Asian Film Festival

As members of the Denver Film Society, we receive regular invites to attend screenings of various independent films. Tonight, we attended a preview screening of South of the Clouds, one of the films being shown at the local Asian Film Festival.

SOUTH OF THE CLOUDS (China, 2004, 100 min.) – Saturday, June 5, 4:15pm.
It’s been a life-long dream for middle-aged Xu Da Qin to return to Yunnan, a province near Tibet, where he had worked when he was a young man. An affair with a girl, which led to children and marriage, kept him living in the north for most of his life where he settled into a daily routine of work and drudgery. Now retired, the children grown and his wife dead, Xu heads south imagining what life might have been like if he had stayed in Yunnan. Once there he unwittingly ends up in a complicated affair with a prostitute, having misunderstood her advances for money as a sign for help, and ends up being taken into police custody. Powerful and impressive, Zhu Wen’s South of the Clouds won the critics prize at the recently concluded Hong Kong International Film Festival.

One of the things I enjoy about independent and foreign films is the emphasis on characterization. Much of the typical Hollywood fare emphasizes action, plot twists, and spectacle at the expense of developing characters. As a result, characters in Hollywood films are usually overly archetypal and emotionally underdeveloped. Independent and foreign films are the exact opposite. There's frequently very little action, few plot twists, and almost no spectacle. Characters engage in real, substantive dialogue with one another and act/react in ways that suggest emotional complexity. The result is film-making that makes audience members think.

At the end of an independent film, I almost always hear some of the following comments.

"Why did she choose to do X and point Y?"
"What kind of ending was that?"
"I thought it was kind of slow."

When I hear such comments I know a film is challenging the Hollywood model. The plot isn't being spoon fed to the audience, the ending doesn't follow a typical big screen narrative sequence, and the overall feel of the film is more cerebral than visceral.

South of the Clouds was exactly that kind of movie. How would I react if I found myself in a similar situation? Why did Xu Da Qin long for the Yunnan province? Why did he smile in the closing frame? What the heck was his dream all about? Great stuff.

Over the course of the weekend, we'll also see the following.

GOODBYE DRAGON INN (Taiwan, 2003, 82 min.) – Friday, June 4, 7:00pm.
It’s the final night of a run-down Taipei movie theatre. Once a majestic beacon for film-lovers, the theatre now serves as a refuge for society’s outsiders. As King Hu’s martial arts classic Dragon Inn plays for the last time on the screen, patrons and employees shuffle through the theatre searching for something…anything to fulfill their desires. “Rarely has the experience of movie going itself been so beautifully rendered. Tsai Ming- Liang has fashioned what may be his most brilliant metaphor yet, a lament for the death of feelings framed as a valediction to an entire era of Chinese cinema and an obituary to film-going in general. Needless to say, it’s cruelly, astringently funny.” –Tony Rayns. Goodbye Dragon Inn was Taiwan’s submission for Best Foreign Language Oscar in 2003.

TRAVELLERS AND MAGICIANS (Bhutan, 2003, 108 min.) – Saturday, June 5, 6:30 p.m.
In the Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan, nestled deep in the Himalayas, two men seek to escape their mundane lives. Dondup, an educated university graduate decides that he would be better off picking grapes in the United States than working as a government official in a remote rural village. Tashi, a restless farm youth studying magic, cannot bear the thought of spending the rest of his life stuck in his small village. The two men embark on parallel, if separate journeys—both seeking a different, and they hope better, life. Forced to hitchhike through the countryside of Bhutan, Dondup eventually shares the road with a monk, an apple seller, a papermaker and his beautiful daughter. Throughout the journey the monk relates the story off Tashi to the group, and eventually Dondup has to wonder if the grass is truly greener on the other side. Travellers & Magicians is the first feature film to be made entirely in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan.