The Asian Filmasia Festival begins in Prague. This year’s theme is Taiwanese film
The event will run at the Lucerna and Ponrepo cinemas until 7 December. The audience will be introduced to both current popular films and festival legends as well as forgotten classics from the 1960s.
The screening will accompany the introductions of film professionals, historians and critics. Chris Berry, a film historian at King’s College London, will present two films in the Lost Treasures section on December 3 at the Ponrepo Cinema. It serves to commemorate the forgotten wave of popular Taiwanese films of the 1960s and 1970s. The festival will offer two of them in a new, digitized form thanks to the cooperation with the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute. It is a Hitchcock story The husband’s secret from 1960 and a representative of the dynamic stream of films for the young viewer The Foolish Bride, the Naive Groom (1967).
The backbone of this year’s show will be a retrospective called Masters of Taiwanese Film, which will introduce five important authors. Classics of art film will be represented, such as Chai Ming-liang with the novelty Days, Edward Jang with Raz dva or Chou Xiao-sien with the forgotten romantic comedy Green Grass on the River Bank. There will also be cult films such as Tiger and Dragon or the historical melodrama of this year’s godfather of the Taiwanese film Li Sing, Autumn Execution. The section will be screened at the Ponrepo cinema.
The festival will follow the legends with beginning talents. On December 6, a series of student films by young Taiwanese filmmakers studying in the Czech Republic will be screened in the small hall of the Lucerna cinema. Equally important will be the final section – Women of Taiwanese Film, compiled by producer Peggy Jia. It features a full-length experimental romance Listen, a nostalgic story In My Young Years and a short documentary essay I-lan, The Taste of Home. All films will be available in the small hall of Lucerna on December 7.
The festival is organized by Axman Production with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and the Ministry of Culture of Taiwan. The complete program is located at pages festival.