Geographies of thought

The eleventh edition of the Asian Film Festival Barcelona | AFFBCN wants to keep contributing to the peak of Asian cinema, not only at international film festivals but also in the screens of our country. When we refer to Asian cinema, we are thinking about the cinematic industries of more than twenty countries that consider the cinematic culture an expression of a global and local event. Through these countries’ cinema we can tackle both close and remote geographies that help us understand the world that we live in. This year’s program is the result of a selection of about a hundred titles from the more than five hundred that we were able to consult, which we owe to this year’s predecessor festivals such as Berlin, Rotterdam, Cannes, Locarno, the Far East Film Festival, Venice, and the San Sebastián International Film Festival. All the same, we also had the contribution of festivals such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, Busan, Jeonju, Kolkata (Calcutta), Goa, Kerala, Singapore, Melbourne y Sydney, Oakland y Manila. Festivals announce and anticipate what can later be seen on the big screen, even though many movies that are presented end up being left out of the commercial circuit. 

One of the objectives of the festival is to explore the everyday and domestic life of this stranger or outsider that we can someday be, being part of a collective history alongside with the feeling of belonging in a territory or being excluded from it, just as cinema shows us. Stimulating the interest in discovery and knowledge obviously matches our intention of delivering to our audience some images of collective life or of the lives of the individuals that belong to a specific community. This is why we aim for our schedule to be more inclusive rather than having more titles each year, so we can not only show those authors that do not go unnoticed because of their supporters, but also the ones that are less known or whose referents compel to enquire into their contextualization and proposals. We also want to give a space for new directors to present their first full-length movie at the festival, and for them to find here a platform to spread what they do outside their country. 

The AFFBCN comprises a broad geographic extension, from Iran, Central Asia, a region that comprises the Ex-Soviet Republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, to Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka; Southeast Asia with China, Korea, Japan, Thailand, Singapore, Malasia, Cambodia, and Vietnam; and Asia-Pacific with Australia y New Zealand. The cinema from these countries that is mentioned and that is particularly interesting for us is the one that affects us with the information that it transmits, the one that makes us empathise with the images we see, the one that somehow kidnaps us and introduces us into the screen, making geographic distances disappear and bringing us closer to worlds that could end up being more real than our own. 

The festival arrives this fall with a schedule that aims to be as representative as possible of the recent experimental and independent cinema coming from the Asian continent without excluding productions that answer both to the interest of the audiences aware of the corresponding cinematography, and to the ones who wish to start out in a not so new cinema, which diversity preferentially answers the different narratives that it exposes. The exoticism that has been attributed to these productions in the West has been replaced by the attraction that they exert by culturally constructing an identity that wants to be inseparable from the territorial belonging. 

The schedule of the present edition of the AFFBCN will consist of a hundred films that are grouped in the five sections, Official, Official Panorama, Discoveries, NETPAC and Special, all to competition, in which the different selected titles are strategically distributed. The correspondent juries are formed by designated members, directors, film critics, and writers that agree to fulfil this function. This year we will also rely on the participation of directors that are a part of the younger filmmaker generations of their origin countries, and who will present their first full-length movie, very often released after producing various short films. As in previous editions, we want to put the emphasis in the history, the conflict, and the drama, because we consider that those are the most appropriate genres for the proposal we want to do, with the purpose of bringing positions and realities closer to contribute to the understanding between individuals, whatever place they inhabit. 

The big retrospective of the Chinese filmmaker Wang Chao with his career’s more relevant seven movies, is what closes the schedule. They start with Orphan of Anyang in 2001 and ends with A Woman in 2022. This independent and experimental producer will also present Day and Night (2004), Luxury Car (2006), Memory of Love (2009), Fantasy (2014) and Locking for Rohmer (2018). Wang Chao graduated in the Pekin Film Academy in 1994 and he began in the world of cinema as a critic, until he met the renowned filmmaker Chen Kaige, who hired him as assistant director and with who he worked between 1995 and 1998 in the filming of Farewell My Concubine and The Emperor and the Assassin. During these years he wrote various stories that inspired certain scripts for some movies. His first feature film Orphan of Anyang took part in the Director’s Fortnight of Cannes in 2001. This retrospective will be presented by Wang Chao in the Filmoteca de Catalunya, where the first three titles previously mentioned will be projected. 

This year the festival inauguration will be celebrated with the projection of Yantzi´s Confusion (2023), the first feature film of the young Chinese filmmaker Li Jue, who will come to Barcelona for the presentation of her movie, that will be at the same time its premiere in Europe. In turn, the closing ceremony of the festival, which will take place on November 4th, a day before the conclusion of the November 5th programmed projections, will feature the Australian film The Royal Hotel, which is the second full-length film of the Australian filmmaker Kitty Green. The cinematic culture is culture in general, and we want to insist on the spreading of a cinema we value because of its closeness and for introducing us into worlds that we would never know if it was not for it, as literature also manages to do. 

By Menene Gras Balaguer
Director of Asian Film Festival Barcelona