Vancouver's Asian film fest celebrates 10 years

(CBC) - The Vancouver Asian Film Festival is celebrating its 10th anniversary with a showcase of 40 films and documentaries, primarily from North American directors, and a special presentation by Canadian director Mina Shum.

The five-day festival began Wednesday.

Shum, whose 1994 feature film Double Happiness starring Sandra Oh received rave reviews, will host a special talk about how she writes her screenplays.

Movies being shown at the festival offer a vast array of genres from comedies to short films to animation.

Films of note include Ham Tran’s feature debut, Journey From The Fall, a Canadian premiere, which chronicles one family’s plight after the fall of Saigon.

Other foreign films include The Shopaholics, by Hong Kong director Wai Ka-Fai, about love and obsession; and Japan’s Shosuke Murakami’s Train Man: Densha Otoko, based on a comic about a geek who falls in love.

The majority of films were either produced in North America or directed by someone from North America.

Mighty Warriors of Comedy, a documentary that follows an Asian-American sketch-comedy troupe’s move to Los Angeles from San Francisco, will be presented along with a live performance by Vancouver’s own Pan-Asian comedy group, Assaulted Fish.

The festival will also be screening Red Doors by first-time director Georgia Lee, who apprenticed under Martin Scorsese on Gangs of New York. The movie follows a man who is planning to run away from his dysfunctional life and family.

Red Doors captured the Best Narrative Feature Award at the 2005 Tribeca Film Festival in New York City.

In the documentary section, director Karin Lee explores what it’s like to grow up in Canada with a Communist father in Comrade Dad, while Xiaoli Zhou examines a free-love tribal society in China dominated by women in The Women’s Kingdom.

Other Canadian offerings include the NFB animation piece Asthma Tech from Jonathan Ng; Vancouverite John Penhall’s Inconvenience - a cautionary tale concerning grocery store clerks and lottery tickets; and the closing night feature, Ang Pamana - The Inheritance by director Romeo Candido.

Ang Pamana centres on a Filipino-Canadian teen and his sister who voyage to the Philippines following the death of their grandmother. It’s described as a “suspenseful tale drawn from Filipino folklore.”

Some of the screenings will be hosted by celebrity Asian performers, including Grace Park of the cult hit Battlestar Galactica, Steph Song who stars in the Douglas Coupland-penned Everything’s Gone Green and Rick Tae, who has starred in the television series Godiva’s and can currently be seen on CBC’s Intelligence.

© the CBC, 2006