“3 Faces”
By Andrew Hamlin
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
“3 Faces”
Iranian director Jafar Panahi, widely praised by cineasts as one of the world’s great working directors, has grown steadily more bold since his country’s government banned him from filmmaking in 2010. Since the gavel came down, he’s made films in and around his own apartment, at his own beach house, as a taxi driver crossing Tehran. And in his new film, he is traveling outside Tehran to some remarkably desolate spots near the border with Turkey. He walks a real-life razor’s edge, knowing that his government can lock him up where he’ll never be found, and on a moment’s notice. His fame, so far, keeps the wolves at bay.
Remarkably, the man hasn’t lost his sympathy for others in peril, most notably women, whose plight under Iranian rule made for Panahi subject matter even before his legal troubles. This new film involves a strange, disturbing video made by a young lady out in the boonies — a video that climaxes with her apparent death. The director, along with Behnaz Jafari, a famous Iranian actress, journey to the village where the video came from, to find out what’s going on.
Not to give much away, but the unlikely couple run into language barriers, cultural barriers, suspicion, paranoia, and the sad but powerful truth that rural areas tend, the world over, to be more traditional and conservative than their urban counterparts. Jafari and Panahi sometimes can’t agree on what’s really going on, and they often quarrel over how to proceed through what they know, or what they think they know.
This is all presented as fiction, but the two adult leads pretty much play themselves. And fiction or not, the clear and present problems for women, and for independent thinkers, can hardly escape the viewer. Panahi seems taciturn, sometimes frustrated, but always very human. I can think of few better advocates for humanity in civilization, politics be damned.
May 18 — Lincoln Square, Bellevue, 6 p.m.
May 19 — SIFF Cinema Uptown, 6:30 p.m.
“Legend of the Stardust Brothers”
“Legend of the Stardust Brothers”
By Andrew Hamlin
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
What to do if you’re starting off your creative career in the shadow of one of Japan’s most famous men, namely Osamu Tezuka, the creator of “Astro Boy,” “Kimba the White Lion,” and many other classic manga and anime franchises?
Well, if you’re Makoto Tezuka, son of Osamu, you start out making friends with a semi-famous weirdo named Haruo Chicada, who has several songs, in several styles, written and assembled for a movie soundtrack — but no actual movie to go with it. Then you resolve to make a film to match the songs.
This was back in 1985. Neither of the two had ever made a feature film before, but they found some money (with some help from the Tekuza family name), and plunged right in, rounding up their fellow musicians and artists to fill out the cast. Visual/conceptual influences included two still-fairly-new Western films, Jim Sharman’s cult classic “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and Brian DePalma’s “Phantom of the Paradise,” but the “Stardust” honchos mashed up the past, the present, and the wacky, to deliver a world very much of their own making.
We start out with the Stardust Brothers themselves, in silver-lame suits reminiscent of Elvis, trying, and failing, to win over a stiff-backed audience filmed in black-and-white.
Through flashbacks, we get the Brothers’ story, which by itself makes for fairly standard rock pic narrative — poverty and obscurity, the big break, fame, crash-and-burn to ruin, then redemption.
Except the whole film merrily thumbs its nose at these expectations. The Brothers actually crash and burn about a third of the way through the whole thing. It doesn’t matter much because the enthusiastic overkill of both the visual and the musical, where you can’t tell what will happen next, just keeps on gushing. It’s funny, rude, occasionally obscene, surrealistic, and even, in parts, melancholic. When the credits do roll, you’ll be lost out in the space between stars. But you’ll know you saw something special, by gum.
May 31 — SIFF Cinema Egyptian, midnight
June 2 — SIFF Cinema Egyptian, 9 p.m.
“Ghost Fleet”
“Ghost Fleet”
By Andrew Hamlin
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
Drugged. Beaten. Forced into round-the-clock labor. Denied any contact with family, friends, or even home country. Worked until practically dead, or sometimes actually dead. No hope for happiness.
