Burmese punks, Jakarta towel girls and Uzbek cowboys

Daniel Nelson

Kings of the Wind & Electric Queens

Image by Kings of the Wind & Electric Queens

“New” is the word. This year’s festival is billed as “a reflection on “new talents, new styles, new landscapes and new modes of film production from and about the Asia Pacific region”.

It’s tricky finding a niche for the event because London has several other Asia and South Asian film festivals, as well as festivals focussing on cinema from specific countries, such as China and Korea. One of them, ‘Tongues on Fire, the London Asian Film Festival’, overlaps with the Asia House event this month.

Tongues on Fire is mainly South Asian – indeed, predominantly Indian – in content, and Sharp points out this his programme has films from Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam, Indonesian, India, Japan and Uzbekistan, “with a special focus and retrospective on Mongolia.”

Retrospective? That doesn’t sound new. One of the films, Before Rising Up The Rank, is a Silk Road movie from 1965, and it will be screened at the little known Cinema Museum in South London. Museum? That doesn’t sound “new” either.

But even the Mongolian content has a new twist. Passion is partly about the career of Jigjid Dejid, an important figure in Mongolian cinema in the Communist era, but it’s really about a journey across the steppes by Jigjid’s son, Binder, to promote his own new micro-budget feature.

Another film about film is The Last Reel, sparked by a young woman’s chance discovery of a derelict cinema holding an incomplete print of a 1970s melodrama from Cambodian cinema’s glamorous pre-Khmer Rouge golden age, starring her now ailing mother: “Helped by the cinema’s elderly projectionist, she tries to recreate the missing final reel, adopting the central role in an attempt to heal the psychological scars still haunting her mother. The premiere, some 40 years after the initial shoot, unearths family secrets and multiple readings of a bloody and tragic past buried beneath the killing fields.”

Sharp had intended to give Cambodia’s once-thriving cinema industry a bigger role in the festival, but was thwarted because so many of the directors and films were killed and destroyed in the genocide.

Reflection on changes in society are also picked up in two films set in Jakarta. In the Absence of the Sun follows three women in a single night in contemporary Jakarta: 32-year-old Gia returning home from New York to find a culture that has changed beyond all recognition and a soulmate who is no longer the person she once was; 24-year-old Indri, a ‘towel girl’ at a local gym, who seeks out her Prince Charming through internet dating; and the recently widowed Mrs Surya who goes on a journey of self-discovery after learning of her deceased husband’s affair.

The second, Jalanan (Streetside), provides a pavement-eye-view of Jakarta through three bus buskers. Films like this give insights to Jakarta life (and the life of other Asian cities) that few NGO officials, international officials or backpackers will ever see.

Similarly, Yangon Calling – Punk in Myanmar, a secretly-filmed documentary, “provides a rare portrait of the rebels who really do have a cause as they stand up against … an authoritarian regime, introducing us to their homes, their friends, their families, and their hidden world of rehearsal rooms and illicit concerts.”

“It’s the young generation calling,” says Sharp, who points out that new releases make up over half the festival. It boasts three European premieres, eight UK premieres and three London premieres.

Even more up-to-date is NUOC 2030, set in a not-too-distant future Vietnam where climate change has resulted in the submersion of over half the country’s farmland, leaving a population reliant on fishing from houseboats and floating farms owned by competing multinationals.

The festival also has some hard-to categorise films – like Kings of the Wind & Electric Queen: Roll up for the ride of a lifetime - The Sonepur in India’s Bihar state is the largest animal market in Asia and the site of a massive carnival, featuring spectacular displays of horsemanship, daredevil motorcycle stunts, voluptuous dancers and pounding music;  The Seventh Bullet, a “Red Western” from Uzbekistan; and Flashback memories 3D, a portrait of a Japanese didgeridoo maestro who suffers from an inability to form new memories following a traffic accident.

·         The Asia House Film Festival runs from 27 March to 31 March has screenings at the Ham Yard Theatre in Soho for the Opening Gala Night screening, as well as Rich Mix in Shoreditch, The Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury and the Cinema Museum  in Kennington. Info: 7307 5454/ enquiries@asiahouse.co.uk

·         Cinema Museum, 2 Dugard Way (off Renfrew Road), London SE11 4^TH. Info: 7840 2200/ http://www.cinemamuseum.org.uk/