49th San Francisco International Film Festival Features 19 Films from the Pacific Rim

New Spotlight: IndieAsia Highlights Four Unique Feature Film Debuts

March 28, 2006

San Francisco, CA—The 49th San Francisco International Film Festival (April 20–May 4) proudly features a strong Asian film presence. Nineteen features—seven from Japan, three from China, two each from Hong Kong, the Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan and one from Indonesia—comprise the selection of Asian films at SFIFF 49. From the Opening Night film (Peter Ho-Sun Chan’s Perhaps Love from Hong Kong), to The Late Show screenings (Executive Koala and The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai, both from Japan), to the special Spotlight: IndieAsia section for films from the edge, this year’s Festival gives audiences to check out the best of Asian cinema, from new directors to the masters of world cinema.

Spotlight: IndieAsia, one of the five new Spotlight: programs in the Festival, was introduced to highlight four unique feature film debuts from Asian directors. Takushi Tsubokawa’s Clouds of Yesterday (Japan) chronicles the story of a silent film reel: In the 1930s, a young boy delivering the film to a theater does not approve of the ending of the film, so he buries the reel; as a grandfather, he searches for the missing reel in order to complete his life. Tsubokawa’s film took ten years to complete, struggling with budget issues and an aging cast, but the result is an impressive and original debut. John de Rantau’s Looking for Madonna (Indonesia), an unusual film about AIDS, follows Joseph, a Papuan teen who contracts the disease. After his girlfriend, who also contracted AIDS, is burned alive by her father for embarrassing the family, Joseph ends up seeking solace in Madonna, a prostitute in his village. Joseph’s friend Minus narrates the film, adding a level of depth, humanity and unexpected maturity to this cautionary tale. Twenty-two-year-old Raya Martin’s A Short Film About the Indio Nacional (or The Prolonged Sorrow of Filipinos) is a beautiful mostly silent film that follows the struggle of a common Filipino against the Spanish colonization in the 1890s. Rounding out the Spotlight: IndieAsia track is Ying Liang’s Taking Father Home (China), which tells the story of a teenager who leaves his village and heads for the big city in search of his father, who is rumored to be rich. Liang mixes social drama with dark comedy to capture the current mood of Chinese society.

Roger Garcia, programming consultant for the San Francisco Film Society, remarked on how the spread of digital technology has aided Asian cinema. “It has enabled many young filmmakers around the world to tell stories that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. What is encouraging is that the best indie films are often both surprising in content and form and the most interesting works come from unexpected areas. Our indie films come from filmmakers who are outside the mainstream and may be all the better for it.”

The selection of Asian films at SFIFF 49 continues with stories of people seeking love. Two South Korean films focus on the search for happiness and love. Park Jin-Pyo’s You Are My Sunshine tells the tale of a sweet and naïve country man who falls for a sex worker. In Kang Yi-Kwan’s Sa-Kwa, a woman reluctantly starts a relationship with a man who is pursuing her after she is dumped by her boyfriend. As the couple moves towards marriage, the woman realizes her ideas of love have changed. Superstar Andy Lau takes on two roles—a doctor whose wife is killed and whose heart is transplanted into another woman, and the husband of the woman who received the transplant—in Daniel Yu’s deliriously beautiful film All About Love (Hong Kong). A different kind of love story is explored in The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros (Auraeus Solito, Philippines), about openly gay preteen Maxi who is devoted to his family of small-time criminals. He cooks for them, cleans for them, even covers their tracks. But his loyalty is tested when he meets Victor, the idealistic and handsome policeman. A second Asian film with a gay theme is The House of Himiko (Isshin Inudo, Japan), a story of a sullen woman who goes to work in a home for elderly gay men founded by her dying father. This offbeat comedy offers a rare look at Japan’s older gay community.

