In the last twenty years the cinemas of the East have developed an incredibly sophisticated and diverse body of work, and have been garnering increasing attention in the West, not just at Film Festivals but on the shelves of high street shops. From the charm of the 1980s Hong Kong action flick, through the artistry of China's Fifth Generation and the Tawainese new wave, to the dynamism of the New Korean Cinema; Asian cinema has reinvented film language as we know it, wresting an essentially western medium from its roots and inflecting it with specifically Oriental themes and forms. Often innovative and formally beautiful, Asian film has reinvigorated cinema and began to challenge the dominance of an increasingly stagnant Hollywood. Hollywood's only defence has been to remake Asian films badly. This Blog will provide a personal commentary on the Asian film renaissance.

Sunday, 18 February 2007

Chinese Film takes the Golden Bear

What more proof could you ask of the rise of Chinese cinema than for its films to walk away with the grand prixs of two out of the three most important film festivals in the wolrd; Jia Zhang Ke's Still Life at the Venice Film Festival and, only yesterday, Wang Quanan's Tuya's Marriage at the Berlinale. The film is set on the Mongolian Steppes, where a woman is torn between the hard but traditional way of life of a shepard and the easy, souless life of the encroaching urban centre when her her husband falls ill. The director, who was born in the region, stated that his intention was to record the nomad's traditional way of life before it disappears for ever. The film might make a good companion peice to The Cave of the Yellow Dog.

The festival was remarkably receptive to Asian films this year with China and South Korea very well represented. Highlights include Hong Sang-su's latest Woman on the Beach, Park Chan-wook's surreal sounding I'm a Cyborg but thats OK, about a woman in a mental home who believes herself to be bionic, and Zhang Yang's latest Getting Home, an intriguing sounding comedy/drama about a man trying to get the corpse of his dead friend across China by pretending that he is dead drunk. To cap it all there was even a (much overdue) retrospective of Kihachi Okamoto (of Sword of Doom fame), which made up for the lack of new Japanese films, apart from the latest film from the prolific Yoji Yomada Love and Honour, about a samurai who goes blind and must rely on his wife to support him.

Lets hope that the international sales agents are paying as much attention to the success of Asian cinema as the festival programmers, and that some of these delights get picked up for distribution.
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