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Taiwan sales outfit Ablaze Image is launching martial arts comedy The Village That Forgets at Filmart.

Starring Shu Qi and Joseph Chang, the film directed by Chen Yu-Hsun revolves around a mysterious event in a rural village by the end of the Qing dynasty. The cast also includes Wang Qianyuan, Eric Tsang, Tony Yang and Lin Mei-Hsiu.

The $9m feature, set for release around Chinese New Year 2017, reunites director Chen with producers Lee Lieh and Yeh Jufeng and Warner Bros (Taiwan), following their breakout hit Zone Pro Site.

A total of seven investors are aboard the project, including Lee’s One Production Film, Wanda Pictures from China and Warner Bros (Taiwan).

Ablaze has also picked up international rights to Kuo Cheng-Chui’s first feature, Foret Debussy, which stars Gwei Lun-Mei and Lu Yi-Ching as a daughter and mother who hide themselves in the deep forest to shun their painful past from the urban life.

Directors must ask themselves, on occasion; is it really worth being part of an omnibus film? Little if anything links the trio of short films featured in the anthology E.S.F. beyond the fact each director is an up-and-coming Taiwanese. Nothing wrong with that per se, but the three are so wildly disparate in tone, length and arguably quality, getting them as a package deal is surely set to sour the effect for some potential viewers.

The opening film comes from director Chang Rong-Ji, who previously helmed the 2006 documentary My Football Summer, about a junior high sports team and their performance in Taiwan's National High School Games. At thirty-seven minutes At the End of the Tunnel is the longest of the three shorts, the story of a blind music student (musician Huang Yu-Hsiang) and a dancer (Taiwanese star Sandrine Pinna, Yang Yang, Miao Miao, Do Over) who inadvertently meet in high school,...

Chicago – When moviegoers think of John Woo, the first image that comes to mind isn’t legions of ancient armies fighting each other with bows and arrows, but rather two men holding each other at gunpoint (as in his 1992 classic “Hard-Boiled”). His best action set-pieces are the most intimate, with gunplay and bloodshed taking on an almost balletic grandeur.

Yet at age 61, Woo was clearly ready to venture out into new terrain, and tackle a project he had been dreaming up for nearly two decades, based on Guanzhong Luo’s 14th century historical novel, “Romance of the Three Kingdoms.” It’s reportedly the most expensive film ever made in China, and certainly one of the most audacious. Unfortunately, like many epic films aiming to reach an international audience, the picture has been butchered for mass consumption.

Blu-Ray Rating: 2.5/5.0

“Red Cliff” was originally a five-hour epic released theatrically in two parts...