Special Programs in Focus
Summer HoursThe mother, with a natural sense of art which is inherited in the family generation after generation, collected artworks and antique furniture all her life. She tries to talk about...
Special Programs in Focus
The HousemaidMade around the same time as Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom and Hitchcock’s Psycho, Kim Ki-young’s weird classic has a mood and neo-gothic visual stylings to rival eith...
Special Programs in Focus
Tokyo StoryWhat do our parents, the people who raised us with the best of intentions, really think of us? And do we really want to know? In Ozu Yasujiro’s tender, breathtaking Tokyo Story<...
Special Programs in Focus
Rashomon*an extract from an original writing for Asian Cinema 100 […] This transcendence is already inscribed in certain aspects of the film itself. The photographic quality of the...
Special Programs in Focus
A City of SadnessIn the opening shot of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s masterpiece, A City of Sadness, a voice emanating from the radio declares the liberation of Taiwan from Japanese imperial rule. A lo...
Special Programs in Focus
Seven SamuraiIt is likely that Kurosawa Akira’s Seven Samurai (1954) is the most frequently remade film in all of world cinema. Though certainly the same director’s Rashomon (1951...
Special Programs in Focus
A Brighter Summer DayA Brighter Summer Day was inspired by a true incident, a touchstone from Yang’s youth: the killing of a 14-year-old girl by a male high school student in Taipei on June 15, ...
Special Programs in Focus
Spring in a Small TownIn China’s official film history, Fei Mu is labeled as an ideologically irresolute petit bourgeois artist, because he never joined the Leftist filmmakers camp. Fei Mu’s final work ...
Special Programs in Focus
Still LifeWhen Still Life was screened at the Venice Film Festival, a surprise entry that received the Golden Lion, I realized that our Jia Zhangke had become the “internationally ren...
Special Programs in Focus
Close UpIt all started from a magazine article. In 1989, Abbas Kiarostami read an article in an Iranian magazine called Sorush. It was about a guy who impersonated Mohsen Makhmalbaf...