Letters from the South
In this omnibus film, six directors from the region each reflect on the Chinese diaspora. Thai filmmaker Aditya Assarat describes a meeting in Thailand between Paula and her friends, who have Chinese roots, with her cousin Mumu, who was born in China; Royston Tan from Singapore tells of the special meaning that making the traditional Popiah dish has for a Chinese family; Midi Zhao from Myanmar follows the death of a grandfather surrounded by Chinese customs in a village in Myanmar; Sun Koh from Singapore makes a small-scale comedy about the commercialisation of the local radio station, influenced by mainland China; Tan Chui Mui from Malaysia composes a poetic, visual reflection on being an outsider and wandering; and Tsai Ming-liang, also born in Malaysia, observes the seventh-storey apartment in which he grew up as a child.
Tsai Ming-liang
Royston Tan
Aditya Assarat
Midi Z
Tan Chui Mui
Sun Koh
Casts & Crew
Lee Kang-Sheng
Also Directed by Tsai Ming-liang
A continuation of Tsai Ming-Liang's Walker series, featuring Lee Kang-Sheng as a barefoot monk who walks very slowly.
This is the festival trailer for Viennale - Vienna International Film Festival 2015. The trailer will be shown in over 100 cinemas in Austria and Germany and during the festival in several cinemas in Vienna.
A superb package of shorts by four leading East Asian directors: Ann Hui on a male-to-female sex change, Kim Tae-yong on an emotional imposture, Gu Changwei on pregnancy in China and Tsai Ming-Liang on time and the city of Hong Kong.
On a dark, rainy night, a historic and regal Taipei cinema sees its final film: 1967 martial arts feature "Dragon Inn". As the film plays, the lives of the theater's various employees and patrons intersect, and two ghostly actors arrive to mourn the passing of an era.
A father and his two children wander the margins of modern day Taipei, from the woods and rivers of the outskirts to the rain streaked streets of the city. By day the father scrapes out a meager income as a human billboard for luxury apartments, while his young son and daughter roam the supermarkets and malls surviving off free food samples. Each night the family takes shelter in an abandoned building. The father is strangely affected by a hypnotic mural adorning the wall of this makeshift home. On the day of the father's birthday the family is joined by a woman - might she be the key to unlocking the buried emotions that linger from the past?
Mr and Mrs Chang live in Taipei's Hsi-Men-Ding (the city's entertainment/red light/nightlife district) with their teenaged kids. The parents work as cleaners in a "love hotel" and send the kids out to work as ticket scalpers, block-buying seats for hit movies like A City of Sadness and reselling them at a profit. Tragedy strikes when the daughter Mei-Hsueh flirts with the idea of prostituting herself and changes her mind at the last moment, leaving her first client with injuries that put him on the critical list. The focus throughout is on the son Ah Tong, who has a latent talent as a writer that is never going to flower.
Segment of the feature Welcome to São Paulo (2004), produced by São Paulo International Film Festival.
Where are you, Tsai Ming-Liang ?
A short film shot on Tamshui River in Taipei featuring two dogs referencing The River of Tsai Ming-liang and dedicated to Simon Field, a film critic who Tsai has known for many years since they met at Rotterdam.
Also Directed by Royston Tan
In D.I.Y, the squeak of dirty plates, the tap of a finger against a seafood restaurant aquarium, the thump of feet inside a cargo lift, and many other disparate sound, all come together into a quirky and funky piece of beat science, a human – and humane – music.
1999 short film by Royston Tan
2002 short film by Royston Tan
1998 short video work by Royston Tan
Parking attendant Fei Fei has always dreamed of becoming a singer, like her famous namesake – the legendary Taiwanese singer Fong Fei Fei. Fei Fei decides to follow her heart and joins a national talent contest. Her voice and sincerity captures the nation's heart, pushing her to the finals! But on the final day, her dementia-stricken father disappears…
Good Morning in Singapore.
In a hotel overlooking the Sea of Japan, six disparate stories inter-connect giving time a shape, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another. Murder, sacrifice, betrayal, longing and regret weave into a tapestry of souls remembering and forgetting.
