This year we are extremely proud to announce our Opening Night and Closing Night films as well as our Centerpiece Presentation. These three titles join a line-up of 45 feature films competing in this year’s New York Asian Film Festival for both the Audience Award and the Jury Award.

OPENING NIGHT FILM

The World Premiere of WRITTEN BY (Hong Kong, 2009)

Directed by Wai Ka-fai

Starring: Lau Ching-wan, Kelly Lin, Mia Yan

With a special appearance by Lau Ching-wan and Wai Ka-fai (and a huge thank-you to Chinastar for making this possible).

Lau Ching-wan

Wai Ka-fai

The man behind Johnnie To is, of course, Wai Ka-fai, the writer of almost every single film from Johnnie To and Milkyway Image. Wai Ka-fai has also co-directed several of the best movies from Milkyway Image including RUNNING ON KARMA, FULLTIME KILLER and MAD DETECTIVE. As Johnnie To says about him, “In our company, he is the creative driving force. Wherever he goes, we follow.”

Lau Ching-wan and Wai Ka-fai first worked together as writer/director and actor on the fractured gangster flick TOO MANY WAYS TO BE NO. 1 back in 1997 and now, 12 years later, they’re back for the equally experimental WRITTEN BY a movie that can best be described as a Hong Kong melodrama twisted into a new shape by Charlie Kaufman.

In WRITTEN BY, Lau Ching-wan plays a lawyer who dies in a car wreck, leaving behind his wife and daughter. To console herself, his daughter writes a novel wherein she and her mother have died in a car wreck but her father has survived. To her surprise, the character of her father in her book decides that HE needs to write a novel to console himself and in his novel he has died but his wife and daughter have lived…and on and on in an endlessly recursive loop as wounded characters desperately apply fiction to try and dull the sharp edges of their grief.

CENTERPIECE PRESENTATION

The World Premiere of

VAMPIRE GIRL VERSUS FRANKENSTEIN GIRL (Japan, 2009)

Directed by: Yoshihiro Nishimura & Naoyuki Tomomatsu

Starring: Yukie Kawamura, Takumi Saitoh, Kanji Tsuda.

With a special appearance by

TOKYO GORE POLICE’s Eihi Shiina

With a special appearance by director Yoshihiro Nishimura, action choreographer Tak Sakaguchi and visual effects supervisor Tsuyoshi Kazuno.

Yoshihiro Nishimura

Tak Sakaguchi

Last year, special effects genius Yoshihiro Nishimura directed TOKYO GORE POLICE and people sat up and noticed. Now he returns with VAMPIRE GIRL VERSUS FRANKENSTEIN GIRL a movie that makes TGP look sedate by comparison. Nishimura makes his home in the world of low budget movies but his imagination and style aren’t limited by the cash on hand and any movie he touches bears his distinctive stamp: high pressure blood spray, human bodies mutated beyond recognition and a gore-drunk celebration of the new flesh. Part of a loose cabal of collaborators that includes Sion Sono and Takeshi Shimizu (JU-ON), Nishimura directs like a David Cronenberg who grew up on exploitation cinema and comic books rather than European arthouse cinema.

As for the film itself, the title says it all. It’s a duel to the death between schoolgirl vampires, reanimated corpses and a Dr. Frankenstein who teaches science and has a lab underneath the gym. The freaky touch of co-director Tomomatsu (ZOMBIE SELF DEFENSE FORCE, STACY, EAT THE SCHOOLGIRL) is also not to be underestimated and the movie is filled with bizarro send-ups of Japanese culture, Chinese culture and the shallow Japanese obsession with African American culture.

CLOSING NIGHT FILM

The World Premiere of BE SURE TO SHARE (2009, Japan)

Directed by: Sion Sono

Starring: Akira, Eiji Okuda

With special guests, director Sion Sono and the film’s star, Eiji Okuda.

Sion Sono

Eiji Okuda

Sion Sono is best known as a cinematic provocateur who first came to Western attention with his 2002 film, SUICIDE CLUB. Since then he’s kept up his reputation for extreme cinema with movies like EXTE, and LOVE EXPOSURE. But what you don’t know is that he’s equally well known in Japan as a poet and that softer side of his personality gets exposed in BE SURE TO SHARE.

Featuring pop star Akira from the band EXILE in one of his first motion picture performances, BE SURE TO SHARE is a quiet meditation on death and the relationship between fathers and sons. Director and actor Eiji Okuda plays a tough-as-nails father who makes the Great Santini look like a wimp. Now, diagnosed with cancer he’s trapped in the hospital and his wife and son (Akira) spend their days visiting and trying to keep his spirits up. Just when it looks like he’s about to recover, Akira finds out that he has cancer too, and that his father may out-live him. Determined not to worry anyone, he keeps it to himself and vows that he’ll beat his disease.

BE SURE TO SHARE isn’t an easy-to-swallow disease-of-the-week movie about fathers and sons. Sono opens the film up and makes it an essay, colored with regret, about how we’re constantly running after each other, and never catching up. We’d say it will break your heart, but Sono might object to such an easy sentiment. So how about this: by the time this movie is over, you’ll feel like your chest has been cracked in two.

Co-presented with Japan Cuts: Festival of New Japanese Film