Month: March 2021

“Her Lullaby” from Hong Kong and “The Catch” from India were the winners of the top fiction prizes at the 2021 edition of the Hong Kong-Asia Film Financing Forum. A total of 17 cash and in-kind prizes worth a combined HK$1,200,000 ($157,000) were awarded at the conclusion of the three day (March 15-17, 2021) project

The Chinese government has reportedly told its local media channels not to transmit live coverage of the Oscars and to downplay the awards ceremony. The move follows the nomination of “Do Not Split,” a 35-minute chronicle of the pro-democracy struggles in Hong Kong, in the documentary short subject category. The order reportedly came from the

Amazon Prime Video is making its first foray into Indian feature movie co-production with Bollywood film “Ram Setu,” starring Akshay Kumar. Directed by Abhishek Sharma (“Parmanu”) with Dr. Chandraprakash Dwivedi (“Prithviraj Chauhan”) as creative producer, the film is an action-adventure drama that is rooted in Indian cultural and historical heritage. The title is a reference

Phoebe Dynevor, star of Netflix’s global smash “Bridgerton,” plays the lead in Sky original “The Colour Room.” The film charts the rise to fame of Stoke-on-Trent ceramic artist Clarice Cliff, played by Dynevor. Cliff, a determined, working class woman in the 1920s, broke the glass ceiling and revolutionized the workplace in the 20th century, while

“Folk horror” is a term of relatively recent vintage — or at least popularity — that only grows more broad as “Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched” spends three and a quarter hours trying to define it. Still, a slippery thesis doesn’t detract from the pleasures of this documentary from genre scholar and programmer Kier-La Janisse.

Beneath the eerily calm surfaces of Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor’s terrific “Rose Plays Julie,” a transgressive story bides its time. It’s a tale that feels ancient in structure, but terrifyingly modern in detail, mapping MeToo-era revelations and a contemporary preoccupation with fractured identities onto a deceptively simple revenge plot that could have been plucked

The question of how to convey characters speaking a language other than English in a fully English-language production is one that many a director of an exotically-set Hollywood production or lumpy Europudding has faced over the years. For those who simply cannot resort to subtitles, the artifice of heavily accented English dialogue is a stilted

It’s tricky to pull off the kind of cryptic mystery labyrinth that “Broadcast Signal Intrusion” attempts, and Jacob Gentry’s film only works to a point — whatever point at which the viewer decides this thriller’s elusive menace is just too vague to generate sufficient urgency or suspense. As long as the promise outweighs the frustrating

A new documentary from Bhutan will share the Himalayan Buddhist kingdom’s unique philosophy of Gross National Happiness (GNH) with the world. Bhutan’s King Jigme Singye Wangchuk came up with the phrase in 1972 when he said that GNH is more important than Gross Domestic Product. The landlocked country with fractious giants China and India as

Legendary documentarian Wang Bing is at HAF this year with his new project “I Come from Ikotun,” which follows two Nigerian families with a foothold in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou over the course of the pandemic. Known for his epically long, unflinching works that have previously tackled sensitive issues like China’s brutal re-education

Despite the ongoing trade war and frostier than ever ties between China and the U.S., “Detective Chinatown 3” producer and financier Shawn Yue (aka Yue Xiang) is still betting on collaboration in the film industry — though perhaps not in the way you’d expect. Chinese production budgets and visual ambitions have lately begun to outgrow

A film studio since 1920, Japan’s Shochiku has a back catalogue filled with works by master directors including Ozu Yasujiro and Kinoshita Keisuke as well as 1960s New Wave leaders Oshima Nagisa and Shinoda Masahiro and studio stalwart Yamada Yoji, maker of the enduringly popular Tora-san series. Shochiku has been digitally remastering its classics in

A late addition to the Nikkatsu lineup for FilMart is “First Gentleman,” a local co-production between Nikkatsu, Toei and Nippon TV. Directed by Kawai Hayato (“Prince of Legend”) from a novel by Harada Maha, this comedy stars Nakatani Miki (“Sweet Little Lies”) as the leader of an opposition party in Japan’s parliament. The plot moves