After last year focusing on art-house genre movies, the Kaohsiung Film Festival (KFF, 高雄電影節) returns today with a popular lineup of flicks about music, manga, fantasy, science fiction, action and a new addition, sports, which was included to welcome the World Games 2009 that are scheduled to begin on July 16 of next year in the country’s second city.
The festival’s Action Zone — Athletic Fighters segment, one of eight thematic sections, focuses on dreams, passion and athletic courage and will premiere Running the Sahara, which follows Taiwan’s ultra-marathon star Kevin Lin’s (林義傑) collaboration with Canadian runner Ray Zahab and Charlie Engle of the US on a 6,920km-long expedition that took them through six countries and across the Sahara Desert.
Slick, fast-paced and packed with pretty-faced leads, Bollywood sports movie Chak De! India tracks a group of female athletes’ quests for self-fulfillment and was made with production values on a par with those of Hollywood.
Gachi Boy: Wrestling With a Memory, one of the festival’s opening films, is about manga-style wrestling. The story follows the amnesiac bookworm Lgarashi who turns to wrestling to remember the past and deal with the present, to seek respect and uncover the meaning of life. Director Norihiro Koizum is scheduled to hold a question-and-answer session after the screening.
For table tennis enthusiasts, documentary filmmaker and Oscar-winner Jessica Yu’s debut feature, Ping Pong Playa, blends elements of comedy, hip-hop, sports and manga to explore ethnic issues in the US.
More genre-bending flicks are to be found in the World Fantastic Cinema category. Adept at making horror, action and erotic films, Japanese director Miike Takashi turned his hand to westerns with Sukiyaki Western Django, which features a cast of Japan’s A-list stars in a story that follows the trials and tribulations of two rival samurai clans.
Takashi’s Zebraman is a campy rendition of the superhero tradition, which centers on Shinichi, a cuckolded elementary school teacher whose daughter sells sex and whose son is bullied in school. The film’s protagonist seeks comforts by dressing up as Zebraman, his black-and-white costumed alter-ego.
The virtual and the non-virtual realms are interchangeable in French director Nic Balthazar’s Ben X in which an autistic teenage boy only feels alive through his online gaming obsession.
The cosplay subculture finds a Western translation in Mister Lonely, which centers on a Michael Jackson impersonator who is led by a Marilyn Monroe look-alike to a hippie commune inhabited by impersonators who include a priest played by German director Werner Herzog.
Best known for co-directing Delicatessen (1991) and The City of Lost Children (1995) with Jean-Pierre Jeunet, French director Marc Caro flies solo in Dante 01. The sci-fi flick puts the ugliness of humanity in the spotlight when a mutiny breaks out aboard a prison ship.
To attract younger audiences, festival organizers have accorded a pronounced presence in this year’s lineup to manga-influenced Japanese films, often hilarious and led by big-name stars. Examples can be found in the cinematic world of Satoshi Miki, one of two directors that take center stage at this year’s festival, who finds humor in the most trivial and odd situations.
In Damejin, Miki’s wacky characters are three good-for-nothing guys who save up for a trip to India after being told by an alien that a visit to the subcontinent is the only way to save mankind from annihilation.
Miki’s Adrift in Tokyo tells the tale of law student Takemura, who is promised a handsome fee for walking through Tokyo with a debt collector. The seemingly innocent outing turns into a bumpy ride in this so-called “walk movie.”
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located