[The Daily] NYAFF 2017

Starting today, the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Subway Cinema present the sixteenth edition of New York Asian Film Festival, running through July 13 at the Walter Reade Theater and then from July 14 through 16 at the SVA Theater. Tonight’s opener is Thai director Nattawut Poonpiriya’s Bad Genius, which Diana Cheng of the Asian America Press calls “a wild concoction of realistic drama, suspense thriller and fantasy.”

Of the fifty-seven features in the lineup, Christopher Bourne and Dustin Chang have selected ten to spotlight at ScreenAnarchy, including:

• Daigo Matsui’s Japanese Girls Never Die, “a strong indictment of the society where girls are subjugated and sexualized at an early age.”
• Cho Hyun-hoon’s Jane, “a sensitive and perceptive portrayal of some of society’s most marginalized, vulnerable, and exploited—in this case, transgender people and teenage runaways.”
• Zhang Lu's A Quiet Dream (image above) “falls somewhere between Jarmusch and Hong Sangsoo.”
• “Truly not for the faint of heart or stomach,” Le Binh Giang’s Kfc’s “biggest act of mercy toward its audience is that it only lasts barely more than an hour.”
• Jung Yoon-suk’s Bamseom Pirates Seoul Inferno is about a South Korean grindcore duo that uses “dated North Korean propaganda” to “criticize highly capitalistic, anti-commie regime” and “their energy” is “infectious.”
• Norihiro Niwatsukino’s Suffering of Ninko, “a very odd bird, to say the least, with many visual modes and genres mashed together.”
• Jet Leyco’s Town in a Lake: “Combining science fiction, magic realism, and pointed political and media critique, this one is a true original.”

In the New York Times, Mike Hale explains that, in the 1970s, the Japanese corporation Nikkatsu “bet the studio on soft-core pornography,” churning out “more than 1,000 studio-backed sex films that adhered to a firm set of guidelines: low budgets, short running times, one-week shooting schedules and female nudity at least four times an hour. The Nikkatsu films became their own genre, known as roman porno.” For last year’s Roman Porno Reboot Project, five directors were invited “to put their own modern spin on roman porno,” and three of those projects have landed in the NYAFF 2017 lineup: Akihiko Shiota’s Wet Woman in the Wind, Kazuya Shiraishi’s Dawn of the Felines, and Isao Yukisada’s Aroused by Gymnopédies. Hale writes about all three, but the bottom line is this: “With a little imagination, a sex film can be about anything.”

“Park Kwang-hyun’s Fabricated City is a mishmash of genres and narrative clichés,” writes Rex Baylon at Meniscus Magazine, “a crime drama, a prison thriller, and most obviously a wrong man scenario all wrapped into one convoluted conspiracy narrative. Borrowing liberally from the Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat show Sherlock, the Wachowskis’ The Matrix films, and a stack of techno-thrillers, Park instead achieves in making the viewer want to watch the works that he is cribbing from.”

Also, “Kim Bong-han’s sophomore effort Ordinary Person starts out as your standard potboiler. . . . It unabashedly shows, by the end of the movie, that though the thumb of oppression can crush one ‘Ordinary Person,’ a mass of ordinary people can rewrite an entire nation’s narrative, from tyranny to democracy.”

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At RogerEbert.com, Simon Abrams previews, among other films, Andrew Wong Kwok-kuen’s With Prisoners (“I came to the film expecting a bonkers sleazefest, and got a bleak, winningly subdued melodrama”), Lee Kyoung-mi’s The Truth Beneath, co-written by Park Chan-wook, and Zhang Yang’s Soul on a String, “a kind of Buddhist acid western.”

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