New York Asian Film Festival 2019

[Chris Knipp]

THE CROSSING 过春天 (Bai Xue 2018)

In this striking debut, the dangerously driven Peipei, just turned sixteen, is a 'danfei' with remote parents split between Hong Kong and China, and she goes back and forth between the mainland and Hong Kong to school every day in school uniform. This makes her perfect to smuggle new iPhones to China. She becomes the mascot of a wild crew of older boys headed by Mrs Hua, who's like a potentially treacherous den mother overseeing dangerous fun. The key figure to her in this new life becomes Hao, her best gf's bf, who draws her into a bolder maneuver. An original, vivid and intense film of teenage obsession that never lets up.

It showed in the NYAFF July 12.

[Chris Knipp]

MAGGIE 메기 (Yi Ok-seop 2018)

This Korean debut feature focuses on a nurse and slacker boyfriend and the insidiousness of doubt. Director Yi makes a fetish of arbitrary plot-shifts. Her interest is ideas. Played at aBusan, Rotterdam and Osaka and won some prizes.

It showed at the NYAFF July 13

[Chris Knipp]

FIVE MILLION DOLLAR LIFE (Moon Sung-ho 2019

Picaresque coming-of-ager about a suicidal heart transplant kid that blends saccharine-ness and lively adventures. Ayumu Mochizuki is the indestructible kindness-magnet kid. The young director is from Hiroshima but went to film school in Korea after high school, exploring his roots.

Five Million Dollar Life 五億円のじんせい ("500 million yen"), 112 mins., releases July 20, 2019 in Japan. It was previewed as part of the NYAFF for this review, where it showed July 11.

[Chris Knipp]

HUANG YAO IN THE CROSSING

A word about this year's New York ASian Film Festival.

You can peruse my recent NYAFF reviews on the Filmleaf Festival Coverage section. A couple I set up there I never completed but there are 19 or 20 reviews.

I particularly like finding good films outside the usual territories, such as Leon Le's dreamy and beautiful SONG LANG from Vietnam and Wang Lina's A FIRST FAREWELL about the Uyghurs. There were several outstandingly good and strikingly original first films by new directors, the standouts being Bae Xue's THE CROSSING, Lee Geuk-pan's G AFFAIRS. A fine Japanese (first) film was Kei Chicaura's COMPLICITY about a Chinese man working illegally in Japan. The idea of a Japanese director projecting into the experience of an outsider in this sensitive and well observed manner was striking and unusual. I watched some of the actioners of the series too - but they get repetitious, no matter how skillfully executed. Nonetheless, if they're your thing, take a look at them.

There may have been more discoveries lurking: I only saw half of the 41 films. For its variety and depth this is a truly remarkable film festival, and I'm glad to have been watching it since 2017 and wish I'd started earlier in its 18-year history.

[Chris Knipp]

KALBINUR AND ISA IN A FIRST FAREWELL

Wide US release of A FIRST FAREWELL 第一次的离别 (Wang Lina 2018 on June 25, 2021.

A few recent reviews find flaws not pointed out earlier.

Wang Lina's well-reviewed A First Farewell is releasing online June 25, 2021 on Amazon Prime Video, Hoopla, Vimeo on Demand, Cathay Play, Smart Cinema USA, Montage Play (more at AFirstFarewell.com).

A First Farewell received raves at its festival release from admiring reviewers, including myself. But some reviews appearing more recently have been more critical.

Among these is a Feb. 25, 2021 LA Times review by Michael Ordona that questions some of Wang Lina's methods and finds the film dangerously unclear about the current Uyghur situation. He feels Wang's "filmmaking techniques blurring documentary and narrative" and her dodging of censorship have led to problems. He notes the director admits deceiving the child actor to make her cry when chastised in school and never revealed the deception. Ordona points out the film never so much as mentions the humanitarian crisis the Uyghurs are in, a situation the US has officially designated as "genocide." The film's lack of direct criticism of Chinese policy toward the Uyghurs, he notes, must have been necessary to "get it past stringent censors in a country where" (quoting a New York Times article), "a vast system of surveillance, detention, cultural erasure and forced labor has devastated the Uyghur people in their homeland." All this, Ordona says, makes the film "murky" - morally and intellectually confused. Can the use of fictionalized documentary methods have brought about dangerous distortions in this case? Ordona certainly implies so.

A Letterboxd citizen reviewer with moniker "nathanrao" expresses similar views. The reviewer notes that though the film is "beautifully shot" and "moving" they "don't understand what wang was trying to say" and concluded that she was probably "hamstrung from a greater message due to politics." This about sums it up: A First Farewell is a striking debut, beautiful and touching and remarkable in its use of non-actors, even if that at some points may be questionable; but the film is vague about the larger issues of the Uyghur humanitarian crisis, a "murkiness" due to politics and censorship constraints. The focus on the children's point of view may be seen in this context as a strategy enabling the filmmaker to bypass those constraints and avoid confronting headlong larger issues the young protagonists might not yet be aware of.