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Statistics :
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Fantasia 2006
Asian Programming 1/1 - Page 4
Info
Author(s) : Yves Gendron
Date : 6/7/2006
Type(s) : Report
 
 Intext Links  
People :
Joe Hisaishi
Jeff Lau Chun Wai
Angelica Lee Sum Kit
Gordon Liu Chia Hui
Tsui Hark
Wong Kar Wai
Corey Yuen Kwai
Movies :
A Chinese Tall Story
The Eye
Re-Cycle
Seven Swords
 
< Previous
Page 3 : Guest artists
 
Next >
Page 5 : Other programming


Pour la sélection asiatique, nous avons droit à des films sud-coréens, hongkongais, thailandais, japonais et chinois.

A BITTERSWEET LIFE

Corée, Kim Ji-Woon, 2005

Montreal Premiere
In a country increasingly known for producing stylish genre films, South Korea 's Kim Ji-Woon has quickly emerged as one of the very brightest talents. His bleak comedy debut, The Quiet Family , won attention worldwide before being remade by Takashi Miike as The Happiness of the Katakuris . From there, Kim moved on to wrestling picture The Foul King , before cementing his reputation as one of the world's premiere visual talents with the stunning atmospheric horror A Tale of Two Sisters . Kim's latest is a stunning visual film, flawlessly composed, beautifully shot, and filled with scenes of shockingly coldhearted violence. It is the heroic bloodshed film gone arthouse, a John Woo film as executed by the bastard child of Wong Kar Wai and Park Chan Wook.

 

A CHINESE TALL STORY

Hong Kong, Jeff Lau, 2005

Canadian Premiere
The characters of "Journey to the West" (aka the Monkey King adventures) have been the subject of numerous cinematic adaptations, like this year's Lost in Wu Song . Steven Spielberg is currently working on his own interpretation. Versatile director and frequent Wong Kar Wai collaborator Jeff Lau has taken a new slant to this soon-to-be-classic revisionist fantasy. An all-star cast graces this HK$100 million production, filmed entirely on the exotic canvas of mainland China, and filled with gloried appearances by the HK industry old and new - including Shaw Bros.' regular Gordon Liu ( Dirty Ho , Kill Bill 2 ) as white-haired Emperor of Heaven. The film received five well deserved HK Oscar nominations for its ambitious visual effects, art direction, costume, make-up and its majestic score by Hayao Miyazaki's frequent music collaborator Joe Hisaishi. Jet Li's regular action choregrapher Corey Yuen expertly directs the action with style and grace.

 
BLOOD RAIN

Corée, Kim Dae-Seung, 2004

Montreal Premiere
In 1808, special investigator Wong Gyu is sent to an isolated and largely autonomous island, away from the Korean mainland, to solve a case of arson, but soon finds himself in the middle of a murder investigation. As he strives to find the killer, and the lies and secrets grow as fast as the body count, he begins to understand the complexity of life in this small community. Blood Rain is a shocking historical thriller with lush cinematography, a picturesque setting and an intricate set and costume design, giving the film a sense of beauty and grandeur. The many suspects, the surprising revelations and the sudden plot twists, all come together to keep us riveted to the screen. In stunning fashion, director Kim Dae-Seung expertly weaves a murder-mystery plot, traditionally associated with detective fiction, together with a little class-conscious social commentary and a flair for gore.

 

CITIZEN DOG

Thaïlande, Wisit Sasanatieng, 2004

Montreal Premiere
Pod's a simple country boy from rural Thailand , and as he sets out for a new life in bustling Bangkok . Once in the big city, Pod encounters all sorts of bizarre events and characters - a rainstorm of red helmets, a ghostly taxi-cycle driver with advice for the lovelorn, a bitter, chain-smoking eight-year-old girl who has an abusive relationship with her talking teddy bear, and his salty grandmother, reincarnated as a gecko lizard. Thai ad-clip director Wisit Sasanatieng, whose 2000 feature-film debut Tears Of The Black Tiger was the first Thai film ever officially selected for Cannes , is simply bursting with laugh-out-loud comedy, mind-bending weirdness, stirring romance and above all a deeply empathic fascination with ordinary people. Gift-wrapped for the audience in a dazzling package of rich colours, brilliant composition and snappy editing, Sasanatieng's lively, magic-realist meditation on one of the cornerstone conundrums of human life – how does one stand out while fitting in?