Teenagers are the focus in The Silent Holy Stones (Wanma-caidan, China) and Cycling Chronicles: Landscapes the Boy Saw (Koji Wakamatsu, Japan). In Wanma-caidan’s film, a teenaged lama takes a break from his religious studies to spend time with his family during the New Year holiday—and to watch television. This debut feature shows an insider’s view of life in a Tibetan village. Koji Wakamatsu’s film is a tale of a young cyclist riding though northern Japan, and the political and personal lessons learned in the boy’s journey.

Perpetual Motion (Ning Ying, China) and Three Times (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan) offers glimpses into the past and the present. In Perpetual Motion, four women meet on the eve of Chinese New Year to play mah-jongg and reminisce. But in this examination of adultery and history, the hostess hopes to determine which of her guests is having an affair with her husband.  Three Times is a three-part film, featuring the same actors in different time periods (1966, 1911 and 2005). Hou Hsiao-hsien’s romantic film moves across the history of Taiwan with two lead roles and one eternal love. The powerful film Bashing (Masahiro Kobayashi, Japan) offers a controversial, fictionalized account of a young woman whose kidnapping and release in the Middle East made her an outsider in her hometown. Kobayashi’s film is based on the experiences of several Japanese aid workers who were held hostage in Iraq in 2004. And in the fascinating Canadian documentary They Chose China (Shui-Bo Wang), the director tells the rarely heard story of POWs captured in the Korean War by the Chinese army who declined to return to the United States upon their release. Wang’s film is the winner of this year’s Golden Gate Award for television documentary (long form).

The Asian film selection concludes with the visually stunning and bizarre. Seijun Suzuki’s Princess Raccoon (Japan) is visually spectacular musical about an abandoned prince who is rescued by an enigmatic, Chinese-speaking woman (who is a raccoon princess in human guise) played by superstar Ziyi Zhang. The Wayward Cloud (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan) features surreal musical numbers to tell the tales of the personal lives of a porn actor, his costars and his pseudo girlfriend. Japanese films make up two of the four films in The Late Show section of the Festival, including Minoru Kawasaki’s Executive Koala about human-sized koala bear struggling with office politics. Also in The Late Show program is Mitsuru Meike’s The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai, in which a call girl is hit by a stray bullet and comes into the possession of a cylinder containing a clone of the finger of George W. Bush. Finally, the Festival’s Opening Night film, Perhaps Love (Peter Ho-Sun Chan, Hong Kong), which pays homage both Western and Eastern musicals and melodramas, rounds out the collection of Asian films at SFIFF 49.

Founded in 1957, the vanguard San Francisco International Film Festival is the longest-running film festival in the Americas. Held each spring for two weeks, the International is an extraordinary showcase of cinematic discovery and innovation in the country’s most beautiful city, featuring some 200 films and live events with more than 100 filmmakers in attendance, presenting some 22 awards and attracting a diverse audience of nearly 80,000 people.

The 49th International runs April 20–May 4, 2006 at the Kabuki 8 Theatres, the Castro Theatre and the Cowell Theater at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco; the Pacific Film Archive Theater in Berkeley; and Landmark’s Aquarius Theatre in Palo Alto, as well as several smaller venues. To purchase tickets and for ticket information log on to www.sffs.org, call 925.866.9559 or visit the Main Ticket Outlet at the Kabuki 8 Theatres (1881 Post Street) or the Satellite Ticket Outlet at Virgin Megastore (2 Stockton Street). For additional information log on to www.sffs.org or call 415.561.5000.

San Francisco Film Society, presenter of the flagship SFIFF, is a nonprofit arts and educational organization dedicated to celebrating the world of film and media in all its glorious forms. In early 2006 the Film Society unveiled SF360, a broad-spectrum series of initiatives designed to showcase the extraordinary vitality, variety and innovation of the San Francisco Bay Area film and media scene, including www.sf360.org, SF360 San Francisco Movie Night, SF360 InSchool Cinemas and the SF360 Festival of Festivals.