New York Asian Film Festival GIVEAWAY!!!!

June is a time when kids are let out for summer vacation and film fans can gorge on the latest genre films from Asia in the New York tri-state area. For those not already in the know the New York Asian Film Festival (NYAFF) has been held in the Big Apple since 2002. Starting off as a small local festival at small repertory theaters. NYAFF, through the help of Subway Cinema, has been steadily growing and now has become a festival that rivals even the more respected NYFF (New York Film Festival) in films screened and fan enthusiasm. Part film festival, carnivale and fan convention NYAFF has been the site that many directors have chosen to first premiere their films in North America. Not to mention the fact that the overworked staff at the NYAFF always deliver great guests like Hong Kong filmmaker Tsui Hark and actors like Choi Min-shik and Donnie Yen.

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Korean Box Office: World War Z Scares Up Huge Opening (06/21-06/23, 2013)

A blockbuster came in stronger than expected this weekend, lifting the box office to a powerful 2.35 million admissions over the frame, a 50% jump over last year. Meanwhile, the news was not so great on the domestic front, as the market share shot down from 64% to 23%, as new titles continue to flounder in the marketplace.

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Edinburgh 2013: Juvenile Offender (범죄소년, 2012)

Part of Connor McMorran's coverage for MKC of the Edinburgh International Film Festival (June 19-30, 2013).

As much as we may like to think society is for the most part a well-oiled machine, there are still far too many people who slip through the cracks. Abandoned, unable to change themselves or the situation they face, they seek to reintegrate into a society which has no desire to welcome them. For most of its life, and especially since the end of World War II, film has been used to highlight and discuss the daily problems faced by those who exist on the outside of society. From the Italian neo-realists and their pleas to humanity, through to the angry white males of British kitchen sink dramas reacting violently in protest to the systems of society, film is used to give these people a voice that would otherwise go unheard.

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Edinburgh 2013: National Security (남영동 1985, 2012)

Part of Connor McMorran's coverage for MKC of the Edinburgh International Film Festival (June 19-30, 2013).

Though 2012 was an important year in Korean cinema for many reasons, one of the more interesting ones is that it saw the return of director Chung Ji-young. 2012 was essentially bookended by his two films; Unbowed was released in January, and National Security arrived at the end of November. Both films featured highly political narratives based on real life events, yet National Security struggled to bring in anywhere near the same audience numbers as Unbowed.

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Edinburgh 2013: The Berlin File (베를린, 2013)

Part of Connor McMorran's coverage for MKC of the Edinburgh International Film Festival (June 19-30, 2013).

Writing in his book 'The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema', Kim Kyung Hyun discusses the male-centric narratives found in Korean cinema of the 1980s and 90s. Discussing the film Shiri (1999), he argues that “The masculinity of Shiri’s protagonist veered away from the Korean male icons of the 1980s, but it did so by simulating Hollywood action heroes.” Shiri could easily be argued as the breakthrough moment for both commercial Korean cinema and genre cinema in general, creating a wave of films which heavily copied its style. The mainstream Korean film industry has thrived off genre cinema for the past decade, with the occasional ‘well-made’ film (films which are both commercially successful and show clear artistic intent, a perfect example being Bong Joon-Ho’s Memories of Murder from 2003) thrown in for good measure.

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New Korean Films: Surgeon vs. Psychiatrist (2013 Week 25)

Doctor

(닥터)

The cosmetic surgeon Choi has a perfect life: he is one of the best in his profession, and married to the perfect woman. But everything changes when he catches her in the arms of another man while coming home earlier. He will put his talents to use as he prepares a long and cruel revenge.

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Edinburgh 2013: Virgin Forest (원시림, 2012)

Part of Connor McMorran's coverage for MKC of the Edinburgh International Film Festival (June 19-30, 2013).

