By Robert St. Martin
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 11/16/24 – The 10th annual Asian World Film Festival opened Wednesday at the Culver Theatres with a gala evening and red carpet before the screening of the new South Korean film A Normal Family (2023), directed of Her Jin-ho. Showcasing Asian film from around the world, the film festival is taking place November 13-21, 2024, at The Culver Theater in Culver City. The nine-day festival will present narrative and documentary motion pictures and short films from 27 countries, including four that premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. More than 30 of the screenings will feature live Q&As with the filmmakers, talent, and crew.
Georges N. Chamchoum, Executive Director of the Asian World Film Festival, said, “We are very grateful to the filmmakers around the world supporting this year’s line-up with more than 60 narrative and documentary films. The AWFF continues to open the window to the region of Asia as well to showcase Asian American talent through our range of programs. I am amazed at the depth and breadth of the work on the AWFF schedule this year.”
Special presentations of Oscar-qualifying feature and short films will take place throughout the festival. They include The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru, from Chinese director Fang Li, which will qualify for the Academy Awards as Best Documentary Feature Film. Also, screening is About Mannequin, director Aruzhan Dossym’s black and white silent tribute to Kazakh storytelling and The Unreachable Star, from Asian American filmmaker Sharon S. Park, both of which have qualified for consideration for the Best Live Action Short Academy Awards.
The opening night film A Normal Family features actor Sul Kyung-gu as a successful attorney Jae-wan, who takes on the case of a wealthy executive’s son who intentionally ran over and murdered a man and gravely injured his daughter. To defend a killer is part of Jae-won’s profession, another rung on the ladder of his career. However, his younger brother (Jan Dong-gun) is a devout and honorable pediatrician who consistently prioritizes the health of his patients before personal gain and profit, frequently breaking the regulations of the private clinic where he works. When an unexpected circumstance involving their teenage children emerges, the brothers’ consciences are tested, and their regularly scheduled dinner talks takes an unexpected turn. Korean filmmaker Hur Jin-ho explores a family in conflict in A Normal Family, an adaptation of the Dutch novel The Dinner by Herman Koch.
In the line-up was Taiwanese film Old Fox (2024), directed by Ya-Chuan Hsiao, which screened on Thursday evening as well. This charming dramatic film takes placed in Taipei in 1989 when the volatile Taiwanese economy experienced high inflation and people struggled to pay rent. The story centers around eleven-year-old Liao Jie (Run Yin-bai) who lives a frugal life with his father who worked in a fashionable restaurant and saves all his money for the dream of buying a house. Inflation is the real culprit along with greedy landlords and many people foolishly purchase fake stocks hoping to make money fast. One fateful day, Liao-Jie unexpectedly befriends their cunning landlords, the “Old Fox.” The boy’s friendship with the Old Fox (played by Akio Chen) allows him to taste the power wealth brings. Liao-Jie discovers the dream of having a house for himself and his father is beyond their reach as the soul-crushing experience of economic woes are the product of deceitful wiles of an “Old Fox” who benefits from the poverty of others. Ultimately young Liao-Jie must grapple with the reality of the honest life of his poor father. Old Fox is Taiwan’s submission for an Oscar for Best International Film 2025.
On Thursday there was a screening of Baghdad Messi (Iraq, 2024), directed by Belgian-Kurdish filmmaker Salim Omar Khalif. Set at the time the Sunni-Shia civil war in Iraq between 2006 and 2008, this film tells the story of eleven-year-old Hamoudi (played by Ahmed Mohammed Abdullah) who lives for futbol (soccer) and his dream of being an outstanding footballer like his hero Lionel Messi. One day in Baghdad he was unintentionally involved in a bombing attack, and he awakened in a hospital with only one leg. While his Shia parents do everything to keep the family safe, Hamoud’s father (Atheer Adel) is forced to flee Baghdad to a village near Ramadi after their home is torched by angry Sunni men. Hamoudi fights to achieve his dream of being a footballer despite all the setbacks. The film is based on true events and is Iraq’s submission to the Oscars for Best International Film.
Also screening at the film festival on Thursday night was In the Arms of the Tree, a 2023 Iranian drama film written and directed by Babak Khajehpasha, and produced by Mohammad Rez Mesbah and Sajjad Nasrollahi Nasab. The story is centered around the complex crisis in the lives of Kimia (Maral Baniadam) and Farid (Javad Ghamati) , who have been married for twelve years, but Kimia is about to divorce Farid due to her constant anxiety and illnesses related to what she called “distance neuropathy” (related to something in her past). The two adults are trying to finalize a divorce but their two sons, unaware of their parents’ decision to separate them, continue to live their normal life and spend their days together never separated and often hanging out with their young uncle Reza (played by Rouhollah Zamani). The attempt to separate the boys ends up in near tragedy and the adults must learn some difficult lessons. The film was selected as Iran’s submission for the Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards.
