News

Nyaff unveils first wave of features from China, Hong Kong, Japan and beyond.

The New York Asian Film Festival (Nyaff) has unveiled the first wave of features for its 22nd edition and announced that Japanese actor Ryohei Suzuki will receive the Screen International Rising Star award.

Nyaff will run from July 14-30 at the city’s Film at Lincoln Center, with a programme of more than 60 titles, and Suzuki will be presented with the award recognising emerging talent from East Asia on July 15.

Suzuki has been acting on screen for more than 15 years, with a string of roles in Japanese...

By Federica Giampaolo

A vibrant mystery comedy about the relationship between transphobia and social media produced by Anima Studios, “Where is the Lie?” (Marupok Af) is a 2023 film directed by Quark Henares, that made its world premiere this January at Slamdance Festival in the US. In April, it made its European debut in Italy at Udine's Far East Film Festival, where it received great praise. The movie is based on a true story, following a Twitter thread posted in 2020 that received remarkable attention. In this thread, a Filipino trans woman recounted how she got catfished in 2020 by a group of transphobes. Several details and elements of the movies (save the original names) are, in fact, influenced by those present on her Twitter posts.

“Where is the Lie?” screened at Udine Far East Film Festival

The film follows Janzen Torres (Ej Jallorina), a transwoman struggling with romantic relationships. We see her...

Johnnie To, Watanabe Hirobumi and Jang Sun-woo set to attend.

The Far East Film Festival (Feff), held in the Italian town of Udine, has revealed the full line-up for its landmark 25th edition, which is set to include appearances from filmmakers Johnnie To, Watanabe Hirobumi and Jang Sun-woo.

Running April 21-29, the festival will open with a double bill: He Shuming’s Ajoomma, the first co-production between Singapore and South Korea; and black comedy Bad Education by Taiwan’s Giddens Ko. It will close with Zhang Yimou’s Chinese blockbuster Full River Red.

The festival will screen 78 Asian films from 14 countries,...

Fest unveils Narrative, Documentary, Breakouts, Spotlight, and Unstoppable programming line-ups.

Organisers at the hybrid 29th Slamdance Film Festival have announced that the word premiere of Dimitri Coats’ Free LSD will close the festival on January 20 2023 as they also unveiled Narrative, Documentary, Breakouts, Spotlight, and Unstoppable programming line-ups.

Free LSD follows an adult store owner who takes an experimental drug that provides a glimpse into a parallel universe where he is the leader of a band battling evil aliens over the future of human consciousness. Keith Morris, Coats, Autry Fulbright II, Dh Peligro, and Jack Black are among the cast.

The...

Director Erik Matti takes a closer look at the gritty reality of the Philippines in “On the Job: The Missing 8.” Inspired by true events and presented in Venice’s main competition, it shows a corrupt journalist seeking justice for his missing colleagues, as well as crime syndicates that temporarily release prison inmates to carry out political assassinations.

Originally intended for the big screen, this film and Matti’s 2013 thriller “On the Job” – shown at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight – have been reworked as a six-part HBO Asia Original series, which bows on Sept. 12 on HBO Go in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.

“We are happy about this partnership. Now, people will get to see it on a global scale,” said producer Ronald Monteverde during the press conference at the Italian festival, calling it a “stepping stone” for the franchise. With Quark Henares of Globe Studios adding...

The journey from franchise to a competition slot at the Venice Film Festival to HBO series was the subject of Thursday’s Venice Production Bridge conference, “From the Philippines to the World: The ‘On the Job’ Franchise and Exploring New Ways of Global Content Distribution.”

In good spirits in a market cocktail that followed on Thursday evening, Erik Matti, the director of “On the Job: The Missing 8,” as his new film is called, told Variety how he got to keep his film at three hours and 28 minutes, and show it at the festival, as well as divide this film, and his previous one, “On the Job,” into one six-part series for HBO.

The series premieres on HBO in Asia on Sunday, two days after the film is shown in Venice. A half dozen festival engagements follow for the film version, he said, with announcements due shortly.

“When sales companies saw it was that long,...

Erik Matti’s new original six-part Philippines series “On The Job” will premiere on HBO Go in Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and Taiwan in September and will also air later on the region’s HBO channel.

Select episodes from the series will screen in competition at the Venice Film Festival in September, the only Asian title in contention out of the 21 in the lineup.

HBO Go has also released a trailer.

The first two episodes of the series were shown as a film at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, where was nominated for an Sacd Prize at Directors’ Fortnight. It went on to win several awards globally, including two at the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival.

Inspired by true events, “On The Job” centers around crime syndicates that temporarily release prison inmates to carry out political assassinations for those in power. However, the crime syndicates themselves are run by politicians. The...

