Orient Express: CASA ASIA in BETEVÉ 2024 - Asian Film Festival Barcelona

ORIENT EXPRESS 

 CASA ASIA in BETEVÉ Apr-Jun 2024

This second timester goes from April 4th to May 30th, 2024, with possible updates in the month of June.

Programme

Thursday 4th of April at 22.30h

Malaysia

Maryam, a 50-year-old gallery owner from an aristocratic family, seeks blessings from her father to marry her young foreigner boyfriend from Sierra Leone, while at the same time she needs to overcome challenges from Sharia bureaucracy, which determines her ability to choose a spouse.

Writer and independent filmmaker Badrul Hisham Ismail studied at The New School in New York, where he shot his short film A Tale of a Mannequin (2014) with the help of a Kickstarter campaign. He directed his first feature-length documentary Voyage to Terengganu (2016) together with Amir Muhammad, also from Malaysia. Ismail’s films often explore themes that question the normality of everyday life. His films have been shown at Freedom Film Fest, IFFR, Malaysian Shorts and Thai Short Film & Video Festival, among others. He is also a regular writer at The Star and co-founder and content editor at the Malay-language print journal Svara. He is based in Kuala Lumpur.

Thursday 11th of April at 22.30h

The Philippines

Amir, a 17-year-old Moro child soldier whose father was killed in an all-out war in 2000, dreams to live a different life – he wants to become a baseball player. Training extensively with his coach, he makes it to the final tryout of a local university. Unfortunately, another all-out war against Moro rebels breaks out in 2003, and he is confronted with making a choice between pursuing his dream or fighting in the war.

Carlo Obispo took up Bachelor of Philosophy minor in Arts Communication at Saint Louis University. His feature debut Purok 7 (2013) formed part of the 2013 Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival Newbreed Category. His second feature, Gasping for Air (2016), was the opening film in Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival 2016. In 2020, he wrote and directed a Boy Love series called Better Days.

Thursday 18th of April at 22.30h

China

It is the first LGBTQIA+ film to receive authorization for release in China. The story begins with the first meeting of the protagonists and their subsequent secret relationship. Zhao Jie and Rohmer decide to travel together to Tibet, and along the way, they are involved in an incident that results in the death of a child. Although they are not responsible for what happened, they feel guilty to the point that they cannot stop arguing about it and eventually separate. However, when Zhao Jie discovers that Rohmer has had an accident on a glacier, he sets out to find his friend with the intention of helping him and preventing him from suffering the same fate as the child they could not save.

After graduating from university, Wang Chao worked for five years in the steel industry, although he was always interested in films and literature. In 1991, joined the Beijing Film Academy where he graduated in 1994 and began working as a film critic. This is how he met Chen Kaige after filming Tierra Amarilla, and he hired him as assistant director between 1995 and 1998 for the filming of Adiós a mi concubina and El Emperador y el Asesino. During this time, he wrote several short stories, which inspired scripts for a few films. With Orphan of Anyang, a film he shot without authorisation, he made his directorial debut. This film was selected in 2001, to participate in the Directors’ Fortnight Section of the Cannes Film Festival. In 2004, he made his second film Day and Night and with Luxury Car in 2006 he completed the trilogy about China that he had been working on for more than five years. His fourth and fifth films, Memory of Love (2009) and Fantasy (2014), which was presented in the Un Certain Regard selection at the Cannes Film Festival that same year, despite its discretion, shows narrative maturity on its director’s part. Looking for Rohmer (2018), shows the interest of Wang Chao for the critic and filmmaker Eric Rohmer and the Nouvelle Vague, up to the point of making a film about him, although not necessarily biographic. A Woman (2022), until now his latest film was shown in the last edition of the Asian Film Festival Barcelona | AFFBCN with great public success, after its screening in San Sebastian, where it was nominated for the Golden Shell.

Thursday 25th of April at 22.30h

China

Based on the autobiographical novel “Dream”, written by Zhang Xiu Zhen, the protagonist of this film works in a factory and spends her free time with her family, but whenever she can, she tries to write. The story takes place during the Cultural Revolution, between the 60s and early 80s of the 20th centuries. Curiously, in her personal and family life, she is the object of daily abuse by her partner, whom she supports and with whom she has already had more children than they could have. However, she ends up overcoming these circumstances through writing, which becomes her liberation.

