New York Asian Film Festival Announces Dates and First Titles

There are film festivals like Cannes and Sundance that are all about prestige and awards and the art of filmmaking and then there are film festivals like the annual New York Asian Film Festival held by Subway Cinema that’s all about fun and entertainment and bringing some of the best Asian films, many which don’t have any US distribution, to this country to be adored by Asiaphiles.

Today, the New York Asian Film Festival announced that this year’s festival will be running from June 29 through July 15, once again screening at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center and the Japan Society, as well as announcing some of the titles that will be screening at the fest.

Opening night is Pang Ho-cheung’s Vulgaria, described as “astonishingly filthy, extremely hilarious, a movie about making movies, shot in just 12 days, all about gangsters named Brother Tyrannosaur, sleazy lawyers, the sex film industry, and men who love donkeys a little too much.” Pang will be on-hand to present the film as well as his romantic comedy Love in the Buff “about a couple who meet in the smoke break alley outside their office building and try to make their romance work despite cell phones dropped in toilets, friends who have the death touch, and corporate moves to Beijing.”

Korean action director Chung Chang-Wha will be receiving the festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award along with a screening of his groundbreaking 1972 movie Five Fingers of Death done for Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers studio.

Korean superstar Choi Min-Sik from Oldboy and I Saw the Devil will be coming to New York with his own latest film Nameless Gangster, a mob film, as well as showing some of his other classics including Oldboy and one of our favorites from New York Asian Film Festivals past, Crying Fist.

Taiwanese films will be getting a special focus at this year’s fest with a screening of the full and uncut four-and-a-half hour version of the war movie Seediq Bale and the Asian box office record-setting romantic comedy You Are the Apple of My Eye.

Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike will once again be represented with his new movie Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, while Park Chan-Wook and his brother Chan-Kyung will present a 3-minute short film. Other movies include Nasi Lemak 2.0, a Malaysian food movie directed and starring rapper Namewee, the animated King of Pigs and Hitoshi (Symbol) Matsumoto’s Scabbard Samurai.

More titles will be announced over the next month.

Movie News

Marvel and DC

X