Preview – Aperture: Asia & Pacific Film Festival 2019, London, June 4-13 & UK Tour, July-October

Day for Night is delighted to announce the programme for the 2019 edition of its Aperture: Asia & Pacific Film Festival. Aperture will run in London from 4-13 June with a line-up of 13 features, both new titles and classics, including 6 UK Premieres and 1 London Premiere, as well as 17 shorts. Highlights for the festival include the UK premiere of critically acclaimed Kazakh director Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s The Gentle Indifference of the World, which will be the Opening Film, the London premiere of Aboozar Amini’s mesmeric debut feature-length documentary Kabul, City in the Wind and a screening of 2K restoration of Peter Weir’s classic drama Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Aperture seeks to bridge the gap within the UK festival landscape as the only UK film festival to cover the whole of the Asian region and also to explore Oceania and is presented by UK based independent film organisation Day for Night in partnership with the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), University of Westminster.

Following its launch last year, Aperture returns for its second edition with a continued commitment to presenting some of the boldest, most daring and striking films from the Asian and Pacific regions to wide and diverse audiences across the UK. As such, other key Aperture highlights include a programme of recently re-discovered Taiwanese avant-garde shorts from the 1960s and the UK premiere of Sergey Dvortsevoy’s 2018 Palme d’Or competition title Ayka for which the lead actress, Samal Yeslyamova, won the prestigious Award for Best Actress.

Further highlights include Shireen Seno’s Nervous Translation, Jang Woo-jin’s Autumn, Autumn, Tenzing Sonam and Ritu Sarin’s The Sweet Requiem, and Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit’s BNK48: Girls Don’t Cry.

Aperture is a collaborative initiative, seeking to forge strong partnerships with other like-minded festivals and organisations both in the UK and overseas and is, therefore, delighted to be partnering with Essay Film Festival, London Korean Film Festival, MUBI and NANG for this second edition. Aperture is also thrilled to be working on a joint programming initiative with Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF) in northern India. Aperture will be screening three outstanding South Asian films that featured in DIFF’s last edition and looks forward to seeing Aperture titles reaching audiences in the Himalayas later this year.

Following its June London run, Aperture will tour various venues across the UK between July and October, before returning to London in September for a Southeast Asian documentary focus.

Aperture Founder and Artistic Director Sonali Joshi commented:

Through this year’s programme, we continue our commitment to offering audiences a broader choice of films from some lesser-seen corners of the globe, while highlighting emerging talent alongside historical works that call for (re)discovery and (re)evaluation. My hope was always for Aperture to become a festival of discovery, opening a window onto the contemporary cinemas of Asia and the Pacific, and drawing attention to the rich histories of the film industries of Asia, celebrating under-represented and under-acknowledged voices, and offering glimpses into rarely seen corners of Asia and the Pacific.

The full programme is available on the festival website.