Thursday 2nd of May at 22.30h

Nepal

Radha, a young pregnant woman from a village in Nepal, is married to Basudev, who’s gone missing. To calm her mother-in-law’s anxieties, Radha hires a caricature artist, Sundar, to talk to them in Basudev’s voice. After her mother-in-law dies, Radha receives a letter claiming that Basudev has been found, and she teams up with Sundar and travels to Kathmandu to find him, but discovers instead an intriguing web of lies, deceit and fraud behind his disappearance and of many others.

Subarna Thapa is a Nepali filmmaker based in France for 17 years. He graduated in dramatic arts in Paris and took a film initiation course in La Femis in Paris. Thapa was funded by CNC-France for his first short film, Malamee (Funeral) in 2008. Soongava (Dance of the Orchids, 2012) was his first feature length and the first film in Nepal’s cinema history to tackle the theme of a same-sex relationship.

Thursday 9th of May at 22.30h

Indonesia

Orpa, 16, is a bookish Papuan girl whose father expects her to marry a wealthy man from Jayapura. Reluctant to accept her fate as a submissive housewife, she decides to run away one night to continue her education in Wamena, where she wants to learn more about the medicinal properties of Papuan plants. On her journey, she meets Ryan, a 28-year-old wannabe musician. As they travel and share their perspectives on life, a gentle friendship spark between them. Their journey is fraught with difficulty, as they are chased by both Orpa’s father and the villagers, who accuse Ryan of murder.

Theo Rumansara was born on 1989 in Biak, Papua. He never took art seriously until he won a film competition in his high school back in 2004, what made him transition from IT programmer to a musician-filmmaker and never looked back. In 2020 he won Jendela Papua, a talent scouting & filmmaking lab program which finally brought him closer to his chance to direct his first film Orpa, which won the Best Performance Award at the Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival in 2022.

Thursday 16th of May at 22.30h

Uzbekistan

Man has always aspired to greatness. He gives up the joys and worries of life on the path to greatness, devotes his life to making a new discovery or a great example of creation and to being known to the world. A young mathematician, Bahadyr begins working on his own on a hypothesis laid out by mathematician Henri Puankare in 1904. The investigation consists of solving one of the seven problems that have been unresolved for many years and for which the Clay Mathematical Institute intends to award the Millennium Prize to whoever solves it first. But time passes, and progress on the Puankare conjecture still lies on the table of a now elderly mathematician, who was left at the starting point of the issue.

Muzaffarkhan Erkinov was born in 1983. He has worked on many TV series, documentaries and short films. From his trajectory in cinematography, we emphasize such films as Armon, Iqtidar, Yagonam, Kasas, Avlony, Poincare and Aydinlar. He has received national awards such as the Tasanno and the Ehtirom, and he obtained a prize at the International Film Festival for Creative Flight, and another at the Eurasian Film and TV Festival for Slavic Tale.

Thursday 23rd of May at 22.30h

Pakistan

Madaari, a gripping story of revenge and justice, is set in the political turmoil of Karachi of 2008. Haris Qadeer hasn’t had an easy life since his father was murdered in a political riff. The cutthroat city doesn’t help him financially or emotionally. The only luck he gets is at his father’s killer’s office. What would he choose? Revenge or a better life?

Seraj Us Salikin is a budding filmmaker from Pakistan who premiered his film Masters of the Sky at the Cannes Film Festival even before earning his degree. He has won awards at numerous national film festivals. Maadari is his last project.

Thursday 30th of May at 22.30h

India

During a pandemic-stricken Noida, a struggling Malayali couple, consisting of Hareesh and Reshmi, harbor dreams of breaking with their challenging life by migrating abroad. Both work in a glove factory, yearning for a better future. They record a video showcasing Reshmi’s skills, hoping to use it to secure employment opportunities overseas. However, their lives take a devastating turn when Hareesh receives a disturbing video via WhatsApp. It appears to be Reshmi’s original video, merged with explicit footage involving another woman engaged in a sexual act. This video unleashes unexpected emotional, social and marital imbalances that put their relationship at risk.