A sequel to Old Places, Old Romances is a collective documentary of personal stories voiced by fellow Singaporeans about the nostalgic places in their hearts.
Also Directed by Aditya Assarat
Beat goes to the public swimming pool on Sukhumvit to spy on Pat and Paula. He has had a crush on Pat since freshman year of university. But she has a boyfriend who is on the national football team and has never given Beat much thought. But the day is long and the sun is hot. Maybe today will be different from all the rest. A short film about the kids down the street.
In a remote Thai village, a man gets a call informing him that his son died in a crash. He needs to bring the body back and give a decent funeral, but he can't afford to do both.
Ananda has returned home from abroad. Unsure of his career plans, he accepts an invitation to act in a new movie for a famous director. During the filming in a small seaside town, Zoe, his American girlfriend from University, arrives for a week-long visit. But the change of country takes its toll and she soon becomes frustrated with the situation. Meanwhile, Ananda meets another girl on the beach...
3 Friends is an experimental fiction/documentary film conceived and directed by 3 friends.
Takua Pa is a small town in the South of Thailand. Ever since the tsunami, people have lost their jobs and remember better times in the past. One day a stranger comes to town. His name is Ton, he is an architect. He rents a room in a small hotel owned by Na. They begin to have a secret love affair. The town finds out about it, people are bored and angry. And now they have found an enemy, a person they can blame. Wit is Na's younger brother, the town gang leader. He loves his sister but cannot bear to see another person's happiness. He is the one that will lead the town to destroy this stranger.
The Scala opened its doors in 1970. It had one thousand seats and every night, they were filled. In those days, going to the movies was something special. The cinema was a place where people got dressed up, went on dates, and fell in love. But today, everything has changed. There is a multiplex in every mall and the young generation watch movies on their phone. But at The Scala, time has stood still. The cinema is still run by many of the same staff who have been there from the beginning. It is now the last remaining standalone cinema left in Bangkok. And soon, its time will come to an end too.
Louis and his girlfriend Fern are on the rocks. He finds some secret messages she left hidden in the pages of his books. Louis drags his best friend Ananda over to Fern's apartment to confront her. He doesn't want to keep finding these messages years after they have broken up. But that is precisely why she left them there. A short film about preserving old memories.
The film features six themes of love in Bangkok's famous districts: Mo Chit, Yaowarat, Khaosan, Phahurat, Silom, and Sukhumvit on the hand of six different directors: Apinya Sakuljaroensuk, Anocha Suwichakornpong, Soraya Nakasuwan, Vorakorn Ruetaivanichkul, Aditya Assarat and Wichanon Somunjarn.
Auntie Nid's legs hurt. Kane stops by visiting. He is bringing her something. Something amazing.
A man cleaning an upscale house is joined by his mother and girlfriend for lunch. The women later help him clean, watching him with unease when he takes a phone call. Aditya Assarat's short film unravels restless and insecure emotions of love where the dusty, empty space of a house and its fluttering white sheets block our view.
Also Directed by Midi Z
After decades of military rule, Burma has finally held its first presidential election. Many Burmese living abroad believe that peace and prosperity will soon soon follow, including Wang Xing-Hong who is living as an immigrant laborer in Taiwan and saves his money so he can return home. When Xing-hong arrives, he feels like a stranger in a foreign land but is determined to stay and make his life in Burma.
Nina Wu, a girl who leaves small theatre company in the country for the big city in pursuit of her actress dream. The wait seems to be endless, as she lives a lonely and repressed life combined with hereditary condition, she suffers from minor depression. One day, she gets a role as a heroine in a 70s espionage film. Having decided to devote herself completely to the character, she did everything she could to get the role and she did succeed. When she finally welcomes her long anticipation of fame, series of unfortunate events and threats start to haunt her. Having to struggle her way through gender and sexuality equality, can Nina, like many other minor individual fight against the odds in life and stand undefeated? Or is it just real life that no one can escape from endless hardships?
Simple, yet complex. A man (favourite actor Wang Shin-hong) meets a woman (standard actor Wu Ke-xi) on a moored ship, a sort of floating palace decorated like a Buddhist temple. The woman or her spirit struggles with her memories and the man takes on the form of a Buddhist monk in his next life. Complex and yet simple. The man, the woman and the camera move gracefully 'dancing' through the space. Only the thought of escape.
