10 Films you cannot miss at the 12th Five Flavours Asian Film Festival

By Asian Film Festival on November 14, 2018 • ( Leave a comment )

We present a list of ten movies you shouldn’t miss at the Five Flavours Asian Film Festival which is taking place from November 14th -21st in Warsaw (Poland).

A Land Imagined (Huan Tu) by Yeo Siew Hua
Singapore, France, Netherlands | 2018 – 95 min.

Police detective Lok takes on a case of finding missing Chinese migrant worker, Wang. His partner seems to be indifferent about the mysterious disappearance but Lok leaves the land reclaimaition worksite deeply disturbed and keeps digging the case, also in order to deal with his sleeplessness. It turns out Wang suffered a worksite injury, with the broken arm he was assigned to drive the company’s truck to transport goods and workers between dorms and construction sites. He made friends with one Bangladeshi worker but both of them are anxious about repatriation. Unable to sleep, Wang started frequenting a cybercafé in the middle of the night where he got fascinated by the tough and disenchanted young woman running the place. Yet he formed an online friendship with a mysterious gamer and disappeared without a trace. The mystery is hidden under the Singapore’s reclaimed land. (Five Flavours Catalogue)

Trailer:

Birds Without Names (Kanojo gas ono na wo shiranai toritachi) by Kazuya Shiraishi
Japan | 2017 – 123 min.

Towako is not a nice girl. Everything irritates her, she gets hysterical in a blink of an eye, she is cruel to her partner, who not only stands her viciousness, but also provides for her. Meanwhile, a new man appears on the horizon, and the woman follows him blindly – perhaps because he reminds her of someone from her past? (Five Flavours Catalogue)

Trailer:

Die Tomorrow by Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit – Thailand | 2017 – 75 min.

In the very second it takes you to read this sentence, two people die in the world. How do their last moments look like? Are they aware the end is at hand? Will their death be reported by the media? Will someone post symbolic candles on Instagram? (Five Flavours Catalogue)

Trailer:

Father to Son (Van pao-te) by Hsiao Ya-Chuan – Taiwan | 2018 – 115 min.

Van Pao-Te, 60 years old field engineer and tool store owner, finds himself suffering from a serious illness. Instead of getting treatment, he leaves Taiwan provincial town of Chiayi and decides to go to Japan to look for his father who abandoned him 50 years ago. Accompanied by his own son, the main character reflects on family ties and life experiences. At the same time, a young man from Hong Kong who is somehow related to Van Pao-Te’s past comes to Taiwan. Two unknown journeys of self-reconciliation begin. (Five Flavours Catalogue)

Schedule:
November 18th | Sunday | Kinoteka 3 | 15:30 pm

Trailer:

Girls Always Happy (Rou qing shi) Yang Mingming – China | 2018 – 117 min.

The mother and the daughter – two women with sharp tongues and neurotic personalities. Their artistic ambitions. Frustrations. Men. Friends. Lovely narrow streets between the small Beijing hutongs, which will soon fall prey to developers’ bulldozers. Disputes at a film school campus, struggling with a leaking roof, unhealthy food, and coming back home at night through the streets of an ever-changing city. (Five Flavours Catalogue)

Trailer:

Have a nice day (Da Shi Jie) by Liu Jian – China | 2017 – 77 min.

A gloomy city in the Chinese province, a bag filled with money, and a few shady individuals hoping to snatch it. One of them is a man determined to get the money for his fiancee’s plastic surgery. But the road to easy money leads through blood, tears, and shabby internet cafes. (Five Flavours Catalogue)

Trailer:

Nervous Translation by Shireen Seno – Philippines | 2017 – 90 min.

Yael is eight. He has a tiny cooking set and a tape recorder he uses to secretly listen to a cassette with the voice of his father who left to work abroad. It is the end of 1980s in Manila. The busy mother, home assignments, the smell of the sofa warming up in the sun. The TV shows ads for Japanese magic pens which occupy a much more prominent place in a kid’s imagination than the news of changing political currents flowing in the background. (Five Flavours Catalogue)

Trailer:

River’s Edge (Ribazu Ejji) by Isao Yukisada – Japan | 2018 – 118 min.

Tokyo’s industrial suburbs, early 1990s. A group of high school students torment a boy, closing him in a metal box, naked. A girlfriend of one of the perpetrators comes to his rescue, but this is only the beginning of their problems. Everyone here has their own troubles – homosexuality, bulimia, forced sex, unrequited love, conflict with parents. When suppressed, inner rebellion has to finally burst out, causing dramatic consequences. (Five Flavours Catalogue)

Trailer:

Ten Years Thailand by Aditya Assarat, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Chulayarnnon Siriphol, Wisit Sasanatieng
Thailand, Hong Kong | 2018 – 95 min.

Ten Years Thailand is an omnibus film inviting four directors from Thailand to imagine their country a decade from now.

Trailer:

Youth (Fang Hua) by Feng Xiaogang – China | 2017 – 136 min.

A young dancer is accepted to an elite artistic group performing for the soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army. It is the 1970s, the time of the Cultural Revolution. The barracts the artists are stationed in create an idyllic enclave, where they can focus on improving their skills, mutual rivalry, traveling to guest performances, budding romances, and buzzing adolescent emotions. Some refuse to talk about their far-away families, others secretly listen to forbidden music. Some of them meets several years later on the front lines of the Sino-Vietnamese war.

Schedule:
November 16th | Friday | Kinoteka 1 | 19:30 pm

Trailer: