The Great Buddha+ (Taiwan, 2017) – Screened Lives, and Screening Power/Play/Pleasure [New Directors/New Films 2018]
From the opening credits of his debut feature, filmmaker Huang Hsin-yao establishes his film’s atypical, tongue-in-cheek perspective and approach to his characters and what they...
The Sacrament (Japan, 2017)
In a time when self-referentiality is no longer a theoretical symptom of the time, but its actual mode of existence, it is hard to convince...
An Elephant Sitting Still (China, 2018) and the movement of emotion-as-space [New Directors/New Films 2018]
In the late Hu Bo’s first and last film, scenes revolve around the inhabitants of an apartment complex located somewhere in northern China, all of...
Gemini (USA, 2017)
Opening with an upside down image of palm trees against a purple tinted night sky, Gemini is an impeccably stealthy neo-noir that coolly traverses Los...
Preview – Nippon Connection 2018, May 29-June 3, Franfurt am Main
From May 29 to June 3, 2018, the eighteenth edition of the Nippon Connection Film Festival will take place in Frankfurt am Main. With more than 100 short and...
Cambodian Textiles (Cambodia/Japan, 2018)
Light and shadows play on greenery and fabrics. Ants crawl in single file on panels of wood furniture. With its circular structure of montages of...
Call for Papers – The 11th Centre for Chinese Visual Arts Annual Conference, Birmingham City University, September 10-11
The Centre for Chinese Visual Arts (CCVA) at Birmingham City University aims to foster new understandings and perspectives of Chinese contemporary arts, design and visual...
Dragonfly Eyes (China, 2017)
Although largely overlooked on release in 1997, Wim Wenders’ neo-noir The End of Violence turned out to be stunningly prophetic in its speculation of how...
Bad Poetry Tokyo (Japan, 2017) [OAFF 2018]
Fake it till you make it. It’s a useful mantra to live by. Appear confident and people will accept it. We all do it, but...
Call for Papers – East Asian Journal of Popular Culture
In recent decades, there has been a huge rise in the interest in East Asian popular culture. Since being launched in 2015, the East Asian Journal of...