an effervescent musical playground with garish costumes, language jokes, and songs that best stir the heart when crackling out of an old radio or sung nostalgically by a loved one who knows no other way to express what she feels.

As in many a Hong Sang-soo film, a director meets a pretty young artist. There are drinks, unseemly interactions, and inevitably more drinks. But in its depiction, once again a marvel of cinematic structure, the narrative fissures into any number of other possibilities, revealing a comical game of what-ifs and switched perspectives as delirious and puzzling as the romantic encounter itself. Hong (The Day He Arrives, SDAFF ‘11) is a genius of deja-vu, and with the splendidly-titled RIGHT THEN, WRONG NOW, drinks to all permutations of mistimed unruliness, questionable decisions, and hazy memories of men, women, and their collisions.

HONOR THY FATHER

Fri, April 29, 7:35p / Wed, May 4, 5:00p

Director: Erik Matti

Philippines | 115 min | 2015

In the waning years of the video arcade boom, the Chinatown Fair was legion: the last place to check out the newest games, the surviving oasis of competition and community. But even the famed CF would succumb to the explosion of home consoles and PC gaming, and with its inevitable closure came the end of an era for a generation for whom CF was not just an amusement, but a home. Filmmakers Kurt Vincent and Irene Chin were there for the arcade’s final nights, but more importantly, for its aftermath, when a racial utopia gentrified into the unthinkable.

THE LOST ARCADE

Sat, April 30, 5:25p

Director: Kurt Vincent

USA | 79 mins | 2015

RIGHT THEN, WRONG NOW

Tues, May 3, 7:20p / Wed, May 4, 7:25p

Director: Hong Sang-soo

South Korea | 121 min | 2015

Tu may have been born to dance, but tell that to his traditionalist dad or to the world-renowned K-Crew, whose members have their suspicions about this kid from the wrong side of the tracks. But nobody tells Tu to pop or pump to any beat other than his own heart’s, and nobody who witnesses his potential and his ethic will leave uninspired by the brilliance of his commitment. BORN TO DANCE tackles harsh truths about class and labor while dazzling with spectacular routines that shine a bright light on the New Zealand dance scene and some of its most dynamic Maori stars.

A graphic designer zooms through his retouching projects, compulsively searching for Wi-Fi everywhere he goes and tracking his success by the number of consecutive days he can stay awake while working. But when worrisome bumps start appearing on his neck, he realizes he needs more than Photoshop to remove the rash… he needs a dermatologist. And when the pathological workaholic falls in love with a doctor-in-training, awkward hilarity will ensue – as will a beautiful portrait of life as a freelancer who discovers that work should never be inversely proportional to love.

HEART ATTACK

Sat, April 30, 7:45p / Mon, May 2, 5:25p

Director: Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit

Thailand | 124 min | 2015

Edgar is a family man, living well off with his wife and daughter. But when a secret regarding their finances is exposed, their lives are put in jeopardy by the very friends they have come to trust. Edgar’s life starts to collapse around him as he struggles to secure the safety of his family and seek vengeance against his betrayers. With John Lloyd Cruz as Edgar and direction by Erik Matti (On the Job, SDAFF ‘13), HONOR THY FATHER features uncompromising grit and drama that surrounds every corner with claustrophobic tension.

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sPecIAL thAnKs: Councilmember Chris Cate, Dr. Lilly Cheng, Frank Howley, Emily Flener, Richard Go, Tim Graham, Deb Hall, Moin Heydari, Traci Hong, Shelly Kraicer, Lidia Martinez, George McGregor, Tim Moon, Leo Morales, Mahmoud Reza Pirouzian, Dana Rivers, Katelin Scanlan, Jorge Silva

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THREE STORIES OF LOVE

Mon, May 2, 8:00p

Director: Ryosuke Hashiguchi

Japan | 140 min | 2015

The most acclaimed Japanese film of 2015 interweaves the aspirations of three characters as they undergo at different stages and in different orders introspective journeys of romantic hope, disappointment, and loss. A bridge-repairer quietly goes on with life after the senseless murder of his wife. A gay lawyer holds a secret love close to his heart. A housewife dreams of a life large enough to contain her sense of self-worth. Together, the quests depict love as lingering fevers resistant to diagnosis and immune to easy remedy. This is drama at its most adult: uncompromising, hardened, and immensely felt.

SAVE THE DATE!NOV 3- 12, 2016 The 17th San Diego Asian Film Festival returns!

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APRIL 28 - MAY 5, 2016 ULTRASTAR MISSION VALLEY

6TH ANNUALSAN DIEGO ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL

HEART ATTACK

SWEET 20

THE MUSIC OF STRANGERS

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