 
EXECUTIVE KOALA

Japon, Minoru Kawasaki, 2006

Canadian Premiere
Tamura is an average divorced salaryman in Japan - and also a man-sized, suit-and-tie wearing, upright-walking koala bear. Though not a human being, he's a successful businessman with ventures overseas who refuses to play office politics. Tamura's corporate lifestyle is severally cramped when his human girlfriend Yoko is mysteriously murdered and he finds himself a suspect with the police. Even worse, he learns the he is their only suspect! Executive Koala is the latest production from brilliant oddball filmmaker Minoru Kawasaki, whose Calamari Wrestler dropped countless jaws at Fantasia 2004. The film is funny and absurdist but nonetheless manages to whip a few dark curveballs into the fax tray, along with some kung-fu and even a musical number.


FUNKY FOREST

Japon, Katsuhito Ishii, Hajime Ishimine, Shinichiro Miki, 2005

Canadian Premiere
From the director and cast of last year's audience award winner, The Taste Of Tea , comes ones of the most outlandish works yet to burst out of Planet Japan . A free associative blackout sketch film featuring TV's made of giant buttholes, powered by belly button energy and capable of producing miniature sushi chefs. Featuring all sorts of extraterrestrial freaks and incomprehensible biological curiosities, mind-bending theatrics, and psychedelic surrealism of the finest grade, delivered with a deadpan shrug. Breathtakingly, often hilariously, bizarre.

 
GLAMOROUS LIFE OF SACHIKO HANAI

Japon, Mitsuru Meike, 2005

Canadian Premiere
What do you get when you cross a counter-culture political manifesto with a sex film, an absurdist comedy, an assault against the Bush administration and a critique on intellectualism? Hired to make a standard softcore "pink movie," Mitsuru Meike delivered the barest requirements of the genre while taking full advantage of the fact that he was actually making a film to create a challenging and hugely original auteur work that is as hilarious as it is subversive, as politically confrontational as it is gloriously pervy and strangely profound. Meike's film immediately attained underground cult notoriety, allowing him the opportunity to add substantial footage and create an altered director's cut which we now know as Glamorous Life … . This recut version has been traveling the mainstream international festival circuit, where it is absolutely blowing peoples' minds, and we are proud to be the first to bring it to Canada .


GREAT YOKAI WAR

Japon, Takashi Miike, 2005

Montreal Premiere
Yokai are major figures of Japanese folklore, spirits that occupy virtually everything in the world around us. They are the spiritual element of everything in the world around us, and as such they deserve to be treated with respect. But humanity isn't much good at respect. Give Japanese shock master Takeshi Miike a big budget to make an epic kid's film and you get The Great Yokai War ! Wildly inventive, very funny, rather alarming by local children's-film standards and layered with a surprising amount of subtext, The Great Yokai War is a Miike film through and through. This is the sort of thing that could come from nowhere other than Miike's fertile mind. Miike uses every trick in the book to bring his creatures to life and they never fail to impress, to amuse, to entertain.

 

HELL

Thaïlande, Teekhayu Thammanittayakul & Sathit Pratitsahn, 2005

Canadian Premiere
The film opens with an attractive young cast of media professionals, each facing romantic problems and/or fitting into cozy genre stereotypes, and just when you think the story will proceed along the well-worn path of having each character meet or evade fate, Hell has them all die en masse when their van is crushed by a truck, and the rest of the film is spent entirely in… that's right, hell! Yes, the unlucky seven are all killed and thrust into the Buddhist version of eternal damnation, which the movie renders as a sort of Bosch canvas colliding with a 1980s Italian Conan rip-off, or Coffin Joe meets The Bride With White Hair in a Frank Frazetta painting. With a fire-and-brimstone ferocity that almost makes the film feel like the cautionary Buddhist equivalent to a Left Behind-styled Christian apocalypse tract, Hell (produced by acclaimed Bang Rajan director Tanit Jitnukul) is a lavish, FX-heavy spectacle that still manages to shock.


