ORIENT EXPRESS: CASA ASIA in BETEVÉ Jul-Sep 2024

Trimestes goes from July 4th to September 26th, 2024

PROGRAMME

Thursday 4th of July at 22.30h

Kyrgyzstan

An elderly childless couple with poor health live in a small village where barely anything ever happens when some unknown people leave a six-month-old baby at their front door. In the beginning, Initially, the old couple wants to hand over the child to the authorities, but having heard that young children could be being sold for trafficking with their organs, they decide to keep him. Caring for a baby turns the lives of older people in a completely different direction, and they end up finding a renewed interest.

Asel Zhuraeva graduated from the Kyrgyz State Institute of Arts in 2010. She also coursed in the Film school of RustamIbragimbekov (Kiev, Ukraine, 2013) and afterwards she started lecturing at AUCA (2017 to 2019). She is the director at the Tazar Cinema Company and the head of Creative Women of Asia Foundation since 2010.

Thursday 11th of July at 22.30h

Uzbekistan

The feature film Aydinlar narrates the history of the Aral Sea region, the past and present of the city of Muynak in particular. The protagonist of the film, Seyit, watches from a young age as the city of Muynak, where he was born and grows up, lies in ruins because of the drying up of the Aral Sea. Seyit is brought up by his grandfather Nurpeis, who tells him fairy tales about the sea, while he grows up alongside Kizlargul and Maman. But as soon as he is not a child anymore, he is forced to leave Muynak to have another fate.

Muzaffarkhan Erkinov was born on 1983. He has worked on many TV series, documentaries and short films. From his trajectory in cinematography, we emphasise films such as Armon, Iqtidar, Yagonam, Kasas, Avlony, Puankare and the one we present, Aydinlar, directed together with Muzaffar Qoraboyev. 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 18th of July at 22.30h

Sri Lanka

The film narrates the history of the alleged sexual assault committed by the poet Pablo Neruda when he was Honorary Consul of Chile in British colonial Ceylon, from 1929 a 1931. From the story that Neruda himself makes in I Confess that I have lived (1974), in the chapter “The Luminous Solitude”, in seven lines the reader finds out how he abuses a Tamil girl, who comes from the lowest castes of the Sakkilie, who are considered “untouchables”. It is about an innocent woman, who unknowingly participated in a strange story in which much remains to be known.

Asoka Handagama ( Sri Lanka, 1962) is considered one of the leaders of the third generation of Sri Lankan cinema. He studied Mathematics at Kelaniya University and he obtained his Masters in Development Economics from the University of Warwick in 1995. His films like This is My Moon (2000), Flying with One Wing (2002) explore new narrative forms. The Amiens International Film Festival paid tribute to him for his contribution to the development of independent cinema in Asia. He recognizes himself as an admirer of Pablo Neruda’s work, so reading that passage had a strong impact, leading him to create his own version of events.

Thursday 25th of July at 22.30h

South Korea

Su-jin is a successful lawyer. After her divorce, she leads a perfect life as a lawyer and mother. She is preparing her daughter, Gina, to study in the United States. Her father In-woo lives with them and takes care of his granddaughter. After a car accident, Su-jin is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. However, her father stays by her side to protect her, while she gradually resembles a little girl due to the progression of the disease.

Shin Youn-shick (Seoul, 1976), starting with A Great Actor (2005), became one of the regulars at the Busan International Film Festival. His fifth film, The Avian Kind, debuted at the Jeonju International Film Festival, where in 2015 he presented another successful film Like a French Film. His recent productions include Dongju: Portrait of a Poet, which he wrote and produced for filmmaker Lee Joon-ik.

Thursday 1st of August at 22.30h

Kazakhstan

Akzhol, who just got out of the orphanage, starts a new life. He is convinced that his father is alive and starts searching for him. However, after meeting his neighbour Dimash, things change as they realise how easy is to earn a living by robberies and burglaries. Later, during one of the meetings with a relative, he learns about the existence of his brother, Dalen, who was adopted by wealthy parents and had an education impossible to access in any other way. Together they embark on a mission to find their father and that will throw light on things that neither of them could have imagined.

Darkhan Tulegenov was born in 1993 in Uralsk. At the age of 15 he entered the Kazakh Academy of Transport and Communications, and in 2012 he was admitted to the Kazakh National Academy of Arts. He has been a participant of many national and international film festivals and Brothers received the Spirit of Cinema Award at the Oldenburg Film Festival in 2022. He is also known for his short films Nabat (2020), The Route (2016), and Sunrise.

Thursday 8th of August at 22.30h

Philippines

Pursued by the police, the bike thief Isaac, asks his boss for help but his boss is not willing to pay attention. The refusal makes him conceive of revenge against the previous one, but with this he will not be able to get out of the criminal network of the slums in which he finds himself trapped.

