Asiaticafilmmediale

Asiaticafilmmediale’s Encounters with Asian Cinema, now in its eleventh year, is at once a serious and light-hearted event: serious in intent, light-hearted in its informality, camaraderie and warmth. Director Italo Spinelli who is always available for everyone, has a nose for handpicking some of the most remarkable Asian films. Whether they premiere at the festival or not (some are premieres, though, and most were shown for the first time in Italy) is not his primary aim. Rather, he garners the best he can for a dedicated audience of Asian film buffs in Rome. And one can hardly quarrel with his choice.   The focus of the 11^th edition (12-20 November 2010) was China.  And what the audience got was more than just cinema. It was a multifaceted glance at this economic giant through films, serious discussions, essays, publications and an exhibition. A seminar on “Asia: Democracy and Economic Development: China, India and Iran” had high-level discussants – career diplomat, scholar and author Roberto Toscano who was Italy’s ambassador to Iran and India; author and well-known journalist and author Prem Shankar Jha from India who has written extensively on both China and India; former President of Rome’s Chamber of Commerce and of the Fondazione Cinema per Roma, Andrea Mondello; and journalist, writer and economist and Editor or the daily Il Messagero, Roberto Napoletano.   An excellent if small poster exhibition on the Cultural Revolution and on Italian films released in China during the 50s was enough to give viewers a whiff of the cinema of those years, of their heavily socialist realism themes and their accent on the masses, shown mostly in a spirit of revolt, courage and triumph. As for Italian films in China, Bicycle Thief was, unsurprisingly, the first to be screened in that country in 1954. A dozen other neo-realist films were exhibited over the following eight years till imports were halted in the early 60s.   The exhibition complemented a set of three films in a section called Chinese Memoirs and eleven films on the Cultural Revolution, mostly from the 70s, except for one made in 2003. The festival catalogue contains detailed and informative articles on a number of topics related to that era of Chinese history: Eleven Suggestions from the Cultural Revolution, China 1971, Cultural Revolution in Contemporary Chinese Cinema, A Survey of Cultural Revolution Movie Publications, Chinese Cinema at the End of the Cultural Revolution: the Cinema of the “Gang of Four”, The Cultural Revolution in Contemporary Chinese Literature, and Censorship and Propaganda in China Today.   The Opening and Closing films were also from China: Fei Mu’s Confucius (1940) and Jia Zhangke’s I Wish I Knew (2010) respectively. And then, there were a large number of publications from China, India and Iran and meetings with European and Asian publishers and writers accompanied by extracts from films relating to the themes discussed.   There was space for much else besides. The Feature Film Competition had a set of seven excellent films, while the Documentary Competition had six. Seven films were part of the Taiwan focus, while three paid tribute to Tsai Ming-liang. Five were stories on human rights apart from a wealth of features and documentaries out of competition. All of this apart from the daily discussions that were both eclectic and wide-ranging: from Roland Barthes in China to Prague Mirroring Kolkata, from the short stories of Sadat Hasan Manto to Travel Stories, from Maoist Influence in Cambodia, Nepal, India to “In the Kitchen of Love”.   Girish Kasaravalli’s Riding the Stallion of Dream (India) walked off with two awards: Best Feature for “successfully featuring all the elements needed to film and narrate a complex story full of ethical values”; and the NETPAC award “for its astute cinematic handling of a precarious situation that straddles real life and superstition”. The film shared the NETPAC award with Hao Jie’s A Single Man (China) – a vivacious tale of old bachelors –  “for a daring and original documentation of the psyche of the Chinese peasant life and for the filmmaker’s ability to transcend a serious social problem with humour and humanity.” Both films were marked by an originality and freshness of approach to their subject.    The Special Jury Award went to Food and the Maiden (Japan) by Minoru Kurimura, a strange film about the preparation and consumption of food and its relationship to the characters in the story – while the Best Documentary Award was shared by 1001 Iransby Firouzeh Koshrovani (Iran) and War and Love in Kabul by Helga Reidmeister (Germany). The Japanese and Iranian films also took the Audience Award.   But awards rarely tell the whole tale. For, beyond the award-winners were many films of high quality: Mazdak Mirabedini’s minimalist, tightly spaced, tightly timed Butterfly in Sleep (Iran), for instance, was about a psychotherapist and his patients; or Sheika by Arnel Mardoquio (Philippines) which showed pitilessly yet through moments of intense contemplation a woman’s search for justice in a society bedevilled by poverty and violence; or Maida’s House by Teddy Soeriaatmadja (Indonesia), an engagingly charming film of a young girl’s idealism as she strives not just to help but to enliven the spirits of street children.   As an Italian audience soaked itself in the cultures of Asia, four Asian directors from the Philippines, Iran, China and Japan shot films during the festival on four internationally renowned Italian artists. This “Crossing Cultures: An Encounter between Asia and Europe” project, devised in collaboration with Cortocircuito Arte, was initiated well before the filmmakers arrived in Rome, was completed during the festivals and the films were screened before an international audience.   Encounters with Asian Cinema left much space for encounters with hosts and guests over lively dinners and good wine in the heart of a throbbing city where everything was within walking distance. And the heart was everywhere at once.