A fascinating documentary, shot in the mountainous north of Burma. No filmmaker is welcome there, because, against the background of a civil war, the jade miners enter the deserted mines illegally. With the aid of filming locals, however, Midi Z was able to compile this portrait. Getting rich quick turns out to be hard and risky work Jade has always been a valuable commodity in Asia. In the mountains in the north of Burma there are valuable deposits of jade. The area forms part of Kachin State, inhabited by many ethnic groups which found themselves embroiled in the Civil War in 2010 with the Burmese government. Jade mining was halted because of the conflict. Thousands of workers, however, went to the war zone in order to dig for illegal jade. It turned the region into a no-go area and the filmmaker Midi Z, who had so far made feature films in Burma, saw no opportunity to go and film there. It was far too dangerous. © iffr.com
Two illegal Burmese migrants fleeing their country’s civil war find love with each other while struggling to survive in the bustling cities of Thailand.
Midi Z visits his oncle who works as a jade miner.
A young farmer and his father are barely able to survive on their meagre corn harvest and so they make their way down from the mountains to the village to borrow money from their relatives working in jade mines or on opium plantations. But missing paperwork, deceit and corruption have left them impoverished too. Finally, the father pawns his cow for a moped so that his son can earn a living as a taxi driver. His first customer is Sanmei, who has returned to Myanmar to bury her grandfather. She decides not to go back to China and to get out of an arranged marriage in order to begin a new life with her son in her old country. When Sanmei accepts a job as a drug runner she persuades the young farmer to be her driver.
Wang Shin-hong is suffering from insomnia. A fortune teller advises the Mandalay businessman, whose car and bulging wallet suggest that business is going pretty well, to spend 14 days in a monastery, living life as a monk and eating an apple a day. Such a thing is possible in Burma today. Wang Shin-hong arrives at the rural monastery, has his head shaved and dons a red robe, in which he instantly becomes an authority. During the welcome procession, the village women, their poverty clear from their clothing and the huts in the background, put more than they have in his alms bowl. During his fleeting role as their advisor, Wang Shin-hong soon learns of the villagers’ attempts to survive and make a living as legal or illegal migrants in China, Thailand or Malaysia. He also finds out how the other monks try to generate profit and additional income.
Also Directed by Tan Chui Mui
Chui Mui Tan's part in the anthology film Fragment. A sort of sequel to A Tree in Tanjung Malim.
We often fall in love first, and then look for reasons, to justify why we love someone. To ask "why you love me?", is as silly as to ask "why you don't love me?". There is no reason, and there is no logic.
In a powerful future world, everything is perfect but nobody is allowed to talk.
Four male friends meet at a pizza restaurant for a late night of boozing and talking.
A washed-up actress who goes through martial arts training for a comeback role while searching for her identity.
Dream #2 He Slept Too Long
Dream #3 We Need You to Save the World
Ping has come from Penang in the north to Kuala Lumpur to work with her aunt. There she meets John, a young man who keeps trying to approach her. Ping feels increasingly attracted to John, and although she has a boyfriend in Penang she is drawn more and more into his world. Ping loses herself in her love and does all she can to keep John.
Fifteen short films with socio-economic subject matter by 15 directors of Malaysia's "New Wave" and "No Wave." 15Malaysia is a short film project. It consists of 15 short films made by 15 Malaysian filmmakers. These films not only deal with socio-political issues in Malaysia, they also feature some of the best-known faces in the country, including actors, musicians and top political leaders. You may think of them as funky little films made by 15 Malaysian voices for the people of Malaysia.
Also Directed by Sun Koh
Seven young directors from Singapore produce a cinematic cadavre exquis.
In a meatless, pandemic-ridden society of extreme inequalities, a meat-obsessed cardboard collector wants a taste of the new groundbreaking meat product—at all costs.
Surreal horror musical.
Koh and Hua are 2 old school radio deejays struggling to stay relevant after their company gets bought over by a mainland Chinese MNC. They are thrown into a trans-media project about the Chinese diaspora, which mirror their lives.