Tag: Asia in Focus
Coverage of films from the Asia-Pacific region.
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Castaway on the Moon
The 2011 Korean Cinema Blogathon is on, and we are taking a look at Lee Hae-jun’s 2009 sophomore effort. Soon to be remade for US audiences by Mean Girls director Mark Waters, audiences everywhere should take the opportunity to explore this modern classic.
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The Water Magician
One of Kenji Mizoguchi’s earliest works is not only a great example of the art of benshi, but a strong voice for the strength of women in Meiji era Japan. Screened as part of the Bigpond Adelaide Film Festival and Screen Live, we present it here for International Women’s Day.
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Mr. & Mrs. Incredible
Vincent Kok (Shaolin Soccer), delivers another satirical farce for the Chinese New Year season. Concerning a couple of retired superheroes in ancient China (Sandra Ng Kwan Yue and Louis Koo), it’s co-written by Kung Fu Hustle scribe Min Hun Fung!
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Shaolin
Despite a brief renaissance in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Chinese film (and in particular, martial arts) has been strangely absent from Australian cinema screens over the last few years. Not since the world’s love affair with Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon – which in turn led to wide releases of Hero and…
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Japanese Film Festival 2010: Wrap Up
It has been half a week since the end of the Sydney leg of 14th Japanese Film Festival, and we’re slowly coming down off the dizzying heights of the best that Japanese cinema has to offer us. Is Post Festival Displacement (PFD) a treatable disorder, and if so, can we claim it on Medicare? With…
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A Lone Scalpel (Japanese Film Festival 2010)
The Closing Night of the 14th Japanese Film Festival in Sydney is an adaptation of Doctor Toshihiko Oogane’s bestselling novel. Drawing on the controversial topic of human organ transplant from brain-dead patients in Japan, where brain-death was not legally recognised for a number of years, it is the second film in the festival (after Dear Doctor)…
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Sword of Desperation (Japanese Film Festival 2010)
The history of Japanese cinema has long been defined into a number of key genres that reflect the history of Japan itself. Arguably the most famous of these is the jidai-geki, or period dramas, and consist of films largely set in the Edo Period of Japan (1603 – 1868), with samurai cinema such as Rashomon,…
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The Summit: A Chronicle of Stones (Japanese Film Festival)
Prior to the availability of handheld GPS, people used to rely on these things called maps and surveying to find their way around the world. It sounds like some kind of madness, but apparently they didn’t have the Internet in those days either. (It’s ok, we can say what we like about them here: they’ll…
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Box! (Japanese Film Festival 2010)
Sport films tend to follow a fairly standard pattern, and are always good for a bit heart-string pulling in the audience. We’ve already had one sports film this year at the Japanese Film Festival in Feel the Wind, two if you count the competition performance calligraphy of Shodo Girls, both of which featured the underdog…
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