Mahesh Narayanan born in 1975 in Kerala, is a filmmaker and editor known for his work in the Malayalam film industry. He started his career in the film industry as an editor. He worked as an editor on numerous films and gained recognition for his editing skills. He made his directorial debut with Take Off (2017), a film based on the evacuation of Indian nurses from Iraq during the ISIS insurgency. His film C U Soon (2020) gained attention for its unique screen recording format and storytelling. Narayanan has also worked as an editor on several Malayalam films and continues to be a notable figure in the industry.

Thursday 6th of June at 22.30h

Kazakhstan

The Kazakh village Karatas has been living for a long time under the threat of a criminal boss called Poshaev. He provides housing and jobs for the locals but will ruthlessly execute anyone who dares to oppose him. This is the lesson Arzu learns first-hand. His wife Karina is murdered after giving the police information of the crimes that are taking place there. Arzu is a cripple and now he has to raise his little daughter alone. He feels so helpless and grief-stricken that he doesn’t even seem to be contemplating revenge. Poshaev takes him under his wing and offers him a job as a guard at a construction site. Arzu has the chance to prove his loyalty, and he becomes Poshaev’s right hand. But where do Arzu’s real loyalties lie – with his boss or with the idea of justice?

Adilkhan Yerzhanov, a film director and scriptwriter, was born in Djezkazgan city, Kazakhstan, in 1982. In 2009 he graduated from the Kazakh National Academy of Arts, as a film director. Yerzhanov is a two-time participant of the Cannes Film Festival: in 2014 with The Owners and in 2018 with The Gentle Indifference of the World. He is also a two-time participant of the Venice International Film festival, with Orizzonti and Yellow Cat in 2020 and with Orizzonti Extra and Goliath in 2022.

Thursday 13th of June at 22.30h

Mongolia

Four very different lost souls meet and manage to spread the hope to continue living. In this director’s first film, the exterior landscape also occupies a place of preference as the mirror of the state of mind of the figures that inhabit it. Mongolia is a country that during the recent years has seen the development of an intimate cinema in contrast to an environment that never ceases to amaze.

Batzaya Gandush moved to Ulaanbaatar to study at the National University of Mongolia where he studied law. In the last year, he dropped out of school to enroll in the Mongolian National Film School with the great Mongolian film director Jigjidsuren. In 2019, Batzaya was diagnosed with leukemia, as a result he underwent through a bone marrow transplant and had to undergo chemotherapy for a year. Batzaya’s filmmaker friends, as soon as he overcame the disease convinced him to write the script for the film that is being presented.

Thursday 20th of June at 22.30h

China

It narrates the story of the miner Liu who despite being very close to his master’s family, ends up sleeping with his wife. When he dies in the mine, hi is overcome by a sense of guilt and undertakes various actions to deal with it. Wang Chao’s realism is consistent with the narrator’s faithfulness to the memory of events that have shaped Chinese history.

Thursday 27th of June at 22.30h

Vietnam

Saigon, 1980s. Linh Phung is the star of an itinerant cai luong company (traditional folk opera) and is heavily indebted to a lender called Dung, Thunderbolt. Despite apparently having nothing in common, the two engage in a video game relationship and discover that they have similar minds and multiple binding points. Linh Phung knows that a well-lived life is required to develop his art and Dung yearns for art to be able to live a life worthy of being lived. The story, rooted in fatalism and fatality, is inspired by the classical narrative structure of Vietnamese opera. The film was presented at the Göteborg Film Festival 2019, the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival 2018 and the Hawaii International Film Festival 2018, and won the Tokyo Gemstone Award at the Tokyo International Film Festival 2018.

Born and raised in Saigon, Leon Le is a dancer, singer and actor who moved to the United States as a teenager. “Song Lang”, his first feature film, is considered a very mature work, resulting from his personal experience committed to his vocation, tying together his sensitivity as a photographer and actor.

ORIENT EXPRESS

CASA ASIA in BETEVÉ Apr-Jun 2024

This second timester goes from April 4th to May 30th, 2024, with possible updates in the month of June.

Programme

ORIENT EXPRESS 

 CASA ASIA in BETEVÉ Apr-Jun 2024