This year’s One Film, One Journey (一部電影，一個旅程) film festival, organized by the Ministry of Culture with National Chengchi University (NCCU), will showcase independent Southeast Asian cinema and works by Iranian female filmmakers.
“Through the journey that each film opens up, we hope the audience has an experience that is not just like that of a ‘tourist,’” said festival curator Chung Shih-fang (鍾適芳), a music producer, filmmaker and faculty member of NCCU’s College of Communication.
Entry is free to all screenings and talks, which will take place at the NCCU Art and Culture Center tomorrow and next Thursday.
Photo courtesy of One Film, One Journey
SOUTHBOUND CINEMA
The SEA Indie-Film Forum program tomorrow will present independently-produced films and documentaries from Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam.
Highlights include Bi, Don’t be Afraid by Vietnamese director Phan Dang Di, the only feature-length presentation in the program. The film about complicated adult and family relationships as seen through the eyes of a six-year-old boy won two prizes at the Cannes Critics’ Week in 2010.
Photo courtesy of One Film, One Journey
Common threads running through many of the selections include migrant workers, folk religion, children’s inner lives and the urban sprawl of rapidly modernizing Southeast Asia.
“We want to take the audience down a different path to see, recognize and understand a world that we are unfamiliar with and that we do misunderstand,” Chung said.
In addition to the screenings, the filmmakers will hold talks discussing their experiences shooting on shoestring budgets, programming local cinema and cultivating the next generation of filmmakers.
Photo courtesy of One Film, One Journey
Speakers include Phan, Laotian filmmaker Anysay Keola, documentary filmmakers and co-founders of Myanmar’s Wathann Film Festival Thu Thu Shein and Thaiddi and director of Bangkok Art and Culture Centre Pawit Mahasarinand.
All talks will be conducted in English.
Southeast Asian film has been a core aspect of One Film, One Journey since its inception in 2017. The festival started as a suggestion by the Ministry of Culture’s Southeast Asia Advisory Committee (SEAAC) to take advantage of the presence of Southeast Asian film practitioners, in town for the committee meetings, to facilitate cultural exchange.
Photo courtesy of One Film, One Journey
Phan, Keola and Shein are members of the SEAAC, as is Chung.
IRANIAN EYE
A chance encounter between Chung and Iranian filmmaker Ghasideh Golmakani at another film festival led to the creation of a new segment this year focusing on female Iranian directors.
Iranian cinema has long graced overseas film festivals and critics’ best-of lists, with greats like Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi and Mohsen Makhmalbaf (all male) achieving international acclaim. But female auteurs have rarely been accorded the same level of recognition.
In other words, the presentation of 16 works on May 2 offers a rare concentration of female filmmaking talent from Iran.
Aside from gender diversity, One Film, One Journey’s program also deals with generational changes since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, which overthrew Iran’s monarchy and founded an Islamic republic.
Chung said that Iran’s post-revolution filmmaking generation has inherited the poetic sensibility and social realism of their New Wave predecessors, and are now telling their own incisive stories about Iranian society.
In that regard, Golmakani will deliver a keynote speech on “Poeticism and Social Realism — A Creative Manifesto for Iranian Female Filmmakers.”
Golmakani’s own work deals with subjects considered taboo in conservative Iranian society, such as fetishism, child abuse and violence against women. She will present her short film Limbo, which imagines a former Iraqi sniper who commemorates his victims by getting their names tattooed on his body.
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