Whatever the intention of the individual filmmakers, the Western genre has always been one about the triumph of colonialism. Despite the genre's preoccupations with justice, personal honor, and rugged individualism, America's westward expansion necessitated the displacement of native peoples and the exploitation of immigrant populations, usually at the point of a gun. It's a bloody, brutal history sanitized through literal decades of whitewashing and cultural sanitization. But it's because of all this that Mike Wiluan's Buffalo Boys is such an odd and exciting surprise—an Indonesian Western that borrows wholesale the visual trappings and thematic touchstones of John Ford, Sergio Leone, and Sam Peckinpah to tell a defiant story of gory colonial revolt.
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Masato Harada’s Sekigahara is a film that stands before you and dares you to follow its story. Much like with Harada’s last film The Emperor in August (2015) which explored the Machiavellian schemings in the buildup to a pivotal moment in Japanese history—in this case Imperial Japan’s surrender to the Allied forces in World War Two—Sekigahara examines the background, motives, and double-crossings of the people involved with one of the country’s most important battles. Fought on October 21, 1600 in the wake of the power vacuum left by the death of daimyō Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the eponymous battle resulted in the consolidation of Tokugawa Ieyasu’s rule over a freshly unified Japan, establishing a shogunate that lasted for over 250 years. Perhaps not since the 1185 Battle of Dan-no-ura which established Japan’s first shōgun had a single military engagement done so much to sculpt the nation’s history.
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When Lin Shu-Chi returns to her childhood home in Taiwan, she finds everything changed. The fetid, canal running through her neighborhood is now a tidy town park and the buildings leveled by the 1999 Jiji earthquake have been rebuilt. Everything seems new and odd, an uncanny reflection of what she once knew as a little girl, having returned home with a life and husband in America and a child on the way. As an immigrant, she never felt truly at home in the States, baffled by the corporate uniformity of the suburbs and embarrassed by her half-white niece who thinks Chinese cooking is smelly and gross. She is similarly displaced in Taiwan, fielding a chorus of questions about being her parents “American daughter” when she wanders down old familiar streets. Chi’s not American, but she’s not exactly Taiwanese either—at least not the Taiwan that arose from the ashes of Chiang Kai-shek’s dictatorship in the 70s. Being one-fourth Amis—one of Taiwan’s aboriginal peoples cruelly suppressed by the refugee Nationalist government fleeing mainland Communists—she was mercilessly bullied in school: mocked by her classmates, her teachers beat every trace of Amis out of her, forbidding her from speaking her native Hokkien in favor of Mandarin. Now in middle age, Chi doesn’t know who she is but she knows what she is: miserable, unfulfilled, lost.
This listlessness born from ethnic ambiguity is central to Hsin Yin Sung’s superb On Happiness Road, an autobiographical Taiwanese animated film receiving its North American debut at this year’s New York Asian Film Festival. It’s deliberately childlike art style—one based on over-simplified geometric shapes, sequences of superfluid movement, and deceptively simple color palettes—makes the film seem like a series of Kindergarten drawings brought to life, promising a whimsical story of life and love. This is Sung’s trap. What appears on the surface to be a superficial Taiwanese riff on Studio Ghibli, particularly the family tales of Isao Takahata, is actually one of the most nuanced and complex animated dramas since Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s Persepolis (2007). The two films share many obvious similarities: both are coming of age stories about optimistic girls growing into conflicted, resigned adults against a historical backdrop of political unrest; both feature protagonists escaping their hyper-conservative native countries to live as expats in the West; both are productions from countries not particularly renowned for native animation industries. While Persepolis’ protagonist Marji benefited from a distinct cultural identity, one that grounded her tumultuous transition to womanhood and independence, Chi finds herself in a state of constant ethnic flux, one seemingly prophesied by her being born the same day of Kai-shek’s death when Taiwan was plunged into political unrest. It is this treatment of racial fluidity that elevates Sung’s wistful coming-of-age story into an essential work.
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What happened to this year’s New York Asian Film Festival main competition slate? For the last 17 years, the NYAFF has prided itself on being one of the most unusual, unpredictable, and daring festivals not just in New York but in America, thumbing its nose at traditional standards of artistic propriety and scheduling the boldest, the strangest, and the most uncomfortable films Asia has to offer. This year is no exception—from odd meta-horror comedies to steroid-chugging actionsploitation, their program is a veritable smorgasbord of the odd and fantastic. But little of that energy seems to have been put into curating their picks for their annual Jury Prize. This year’s competition films are among the dullest, blandest, and safest of the entire festival.