Perhaps because of his long-term struggle with leukaemia, highly influential film theorist Andre Bazin based a lot of his ideas around the concept of death. More specifically, he argued that film could be seen as a way to embalm time, capture time and allow people to linger in the memories of others following their death, just as portraits, or embalming, had done in the past. As technology progresses at an astonishing rate, the moving image, and with it the photographic image, has become ever present in society, capturing almost anything and everything in our world.

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Edinburgh 2013: Hawking (UK, 2013)

Part of Connor McMorran's coverage for MKC of the Edinburgh International Film Festival (June 19-30, 2013).

Stephen Hawking is one of the most well known scientists of our time, and he will undoubtedly go down in history as one of the greatest minds of all time. When presented with the possibility of seeing a documentary about his life, I suddenly realised that I actually knew very little about Stephen Hawking beyond his book A Brief History of Time and his long-term motor neuron disease. Documentaries serve to discuss real people and real situations, acting as much as educators as they do entertainers or pieces of art. The main problem with them is their chosen medium, as film is so easily edited and changes the way people act in front of it that it at times becomes very hard to take what is presented to the audience as ‘real’.

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Edinburgh 2013: Pluto (명왕성, 2012)

Part of Connor McMorran's coverage for MKC of the Edinburgh International Film Festival (June 19-30, 2013).

We often claim that mainstream cinema becomes unbelievable in its attempts at spectacle. This is usually the case, but such statements should force us to examine exactly why we watch films in the first place. What function should films ultimately aspire to in society? Entertainment? Art? Isn't the whole thing, as I tend to think, entirely subjective? Regardless of how we feel, it may be beneficial to rethink the role of spectacle and genre cinema and its ties to reality. As humans, we make narratives about ourselves, about our lives and struggles. However, mainstream cinema demands a certain detachment from reality, as it exists in a strange reality where expected narrative resolutions allow characters to overcome almost any kind of obstacle.

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Edinburgh 2013: Day II - Getting the Hang of Things

Part of Connor McMorran's coverage for MKC of the Edinburgh International Film Festival (June 19-30, 2013).

Having gained a better understanding of how a film festival operates, I used my second day to watch some films and better acquaint myself with other festival aspects like the videotheque. Getting to Edinburgh for 9AM was quite a challenge, but it was worth it to finally see Shin Su-Won’s Pluto. What was rather disappointing however, was the lack of people in the screening. It could have been the time of day, or it could have been the lack of awareness about the film itself, but whatever the reason it left me hoping that the two public screenings were well booked. Looking at the schedule for this morning, I noticed that Pluto clashed with Hideo Nakata’s latest horror The Complex and the UK/North-Korea co-production Comrade Kim Goes Flying. It seemed weird to me that three films from the same ‘niche’ were grouped together like this. I guess clashes are inevitable at any festival, film or otherwise.

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Edinburgh 2013: I Catch a Terrible Cat (こっぴどい猫, Japan) 2012

Part of Connor McMorran's coverage for MKC of the Edinburgh International Film Festival (June 19-30, 2013).

If there can be one major complaint of post-modern cinema, it is that it is far too aware. Not only of itself as a piece of cinema, but also of the limitations of genre. This can often lead to an over-eager attempt to break or push genre boundaries, or to reject genre in favour of observational, dialogue-heavy, or highly referential cinema. Thankfully, Rikiya Imaizumi’s I Catch a Terrible Cat manages to avoid such pitfalls whilst also providing a rather interesting and playful look at the romance genre.

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Edinburgh 2013: Day I - First Impressions at a Film Festival

Part of Connor McMorran's coverage for MKC of the Edinburgh International Film Festival (June 19-30, 2013).

Today was the first time I had ever attended a film festival. I had always longed to go to various different ones, but for various reasons – be it price or distance – I just never managed to make them. Perhaps because of this, film festivals have always seemed like magical places to me; places where you get to see a wide range of films, some of which may never screen in the country again. I have, over the years, looked at many programmes and hoped that some company would release these films in the UK at a later date. For the most part, this never happened.

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