LOST IN WU SONG

Chine, Lu Yi Tong, 2005

Canadian Premiere
He was strong, he was stoic, he was morally pure and he could slay a tiger singlehandedly. He was Wu Song, one of the greatest folk heroes of classical Chinese literature, and millions of Chinese males – including aspiring filmmaker Men Desong – admire him without question or qualification. He's devoted to making the definitive Wu Song film, after which he intends to give the rest of his life to Buddhist monastic retreat. His task will not be an easy one. While the Herculean task of creating a personal vision in independent cinema is a truly international one, 40-year-old first-time director Lu Yi Tong's Lost In Wu Song offers a special Chinese twist on the theme. It's not just a piercing look at the collision of art and commerce, tradition and transition in the immensely populous and rapidly evolving nation, but also a ruthless deconstruction of the hollow patriarchal machismo present there, punctured in this film by way of dark, sarcastic humour.

 

MURDER TAKE ONE

Corée, Jang Jin, 2005

Canadian Premiere
In a posh hotel room, the body of a beautiful woman, a high-ranking employee of an advertising firm, is found in a pool of blood. The police quickly nab the most obvious suspect near the scene, a young man clutching a canister of gasoline. What initially seems like an open-and-shut case for hard-as-nails prosecutor Choi and his team quickly unravels – not only does the suspect, Kim, refuse to confess and moreover pass a lie-detector test, other suspects with very strong motives for the crime start to surface. Weaving together elements of the gritty police procedural, psychological drama, subtle yet mordant black comedy and a touch of the supernatural, Jang Jin's Murder Take One is a film that doesn't fit neatly into any one category, yet comfortably stakes out its own identity. Adapted from Jang's own stage play, the film dispenses with flashy but unnecessary ornamentation, focusing on the nerve-wracking process of a high-visibility investigation.

 

PRINCESS AURORA

Corée, Bang Eun-jin, 2005

North American Premiere
A particularly vicious and gruesome killing has taken place in a women's washroom at a Seoul shopping mall. Two detectives are on the case – rebellious young Jung and the stoic, understated Oh, who prays frequently and is planning to leave the force to become a Christian pastor. Detective Oh is quickly coming to the realization that he may know the identity of the guilty party. As the body count rises and the horrifying, heartbreaking logic behind the bloodshed starts to fall into place in Oh's mind, he finds himself dragged deeper into a twilight realm of moral uncertainty and quiet but powerful personal darkness. Directed with care and tasteful understatement by Korean actress Bang Eun-jin, who makes he debut behind the camera, Princess Aurora boasts capable, nuanced performances from the leads and from the quirky supporting cast. It poses some very difficult questions about the limits of love, the morality of revenge and the extent to which one single, sad crime can infect the lives it touches with deadly guilt.

 

RE-CYCLE
Hong Kong, Oxide Pang Chun, Danny Pang, 2006

North American Premiere
Angelica Lee, the award-winning star of The Eye, reunites with the Pang Brothers for Re-Cycle. Lee stars as a struggling young writer. When she discards the opening chapter to her latest work, she begins to be plagued with visions and events seemingly lifted from the pages of her rejected work, and it is not long before she is drawn entirely into a strange other world, a nightmarish alternate reality that serves as a repository for everything discarded and forgotten in ours. Not only do twin directors Oxide and Danny have a Hollywood remake of their breakthrough international hit The Eye in the works, but they're also wrapping up work on their Sam Raimi-produced English-language debut, while Re-Cycle , their most recent Hong Kong film, is fresh off a stint in the “Un Certain Regard” program at Cannes.

 

SEVEN SWORDS

Hong Kong , Tsui Hark, 2005

Montreal Premiere
With Seven Swords, the great Tsui Hark, often tagged as the Chinese Steven Spielberg, makes his overdue return to the director's chair, and to the magnificent genre of the grand, fantastical martial-arts epic. Stunning landscapes, gorgeous production design and astounding action scenes (note the inclusion of the great Donnie Yen in the cast!) are most certainly on the menu! Hark is working here from the celebrated martial-arts novel "Seven Swordsmen from Mountain Tian" by Yusheng Liang, part of a greater mythology that once spawned the Hong Kong classic Bride With White Hair . Seven Swords is a momentous event in the glorious, ongoing history of kung fu cinema!

