The 27th San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival schedule is finally out! But a quick Filipino film-related aside first: You can get a good heady dose of Filipino cinema the weekend of March 20, as Brillante Mendoza’s Serbis is opening at the Embarcadero, with Lav Diaz’s monumental 10-hour In the Land of the Encantos at the Yerba Buena Center the following day, on the 21st. How cool is that? (I wasn’t the biggest fan of Mendoza’s Tirador, but Foster Child was a powerful piece of work; I can’t make it to Diaz’s film, but his ten-and-a-half hour The Evolution of a Filipino Family was staggeringly good, and this new one shouldn’t disappoint either.)
The SFIAAFF program this year looks pretty good, including a Kiyoshi Kurosawa retrospective, but here’s what’s bubbling up for me, in calendar order (I live in the East Bay, so I’m very PFA-biased, but who wouldn’t be?):
Friday, March 13 (both at the PFA):
- Adolfo Alix Jr., Adela
- Jennifer Phang, Half-Life
Saturday, March 14 (both at the PFA):
- Jia Zhangke, 24 City (here’s my short entry on Still Life as well)
- Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Tokyo Sonata
Wednesday, March 18 (both at the Kabuki):
- Jeff Adachi, You Don’t Know Jack: The Story of Jack Soo
- Bong Joon-Ho, Leos Carax and Michel Gondry, Tokyo! (and here’s my entry on Bong’s The Host)
Thursday, March 19 (PFA)
- Heiward Mak, High Noon
Friday, March 20 (PFA)
- H.P. Mendoza, Fruit Fly (Mendoza is the co-writer and star of Richard Wong’s Colma: The Musical, which I loved. I can’t go to the Castro premiere, unfortunately, because I’m going to a concert that evening, which is uncannily similar to what happened a few years back (I never tire of linking to this): here he is hassling me about not going to the Colma premiere, and when I introduced myself to Wong and Mendoza a couple of years later, Mendoza actually remembered.)
- Na Hong-jin, The Chaser
Saturday, March 21 (PFA)
- Peng Lei, The Panda Candy
- Ryosuke Hashiguchi, All Around Us
Elsewhere (and I’ll keep adding to this list as more programs come in), Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light is showing for a week (Feb. 27 – Mar. 5) at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas.
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I saw Tokyo Sonata on the flight back from Narita. I cried. I attribute some of it to being homesick. The movie perfectly captures a particularly Japanese repression and isolation. The arc of the plot and characters gets incredulous about 3/4ths of the way through, but I enjoyed it.
Posted 12 Feb 2009 at 1:31 pm ¶Post a Comment