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It's been twelve years since director Dain Said completed his true crime/supernatural thriller Dukun, a highly fictionalized retelling of the Mona Fandey case in Malaysia. Fandey, an ex-nightclub singer-turned-shaman, was accused of murdering a politician in 1993 during a black magic ritual intended to grant him invincibility. The rite, shall we say, wasn't particularly successful: he ended up decapitated with the rest of his body chopped into 18 pieces. As if this wasn't suspicious enough, Fandey reportedly went on a shopping spree with the politician's money where she bought a Mercedes-Benz and a facelift. She was eventually arrested, tried, and executed along with her husband and assitant. The trial gained international notoriety, partly due to the sensationalized nature of the case and partially due to the sensationalized nature of Fandey herself: during the trial she acted like a Hollywood celebrity, mugging for the cameras and wearing ostentatiously colorful dresses.
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With virtually no women directors in mainstream Thai cinema, the indie and festival circuits have become the sole refuges for their few female filmmakers. Consider actress Bongkod Bencharongkul's second directorial feature Sad Beauty--an alternatively pensive and energetic, life-affirming and heart-breaking examination of female friendship. Originally rejected by major studios and facing considerable blowback from producers who wanted it to be a straightforward thriller, the film underwent a tumultuous six-year production cycle necessitating the replacement of the entire production team three times. The film has gathered some minor attention in festivals outside its native Thailand, and its North American debut here at NYAFF allows new audiences to witness this fascinating if inconsistent kaleidoscope that represents a crucially underrepresented facet of Southeast Asian cinema.
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Don’t let the coy title confuse you—Irene Villamor’s Sid & Aya: Not a Love Story is, in fact, a love story. But the point is that, unlike the majority of Filipino romances, it isn’t just a straight romance with a clean-cut ending.
In keeping with the recent trend of female Filipino directors reinterpreting the romance genre, Sid & Aya seeks to examine the buried hurts and needs that drive lonely people together and the fears and anxieties that oh so often drive them apart. The film follows Sid (Dingdong Dantes), a cutthroat stockbroker plagued by insomnia. One night while grabbing a midnight snack at a cafe, he encounters Aya (Anne Curtis), a brassy waitress who impresses him by finding him completely unimpressive. The two strike up a friendship and Sid eventually offers to pay her $20 an hour to talk him to sleep. Though initially hesitant, Aya agrees because she needs the money. The two slowly fall in love, both in the course of their midnight conversations and through a series of meet-cutes where Sid keeps accidentally running into her at her other part-time jobs. Things promptly fall apart as soon as they consummate their relationship: Aya’s father has a stroke and she moves to Japan to take care of her mother. As lovesick young men are wont to do in these movies, Sid follows her overseas and tries to rekindle their affair.
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Despite having already premiered in New York earlier this year in a smattering of local cinemas, the screening of Dante Lam’s latest film, the Chinese mega-blockbuster Operation Red Sea, was one of the most hotly anticipated events of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival. A cataclysmic cross between the gung-ho jingoist action blowouts of Michael Bay and the heroic bloodshed melodramas of Hong Kong, the film’s more-is-more aesthetic resulted in one of the most thrilling and punishing spectacles in recent world cinema, surpassed only by George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015).
Afterwards, while many still sat shell-shocked in their seats, the lights came up and Lam received one of the festival’s highest honors: the Daniel A. Craft Award for Excellence in Action Cinema. Even if Lam had been a fresh film school graduate who’d lucked into the budget to make Operation Red Sea, that single film would justify such an award. While Lam may not be as prominent a name in the West as John Woo or Tsui Hark, he nonetheless boasts an impressive career stretching back over 20 years as one of China’s go-to action auteurs. Beginning as a mere production assistant in the mid-80s, Lam worked his way up into the director’s chair where he quickly established a reputation for bold genre experimentation. In addition to Operation Red Sea, this year’s festival screened two of Lam’s other films in a mini-retrospective detailing his love of transcending cinematic norms.
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