Brillante Mendoza (Philippines, 1960) is a director and producer. He is the first Filipino to receive the best director award at Cannes for his film Kinatay in 2009. He is also the only Filipino to have received the distinction of “Chevalier de la Orden de las Artes y las Letras” from France in 2014. He was more than forty years old when he directed his first film, Masahista, which won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival in 2005. His films have repeatedly received awards and nominations at the main festivals such as Venice, Berlin, Cannes, San Sebastián and Cairo.

Thursday 15th of August at 22.30h

China

A woman, He Sizhu, and her lover, Chen Mo, have a car accident in which she loses her memory. She is admitted to the hospital where her husband works as a surgeon, and when she wakes up, she doesn’t remember anything of the immediate past. Her lover has become a stranger, but he refuses to lose her even though the therapy she receives does not guarantee that she will regain her memory.

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 22th of August at 22.30h

Pakistan

Sheila is a Canadian teenager of Pakistani origin living in the suburbs. About to finish her first year of university and having fallen in love for the first time with her classmate Eden, Sheila longs for a freedom that her mother and father are unwilling to offer her. After Sheila has sex for the first time with Eden, he abruptly breaks up with her, and her sense of reality begins to crumble, thus, her reality begins to crumble which drastically alienates her from friends, family and community.

Haya Waseem is a Swiss-raised, Brooklyn-based Pakistani-Canadian filmmaker. She began her career as a documentary editor, which allowed her to shape stories and intimately interact with diverse narratives. Haya carried those principles of honesty and perspective into her creative work as a director. Her short films have been screened at prestigious festivals such as Toronto, Cannes, and Berlin.

Thursday 29th of August at 22.30h

Japan

Ai wants to be an actress. Despite her failures she keeps trying to be what she is pursuing. One night she meets Hashimoto, a mysterious man. Ai goes to Hashimoto’s house and they have sex. One day she finds a pornographic video whose characters look exactly like her and her partner. Ai goes to Hashimoto’s home and finds out that the house was an Airbnb and Hashimoto is no longer there. The sex tape is still uploaded, and in spite of not knowing if the participants in the video are, they. She starts to lose the control of her life.

Daisuke Miyazaki is graduated at Waseda university and has participated at the Summer New York university. He started his career as a director assistant of directors such as Kiyoshi Kurosawa. His first movie arrived in 2011 named End of the night.

Thursday 5th of September 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 12th of September at 22.30h

India

Belonging to an isolated fishing community of the Loktak lake, Chaoren makes the best use of his exclusive existence by excelling in school. When the canoe he uses every day to attend school must be sold off because of his father’s illness, his spirit is not dampened. He beats the long distance from his shanty floating hut to his school by swimming his way through. But when the Government issues an eviction notice demanding Chaoren’s family to leave their home, his dreams are left with the angst of a displaced person.

Romi Meitei is prolific filmmaker who has given several box-office hits. Besides notching up commercial successes, his films have been screened in prestigious film festivals including IFFI, MIFF, IFFK and others. He has won the prestigious FIPRESCI (International Film Critics Awards) and NETPAC (best Asian feature film from the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema) awards. He has also received several Manipur State Film Awards. He is the Chairman of Mami Thawan Foundation which aims to render services for the welfare of Manipur. His feature film, Our Home, won Best Film at the National Film Awards in India.

Thursday 19th of September at 22.30h

Bangladesh

After marrying Putul and bringing her home, Fazlu finds his wife amidst loneliness therefore he brings in a third member- a cow. With this newfound companion, Putul starts to settle in her new place. However, Teesta River’s dams caused the lower region to be affected by drought, this brings struggle in the lives of farmers like Fazlu. The dams gatekeep all the water until the overflow in monsoon. As a result, they open the gates causing floods, bringing misery to the livelihood of everyone inhabiting the lower region. Due to such hostile behaviour of the river, Fazlu’s family is no longer content.

Khandaker Sumon is a filmmaker from Bangladesh. He was born on 2nd February 1982 in Gaibandha district. To produce dramas and films, he has been running a production house called “Idea Exchange” for a long time. Some promotional films for social awareness have been made by this organisation. To become a filmmaker, he completed a course at the Bangladesh Film Institute (BFI). Saatao (2022) is his debut feature film.

Thursday 26th of Septemberat 22.30h

South Korea

Yoo-ri, a seemingly model student from a well-to do family suddenly commits suicide. Detectives suspect suicide, but her mother Hye-young believes that Yoo-ri’s classmate Ye-na and homeroom teacher Gi-beom were the killers. As the investigation dives into the lives of these people, it spirals out of control due to conflicting statements between the three, but detectives find out that Hye-young caused cracks in Yoo-ri’s heart. Deeply believing that she was doing everything possible for her child out of love, can Hye-young uncover the truth behind her daughter’s death?

Kim Su-in is a South Korean screenwriter. She graduated from Dankook University’s Department of Creative Writing, and completed her major in the Department of Film at Chung-Ang University’s Graduate School. She wrote adaptations and screenplays for several feature films, including the adaptation of Oksu Station Ghost (2021) and the screenplay of B Cut (2021). Toxic Parents is her first feature film.