The Asian Film Festival of Dallas runs until Thursday night, but it announced its Jury Award winners yesterday. I suppose that means that only the movies screened through Tuesday were up for big awards. The Audience Award hasn’t been announced yet, and voting for that will continue. But does this signify that the films will drop in quality for the last two days of the festival? I hope not.
The jury was composed of several local figures, including D’s Best Actor of the Year Bruce DuBose, and former Dallas Morning News critic Philip Wuntch. Aside from the awards for short subjects, the winners were Au Revoir Taipei for Best Narrative Feature, and Iron Crows for Best Documentary Feature. Opening night film Au Revoir Taipei has gotten great buzz, and it screens again tomorrow at noon. Be sure to catch it, and be sure to check out Peter’s review of it.
As for documentaries, yesterday’s Iron Crows deserved its recognition. Bong-Nam Park’s film is named after the birds that gather around the derelict ships on the Bangladesh port of Chittagong, which disposes of more than half of the world’s ships. These crows built their nests with the iron strips and shavings of the huge boats. It’s a powerful central metaphor for this film. The workers build their homes with scraps of iron, too, or at least with the negligible wages that they earn from their dangerous job.
“We cut up ships,” several of them say. There’s no other way to describe it. Huge ships dock at the dirty port, and hundreds of men go at them with blowtorches, only a few of them wearing helmets, hardly any of them wearing shoes. Large portions of the vessels fall into the low water and mud, and the footage of it is breathtaking. But the story is about the men.
Their ages range from 12 to older than 60. Almost all of them want to escape the hopeless toil of their lives, and they dream of providing for their starving families or moving abroad, where there is education and food. There is irony in the fact that they are employed in ripping apart ships — such a classic means to emigration. We follow one man to his home three days north, where he meets his blind baby daughter for the first time and weeps over her. It’s a wrenching scen. Iron Crows is remarkable for the strange beauty of its images and sounds, and for the simple tragedy of poverty, which is its ultimate focus.
I Corrupt All Cops has a great title, but it’s an odd and unsatisfying film. It was screened for the second time yesterday, this time at the Angelika Film Center for a crowd of about eight people. It’s a great idea to incorporate both theaters in the festival, but the turnout at the Angelika hasn’t been great so far, especially for the repeat screenings. In the future, AFFD needs to choose more wisely which films will be crowd favorites.
Echoing sprawling crime chronicles like Goodfellas and Infernal Affairs, I Corrupt All Cops seems more like four movies packed in one, with a plot better suited to a TV series or miniseries. It’s never clear, for example, who is the “I” in the title. The film has a narrator, but it can’t be him because he’s a good guy. Is it money incarnate speaking? As it is, director Jing Wong doesn’t complicate his characters enough. It’s a simplistic portrait of good and evil. But the idiosyncratic acting of Anthony Wong, as a bad cop turned good, manages to elevate an otherwise flat movie.
The audience was bigger for the late-night offering Chaw, which was derivative of Joon-ho Bong’s The Host. Both combine dark comedy with monster horror, and both had some sort of ecological message. Whereas The Host was suited for the Industrial Age, though, and featured a chemically mutated sea creature terrorizing Seoul, Jeong-won Shin’s Chaw deals with a giant boar terrorizing a tiny village. Once hunters started killing off the wild animals, and humans started destroying the countryside for golf courses and summer gardening, boars began to starve and started digging up human graves for nourishment. They developed a taste for flesh. It seems like there’s a message in there, especially since one character is deeply repentant for his years of hunting. Trouble is, I can’t find it. At any rate, the film was often hilarious, and last night’s audience enjoyed themselves. Chaw is ultimately too jokey, too bizarre, and too busy to find an emotional core.
Today at the Magnolia, you can catch the third installment of shorts at noon, the rural cop drama Running Turtle at 7:20 pm, and a repeat of Robogeisha at 10 pm. At the Angelika, the historical drama Empire of Silver plays at 5 pm, the gay historical drama A Frozen Flower at 10 pm, and the immigration documentary 9500 Liberty at 7 pm, with director Eric Byler in attendance and a Q&A to follow. Check out Pete’s review of it here.
Here are the two I plan to see:
Let’s Fall in Love – After the universally depressing documentaries so far (Agrarian Utopia, Beijing Taxi, Iron Crows) comes Wuna Wu’s lighthearted and personal exploration of love in Taiwan. The island nation has a 50 percent divorce rate, the highest in Asia, and Wu interviews a string of married couples. Their common link? They’ve all been set up by a modern matchmaker, who tries to set up the filmmaker herself with a match. The interviewees are said to be brutally honest about their relationships. (Magnolia 3 pm)
Seven 2 One – Another Hong Kong thriller, but this one is more modern and grittier, focusing less on martial arts, and more on ordinary people who have violence visited upon them. Slickly shot, it’s set in a convenience store and involves a large cast of characters. Steve Norwood, the programming director of the AFFD, calls it “Rashomon for the cell phone age.” (Magnolia 5:10 pm)
