Today, VanRamblings will take you on a journey into the cinematic worlds envisioned by East Asia’s boldest filmmakers, while introducing the most adventurous & exciting cinema to emerge this past year from the Far East.
Long the heart of the Vancouver International Film Festival, each year for 37 years VIFF’s Dragons & Tigers and Gateway series have represented the largest and richest annual exhibition of Pacific Asian films outside of Asia.
Every year, VIFF’s annual Dragons & Tigers and Gateway programmes attract a strong retinue of internationally recognized filmmakers, film critics, distributors, and scholars, these well-attended programmes highlighting cutting-edge cinema and bodies of work from Asia’s boldest creators, encompassing the exceptional work of established masters as well as those who may soon be recognized alongside them, with films arriving on our shores from South Korea, Singapore, Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Myanmar, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia & Thailand.
Over the course of the past 37 years, VIFF has steadfastly sought to convey the richness and diversity of East Asian cinema to appreciative audiences.
Director Jia Jia Zhang-ke’s Ash is the Purest White took Cannes by storm this year, a fierce, gripping, heartbreaking and at times loopy tale of Qiao (Zhao Tao) who in defending her mobster boyfriend Bin fires a gun to protect him, resulting in a five year sentence in prison for her act of loyalty.
Out of prison and up for adventure, in the film’s most stunning visual sequence, Qiao takes a ferry ride down the Yangtze River and, after a little misfortune, finds Bin shacked up in a shabby motel. Bin has seemingly lost his pride. “Was I ever that important?” he asks. “Well, if not you, then what is?!” Qiao responds with all the quiet force of a knee to the stomach.
A gripping parable about the vanity of human wishes, and an impassioned portrait of national malaise, in the end Jia Zhang-ke’s latest emerges as a glorious drama about how one woman’s journey from self-sacrificial moll to avenging criminal echoes her country’s wanton embrace of capitalism.
And let us not forget the master of Asian cinema, Zhang Yimou (Ju Dou), who this year brings Shadow, as rousing and beautifully rendered a film as you’ll see at VIFF this year, and a stunning epic re-imagining of the Wuxia third century Three Kingdoms period in Chinese history.
With its gorgeously choreographed sword duels, sabres slicing through paddles of blood and rain, watercolour bi-chromatic palettes and sumptuous costumes, Shadow offers a visual feast from the maestro of Chinese cinema. Here’s how Jessica Kiang opened her review in Variety …
Black ink drips from the tip of a brush and daggers into clear water, spiraling out like smoke; a Chinese zither sounds a ferocious, twanging note that warps and buckles in its sustain; rain mottles the sky to a heavy watercolour grey, forming pools on paving stones into which warriors bleed; whispery drafts from hidden palace chambers stir tendrils of hair and set the hems of luxuriant, patterned robes fluttering. Every supremely controlled stylistic element of Zhang Yimou’s breathtakingly beautiful Shadow is an echo of another, a motif repeated, a pattern recurring in a fractionally different way each time.
And just think: there are 25 more equally spectacular, moving & sumptuous films in the Gateway and Dragons & Tigers programmes this year!
VanRamblings wrote about Cannes FIPRESCI Critics Prize winner Burning and Cannes Palme d’Or winner Shoplifters last week, two of the lauded must-see films in the Gateway programme that will screen at VIFF 2018.
Now there are just 23 more films from East Asia for you to discover at the 37th annual Vancouver International Film Festival, which kicks off in only 11 days, running from Thursday, September 27 thru Friday, October 12.
