Film Series: “Orient Express” at Betevé and Movistar+ (Oct.-Dec. 2021)

Betevé and Casa Àsia set in motion a series of the best Asian cinema, “Orient Express” which will be broadcasted weekly on Fridays from Friday the 22nd of October 2021, a week before the start of the 9th edition of the Asian Film Festival Barcelona -AFFBCN-2021.

The programme will consist of 10 titles and will not only include feature films from the AFFBCN’s previous year, but also “El barro de la Revolución” from director Paloma Polo, which will compete in the NETPAC section from this year’s festival. Every title will be available to watch on both Betevé and Movistar+ (160 channel).

Sexual violence against women became a punishable offense in Afghanistan in 2009. But in practice, women fear the possible consequences of bringing charges. Regrettably, Khatera’s story is a prime example of this phenomenon: she and her mother receive various threats, including from her own uncles, and they frequently have to move. Khatera’s father abused her throughout her childhood—he got her pregnant several times, so she had a number of abortions and eventually gave birth to a daughter. Acting on the advice of a mullah, she told her story on a TV program and brought charges against her father. The film has been presented at the Göteborg Film Festival 2019, Seattle International Film Festival 2019, Sheffield International Documentary Festival 2018 and Fribourg International Film Festival 2019.

Ayka just gave birth, but she can’t afford to raise a child. She has no job, not even a room of her own but many debts to be paid. The film guides the public into the reality of babies given up by their mothers, and follows a Kyrgyz girl, Ayka, trying to survive while searching for the child she abandoned in a Moscow maternity ward. It won the award to the Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival 2018, Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival 2018 and the Asian Film Awards 2019; and to the Cinema Extraordinaire at the Bergen International Film Festival 2018.

El Barro de la Revolución takes place in the Philippine rainforest and reveals the inner life, without the usual mandate of the camera, of the military, social, political, emotional and educational actions of one of the guerrilla units that Polo visits with his complicity. It is a shared and solidary project, which shapes a story in which the daily duties and urgencies acquire an extreme political and poetic relevance. In short, and from our perspective as spectators, we are once again questioned about the indissoluble condition of the intimate and personal in the political sphere.

Shimu is 23 years old. She left her city as a child and now lives in Dhaka. She works in the textile industry in very difficult conditions and with very precarious pay, so she decides to join her fellow workers to demand better working conditions. Despite threats from her superiors to stop the pressure she and the other women are exerting, and her husband’s disapproval, she decides to continue the fight by defying the sure-fire adversity of achieving what she wants.

The precariousness of the economy in Japan hits hard on families with less purchasing power, like Cocoa’s, a high school student who struggles to get out of the difficulties she encounters, never giving up. Not a day goes by that she does not strive to make her way in the hope of a better future.

Cai Xiangren’s family runs a photography studio in Shenzhen. This talented photographer is the husband of a young woman entirely devoted to her work in the financial sector. Their son, meanwhile, spends his time developing photographic software. This situation creates permanent dispute within the family and will finally reveal a secret hidden for ten years. The film was presented at the Fajr Film Festival 2019.

Two university friends take a trip to Esfahan with the whole class. But, what starts as an idyllic trip ends up becoming a nightmare, when one of them unexpectedly suffers an accident and falls into a coma. Her friend must cope with the situation especially when she is given a responsibility that she wishes she did not have. Despite her innocence, everything will go against her.

Bulbul is a young girl who lives in a village in India’s Assam state. When she and her two best friends, Bonny and Sumu, begin to define their own identities, they realise that who they want to be and what their community expects them to be are two different things, and find themselves increasingly clashing with the age-old rules set down by the village. Bulbul is attracted to a boy for the first time, but her mother advises that “Girls should be modest. Girls should behave well.” Sumu is bullied for not conforming to what his peers expect of a young man. For Bonny, the pressures of the community become unbearable. The film was presented at the Toronto International Film Festival 2018, New York Indian Film Festival 2019 and the Asian Film Awards 2019. It won the Golden Gateway award at the Jio MAMI Film Festival 2018, Best Performance award at the Singapore International Film Festival 2018, an Special Mention at the Berlin International Film Festival 2019, Best Director at the Dublin International Film Festival 2019, Jury Special Mention at the Osaka Asian Film Festival 2019, and the Best Film, Best Actor (Female and Male), Best Cinematography and Global Icon Award at the Prag Cine Awards 2019.

Two sisters, Wessi and Ossi, who have lived more than twenty years apart with hardly any knowledge of each other, get in touch again when the one living in the West experiences an identity crisis and wants to return to her origins. Wessi, who has lived in Germany all this time, wonders about her personal and professional life, deciding to go and visit her sister without setting a returning date to Europe. The encounter with the past will open up surprisingly new perspectives in the life she has led until now, not without experiencing the culture shock that comes with the new circumstances she will find herself in, when she is in the Gobi Desert, sharing the yurt with her sister and her nomadic family.

Saima takes care of her daughter Aisa, who is sick with cancer and is in a recovery centre in Davao, while she waits for her husband, Malang, a combat doctor, to return home after completing an operation in the province of Maguindanao. Saima knows that there are patients who overcome the disease and others who do not; Malang for his part has seen death on the battlefield. While waiting, Saima narrates the legend of Rajah and Sulayman, to keep hope alive, and to help her daughter and husband to escape death.

Leslie works taking celebrities’ portraits like Madonna. He works worldwide and had lived in Japan for the last twenty five years, where there is a rising movement for LGBTQ, however, he has been deeply troubled that they still have to live invisibly. Leslie is gay and can’t tell it to his family in Singapore. Even so, he embarks on an ambitious project to photograph ten thousand LGBTQ people, in order to hold the exhibition Out in Japan. His first portraits photo exhibition held in Nara, a conservative city in Japan, was poorly attended but he continues to take portraits. The film was presented at the Melbourne International Film Festival 2018, the Queer and Migrants International Film Festival of Amsterdam 2018 and the Doc Edge Pride Festival of Auckland 2019.

22/10/2021
From the 22nd of October 2021 to the 31st of December 2021. Fridays at 22.00 h.
Betevé and Movistar+ (160 channel).
Casa Àsia and Betevé.