Kano
Umin Boya’s Kano has been selected as the Centerpiece selection for this year’s New York Asian Film Festival (NYAFF), taking place June 27 to July 14, 2014. Returning for its 13th edition, the New York Asian Film Festival is one of North America’s leading festivals of popular Asian Cinema.
Umin Boya’s Kano, produced and co-written by Taiwan’s hitmaker Wei Te-Sheng (Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale, Cape No.7), is an epic sports tale, based on a true story from Taiwan’s colonial past, about an underdog mixed-race high-school baseball team that beat the odds and earned the right to travel to Japan in 1931 to compete in a national tournament. In order to succeed against their elite competition, the team had to overcome their ethnic differences and find a way to utilize their individual strengths in order to come together as a true team. The screening will mark the film’s North American Premiere.
NYAFF’s Korean Actor in Focus program will welcome Lee Jung-jae to New York City and present some of his most notable films as well as two exciting recent releases: Han Jae-rim’s historical comedy-drama The Face Reader, and Park Hoon-jung’s epic gangster thriller New World.
3D Naked Ambition
Early highlights among the first group of titles announced include Philip Yung’s explosive female-juvenile-delinquent drama May We Chat; Benny Chan’s resurrection of the heroic bloodshed genre The White Storm; Lee Kung-lok’s porn-industry comedy 3D Naked Ambition (NYAFF’s first 3-D movie!); superstar Andy Lau in Allen Yuen’s heart-busting police thriller Firestorm; Juno Mak’s hopping-vampire homage Rigor Mortis, along with the classic that inspired it, Ricky Lau’s Mr. Vampire; and Chow Yun-fat reuniting with director Wong Jing in the gambling comedy From Vegas to Macau.
The Eternal Zero
The legendary Takashi Miike will also be represented at NYAFF once again with his outrageous gangster comedy based on a popular manga, The Mole Song: Undercover Agent Reiji. Korean cops take on a criminal mastermind in Jo Ui-seok and Kim Byung-seo’s thriller Cold Eyes; Takashi Yamazaki’s Japanese WWII kamikaze pilot drama The Eternal Zero; and Anna Broinowski’s Aim High in Creation, a behind-the-scenes look at the North Korean film industry, are also set to screen.