If this sounds like slavery, it is. And what will shock most Americans — it’s going on right this very minute, has been going on for decades, and probably reflects on something you ate recently. The documentary “Ghost Fleet,” co-directed by Shannon Service and Jeffrey Waldron, exposes the systematic slavery endemic to the Thai fishing industry.
To keep the fish flowing into the nets, the boats venture into deep water and stay there for weeks, or months, possibly even years. Their catches get offloaded into a larger vessel — the enslaved fishermen call that the “mothership” — and the mothership takes the fish to land. The workers on the smaller ships can’t escape, usually, because their boats never come anywhere close to land.
It’s all horrible, practically unthinkable, and almost invisible to Westerners. But a short, sweet, and incredibly pugnacious Thai woman named Patima Tungpuchayakul has a plan to bring it down. She runs an organization to help these men. She doesn’t have much money, or much influence, not yet anyway. But she has her husband working alongside her. She has her small son rooting for her. She has a few folks, with cameras and microphones, willing to go alongside her wherever the journey takes them, no matter how harrowing or menacing.
And she has the men. Every so often, one will escape, when a boat makes a rare venture into shallow water near land. Many of them are sick from being forcibly drugged while forced to work. Some of them bear scars where fingers or limbs used to be. And some have settled down into wherever they got free from their captors — often, though not always, Indonesia. Their desire to go home becomes tempered by the wives and children they would have to leave behind.
Patima Tungpuchayakul weathers all of this. She describes how she grew sick and almost died, and how that helped her become fearless. It’s hard not to cry or at least falter in the face of this stuff. But she keeps her head up, asks questions, and insists on answers. She challenges everyone else to do the same.
(Director Shannon Service and subjects Patima Tungpuchayakul and Tun Lin are scheduled to attend the first screening).
June 2 — SIFF Cinema Uptown, 6 p.m.
June 3 — AMC Pacific Place, 4:30 p.m.
“House of My Fathers”
“House of My Fathers”
By Vivian Nguyen
Northwest Asian Weekly
The 45th Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF), running from May 16–June 9, features films from 86 countries including Sri Lanka. “House of My Fathers,” the first feature-length film from Sri Lankan director Suba Sivakumaran, is a tale of two rival villages — one Tamil, one Sinhalese. An infertility curse forces both villages to join forces, and sees three characters head into a mysterious forest to find a solution that will lift the curse.
Set against the backdrop of Sri Lanka post-civil war, this film is as political as it is surreal, and its magical realism storytelling allows it to explore the grey space between the country’s past and its present. Although the editing makes this film hard to follow at times, this story is ultimately an allegory about the consequences of war, and how one can never fully escape its baggage.
May 18 — Lincoln Square, Bellevue
May 21 — SIFF Cinema Uptown
June 7 — AMC Pacific Place
“Le Chocolat de H”
“Le Chocolat de H”
By Vivian Nguyen
Northwest Asian Weekly
If you’re looking for a film to tantalize the taste buds, “Le Chocolat de H” will whet your appetite. The Japanese documentary, which follows renowned artisan chocolatier Hironobu Tsujiguchi, is a love story between chocolate and the foundations of Japanese cuisine — salt, miso, mirin, and rice flour. Referred to as the “Salvador Dali of chocolate,” Tsujiguchi honors his heritage by showing how Japanese ingredients can produce the world’s most exceptional chocolate. (And it’s true — he’s already won several gold medals from the prestigious Salon du Chocolat competition by the film’s start.) His talent is equal parts skill as it is an art expression, with Tsujiguchi using his sweets to share his life story, demonstrated through cute re-enactments throughout the film. From Japan to France and Ecuador, this documentary, much like Tsujiguchi’s chocolate, is a true confection of east meets west. “Le Chocolat de H” is Japanese director Takashi Watanabe’s feature debut, and SIFF marks the film’s premiere in North America.
Watanabe, Tsujiguchi, and additional producers will attend both SIFF showings this coming weekend.
May 17 — AMC Pacific Place
May 18 — SIFF Cinema Uptown
June 1 — Kirkland Performance Center
For more information, visit siff.net.
Andrew and Vivian can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com.