Taiwan’s legalization of gay marriage last year helpfully came in time for the real-world launch of the Gol Summit, Asia’s largest LGBTQ+ filmmaking conference. That in turn helped maintain the momentum for a second edition that, due to the coronavirus pandemic, will be a fully virtual affair.

The event, which runs Monday and Tuesday is backed by the GagaOOLala streaming platform, launched by Taiwan studio Portico Media, in collaboration with the Taiwan Content Creative Agency (Taicca). The Gol Summit is also one of the first events this year in a series that makes up the 2020 Taiwan Creative Content Fest International Market (Tccf).

The focus of the first day is the GagaOOLala Pitching Sessions, aimed at bringing together financiers, distributors and sales agents around some 15 new pieces of LGBTQ content – features, series and shorts.

While pitching videos are to be made available on the event’s website, an advisory...

David Lynch wants to share his knowledge. The noted "Twin Peaks" director and devoted Transcendental Meditation practitioner is teaching students at the David Lynch Ma in Film program at The Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa. And he is giving away tidbits of wisdom in 10-second clips -- or at least one of them. During last weekend’s David Lynch Signature Cup Coffee event at the Whole Foods Market in West Hollywood, CA, Lynch fans got the chance to meet the director and taste his fairly traded line of organic coffee. Fan (and "Rakenrol" filmmaker) Quark Henares attended the event and got a chance to ask the director for some filmmaking advice. Henares captured the moment on Instagram and now you can see it for yourself. In short (and there's really no other choice on Instagram), Lynch advises, "Be true to yourself. Don't take no for an answer. And start your Transcendental Meditation.

Rakenrol is a lot of firsts for its director, Quark Henares. It is his first feature film to be produced and directed independent of any major studio backing. It is his feature first film to be completely free from any genre limitations. It is also his first feature film after the untimely death of his most loyal supporter and most honest critic, Alexis Tioseco, to which he dedicates the film as a partial fulfilment to one of Tioseco's famous wishes for Philippine Cinema.   Gamitan (2002), produced by Viva, was clearly bankrolled to maximize the very popular sex appeal of Maui Taylor, who pumped fresh blood and class to the waning genre of titillating films that dominated Philippine cinema in the last few years of...

Feature documentary prize-winner, "The House of Suh" by Irene K. Shim

As a member of the feature documentary jury for the La Asian Pacific Film Festival, Moving Pictures editor Elliot Kotek attended the awards ceremony for the 2011 installment of the festival, the 27th anniversary of the festival.

Held at the outdoor, seventh-floor courtyard of the Solair building at Western Ave and Wilshire Blvd in Los Angeles’ Koreatown, Laapff continued to honor courageous programming. With previous winners including the documentary “Last Train Home” (regarding the epic human migration around the Chinese New Year) as well as narrative features such as “The Taqwacores” (about Muslim punks in Buffalo), the 2011 festival found the jurors in near-unanimous agreements for each section’s best.

The big winners for each category were “Teamwork” (Best Short), “The House of Suh” (Best Documentary) and “Living in Seduced Circumstances” (Best Narrative Feature).

Having kicked off proceedings on April 28 with...

Feature documentary prize-winner, "The House of Suh" by Irene K. Shim

As a member of the feature documentary jury for the La Asian Pacific Film Festival, Moving Pictures editor Elliot Kotek attended the awards ceremony for the 2011 installment of the festival, the 27th anniversary of the festival.

Held at the outdoor, seventh-floor courtyard of the Solair building at Western Ave and Wilshire Blvd in Los Angeles’ Koreatown, Laapff continued to honor courageous programming. With previous winners including the documentary “Last Train Home” (regarding the epic human migration around the Chinese New Year) as well as narrative features such as “The Taqwacores” (about Muslim punks in Buffalo), the 2011 festival found the jurors in near-unanimous agreements for each section’s best.

The big winners for each category were “Teamwork” (Best Short), “The House of Suh” (Best Documentary) and “Living in Seduced Circumstances” (Best Narrative Feature).

Having kicked off proceedings on April 28 with...

In the works for long enough that even its own creator - director Quark Henares - joked that he was releasing the trailer because it was about bloody time, Philippine rock and roll coming of age story Rakenrol will be making its world premiere at the Udine Far East Film Festival.Henares is a director that has been on the radar here at Twitch for quite some time, creating stylish and energetic indie films that stand at odds with most of the typical Filipino studio product. This one follows a pretty simple pattern - boy meets girl, girl loves rock music, boy starts a band with her - but it's all about the execution. Take a look at the trailer below....