Across Asia
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Stonewalling
Directed by Ji Huang, Ryûji Otsuka • Drama • With Honggui Yao • 2022 • 148 minutes
20 year-old Lynn is told she needs English classes, flight attendant school, and a go getter-attitude. She perseveres along this path of upward mobility until she finds out she’s pregnant. Indecisive and running o...
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Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East?
Directed by Yong-Kyun Bae • Drama • With Yvonne Williams, Homer Nish, Tom Reynolds • 1989 • 137 minutes
The first ever feature-length film from South Korea to gain theatrical distribution in the USA, WHY HAS BODHI-DHARMA LEFT FOR THE EAST? has received acclaim from critics and audiences around t...
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Nikah
Directed by Bastien Ehouzan and Mukaddas Mijit • Drama • With Guzalnur Uchqun • 2022 • 56 minutes
Dilber is 27, and her mother wants to quickly find a husband for her — especially now that her younger sister Rena is settling into newly married life. But it’s 2017, a time when Uyghur people are b...
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Hanagatami (Nobuhiko Ōbayashi)
Directed by Nobuhiko Ōbayashi • Drama • With Shunsuke Kubozuka, Tokio Emoto • 2017 • 169 minutes
In 2016, Nobuhiko Obayashi, the director of the cult Japanese film HAUSU was diagnosed with lung cancer and given only a few months to live. Despite not much time left, for what was supposed to be hi...
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Maborosi (Hirokazu Kore-eda)
Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda • Drama • With Makiko Esumi, Tadanobu Asano • 1995 • 110 minutes
One of the finest films of Japanese cinema, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s first feature film Maborosi is a story of love, loss, and ultimately, regeneration.
Haunted by the mysterious loss of her grandmother m...
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Island in Between
Directed by S. Leo Chiang • Documentary • 2023 • 20 minutes
The rural Taiwanese outer islands of Kinmen sit merely 2 miles off the coast of China. Kinmen attracts tourists for its remains from the 1949 Chinese Civil War. It also marks the frontline for Taiwan in its escalating tension with Chin...
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Youth (Spring)
Directed by Wang Bing • Documentary • 2023 • 215 minutes
The town of Zhili, about 95 miles from Shanghai, is a center for the children’s garment industry. Workers in their teens and early twenties come from surrounding provinces to live in sparse, trash-strewn concrete dorms in the same building...
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Blue Island
Directed by CHAN Tze Woon • Documentary • 2022 • 98 minutes
BLUE ISLAND documents three people who engaged in rebellions when they were young. Through reconstructing these events, the film dramatizes their scarred memories and experiences by using four young people who participated in the 2019 A...
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Education and Nationalism
Directed by Hisayo Saika • Documentary • 2023 • 108 minutes
A group of uniformed Japanese schoolchildren make their way to class. But what they will be taught when they get there is a subject increasingly under government scrutiny.
EDUCATION AND NATIONALISM traces growing government interventio...
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A Light Never Goes Out
Directed by Anastasia Tsang • Drama • With Sylvia Chang, Simon Yam • 2023 • 103 minutes
Directed by Anastasia Tsang and starring the legendary Sylvia Chang, A LIGHT NEVER GOES OUT revolves around a woman attempting to reinvigorate the neon signs of Hong Kong after her husband's passing, while nu...
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Elegant Beast
Directed by Yuzo Kawashima • Drama • With Ayako Wakao, Eiji Funakoshi, Yûko Hamada • 1962 • 96 minutes
In their humble two-room apartment, the Maeda family seem ever so self-effacing - but their modest façade hides another truth. Daughter Tomoko is the mistress of a bestselling author with well-...
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The Story Of Hong Gil-Dong
Directed by Dong-heon Shin • Animation • 1967 • 67 minutes
South Korea's first ever animated feature, this epic adventure has been remastered and released for the first time ever in North America! The illegitimate son of a nobleman, banished from his family due to a fake prophecy, Hong Gil-dong ...
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Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue
Directed by Jia Zhang-Ke • Documentary • 2020 • 112 minutes
From master director Jia Zhang-Ke (Ash Is Purest White, A Touch of Sin) comes a vital document of Chinese society since 1949. Jia interviews three prominent authors—Jia Pingwa, Yu Hua, and Liang Hong—born in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, ...
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An Elephant Sitting Still (Hu Bo)
Directed by Hu Bo • Drama • With Yu Zhang, Yuchang Peng, Uvin Wang • 2018 • 230 minutes
Under the gloomy sky of a small town in northern China, different protagonists’ lives are intertwined in this furious tale of nihilistic rage. While protecting his friend from a dangerous school bully, 16-yea...
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Nobuhiko Obayashi's Anti-War Trilogy
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In the last decade of his long and prolific career, Nobuhiko Obayashi (1938-2020) —best-known in the U.S. as the filmmaker behind the cult hit House (1977)—wrote and directed a trio of deeply personal and formally audacious films that confronted Japan’s wartime past.
Made in the wake of the Grea...
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Visible Secret (Ann Hui)
Directed by Ann Hui • Drama • With Eason Chan, Shu Qi, Anthony Wong • 2001 • 101 minutes
Spirits lurk everywhere in Ann Hui's horror-comedy, Visible Secret. Instantly infatuated by enigmatic amnesiac June (Shu Qi, Millennium Mambo) who has the ability to see spirits, Peter is swept into a world ...
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The Search (Pema Tseden)
Directed by Pema Tseden • Drama • With Zong Zhi, Manla Jiepu, Dobe Dorje, Drolma Gyab, Lumo Tso • 2013 • 105 minutes
A director, his assistant, and a businessman drive through the Amdo region of Tibet, scouring small villages to find actors for their adaptation of the namthar of Drime Kunden, an...
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A New Old Play
Directed by QIU Jiongjiong • Drama • With Tao Gu, Yi Sicheng • 2022 • 180 minutes
Jiongjiong Qiu’s visually magnificent new film is a unique hybrid of fiction, historical reminiscence, and experimental theatre. Its overview of China from the 1930s to the 1980s is filtered through Qiu Yu, a Sichu...
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Mrs. B., A North Korean Woman
Directed by Jero Yun • Documentary • 2016 • 71 minutes
"There are five kinds of families that buy us," says Mrs. B over dinner and drinks with fellow North Korean exiles living in China. "The first type, either the father or the mother is missing and the son can't get married. Then there are the...
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Adela
Directed by Adolfo Alix, Jr. • Drama • With Anita Linda, Joem Bascon, Jason Abalos • 2008 • 90 minutes
It is Adela’s 80th birthday. A former radio personality, she lives on her own in the slums of Manila. Adela is surrounded by a sea of humanity and with it their problems, successes, and trivial...
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Though I Am Gone
Directed by Hu Jie • Documentary • 2007 • 68 minutes
Pioneering filmmaker Hu Jie uncovers the tragic story of a teacher beaten to death by her students during the Cultural Revolution.
In 1966, the Cultural Revolution exploded throughout China, as Mao's Red Guards persecuted suspected Rightists....