 

SHINOBI

Japon, Shimoyama Ten, 2005

Canadian Premiere
Call it Romeo and Juliet with ninjas. Director Shimoyama Ten is a respected commercial and music-video director in Japan , and it is easy to see why. He shoots simply gorgeous film, loading Shinobi with startlingly beautiful images from start to finish. More a fantasy film than an outright actioner, Shinobi strikes an easy balance between dramatic and action elements and, when the action elements come, they blaze across the screen thanks to the charismatic performers – Tak Sakaguchi from Versus fame again proves his is a screen presence to be reckoned with – and a broad range of powers.

 

STRANGE CIRCUS

Japon, Sion Sono, 2005

Canadian Premiere, Hosted by Director Sion Sono
From the director of Suicide Club comes this disturbing, visually electrifying shocker about a sexually abused young woman who becomes Japan 's leading writer of erotica while struggling with a hallucinatory hold on a constantly shifting reality. This year's most challenging title, Strange Circus is a surreal shockfest that just gets more disturbing as it progresses down its increasingly dream-like path, and much of the audience is likely to be reeling - even before the amputations, bondage imprisonment or transsexuality come into play. A transgressive and controversial poetic work that is as fascinating as it is upsetting, as vital as it is dangerous.

 
SUNDAY SEOUL

Corée, Park Sung-hun, 2006

Canadian Premiere
A three-in-one wacky pack of horrific hilarity and fantastic fun, Sunday Seoul is modeled on those vintage horror/fantasy omnibuses, from Mario Bava's Black Sabbath through to Twilight Zone: The Movie - with a sharp twist of the deadpan, deprecating humour Koreans can't resist injecting into such things. Keep in mind that the film's title is the name of a notorious tabloid paper (the Korean equivalent of the Weekly World News), which went out of print a decade ago. Thrills, chills and chuckles galore!

 

SYNESTHESIA

Japon, Toro Matsuura, 2005

North American Premiere, Hosted by Director Toro Matsuura
"What you see is not what I see." Synesthesia is a rare sensorial disorder in which the stimulation of one sense invokes the response of another. Those afflicted taste colors, see sounds and experience the world in ways that alienate them from the rest of society. Shinsuke (Swallowtail Butterfly's Eguchi Yosuke) has been dealing with synesthesia his entire life, but has adapted enough social survival skills to mostly hide his condition from those around him. He has long held a fascination with a notorious killer who christened himself Picasso (Ryuhei Matsuda). Picasso has become legendary among certain underground subcultures for releasing a hypnotic video game through which players can be lulled into a trance state. He has used the game to induce a string of murders and suicides. What particularly fascinates Shinsuke is the unusual visual signature the killer has left on his crime scenes. A mesmerizing and haunting discourse on loneliness, Synethesia marks the arrival of a fascinating new auteur.

 

TAPE Number 31
Chine, Agan, 2005

North American Premiere, Hosted by Director Agan
Through a series of taped interviews we meet the central players, a crew of eight documentary filmmakers assembled to travel into the remote mountain regions of China to shoot a Discovery Channel documentary on a reported tribe of sasquatch-like "wild-men" living in isolation there. Tape Number 31 is a very rare beast, a horror film out of mainland China . Built around the "found tape" premise as it is, comparisons to The Blair Witch Project are inevitable, but this is a fairly different animal. The supernatural element is entirely absent, with the film aiming more for Grizzly Man -gone-bad than any sort of ghost shocker. The action takes place in the remote the mountainous regions of China , providing one of the most beautiful and dramatic landscapes in the world.

 

TRAIN MAN

Japon, Masanori Murakami, 2005

Canadian Premiere
Shot in 25 days, then released into cinemas only 35 days later, Train Man is a sweet, lyrical, technologically savvy and occasionally magical retelling of a true story that's grabbed Japan by its heartstrings. It's based on a million-selling book of the same name from 2004, authored not by a single writer but rather by every blog poster who did their part to bring together the titular Train Man and the lady he's fallen for. It's certainly a funny and touching romantic comedy. As telecommunications technology evolves to a point where it all too easily replaces the messy, complicated matters of unshielded human interaction, and more and more people find themselves glumly locked away in a lonely, digital simulacrum of a social life, Train Man shows how our hunger for real love, real connection and a real sense of being part of a community brings the best of us to the surface, like flowers breaking through the concrete of a grim, grey sidewalk.

 
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