San Diego Asian Film Festival 2022 Features Price Theatre Showings

The San Diego Asian Film Festival (SDAFF) annually shows new films from up-and-coming directors and restored classics from fundamental Asian filmmakers. This year, the SDAFF is partnering with UCSD to show multiple features at the Price Theatre. The 2022 iteration of the SDAFF will feature over 100 films and premiere on November 3.

In 2021, our Arts and Culture Editor and Opinion Editor, Tate McFadden, attended the SDAFF and watched a handful of films from their incredible collection.

Here is Tate’s review of last year’s festival:

Day 1: As We Like It, directed by Cheng Hung-I and Muni Wei of Taiwan

Many people, most notably a heart-throbbingly young Leonardo DiCaprio, have adapted Shakespeare’s work, and I’m sure will continue to do so ad infinitum. I am also sure, however, that no one – and I mean no one – has done it like Cheng Hung-I and Muni Wei. They spare no time throwing you into the deep end of the play, bouncing from a park filled with queer couples to a comically dramatic series of fight scenes that wield fight scene tropes as deftly as Scott Pilgrim ever could, replete with health bars and lovely women motivating their champions.

From there, we blend into a classically complex series of romantic plots that Shakespeare made famous. Classic tropes, verging on cliche like cross-dressing for comedic effect a la Merchant of Venice or As You Like It, are transformed into exciting examinations of characters’ identities. The queerness of the movie, which is open and fully accepted in its futuristic Taipei City, is idyllic and comforting, as characters enjoy legal same-sex marriage. No one is confronted with gratuitous trauma, and it is refreshing to find queer people living happily with their partners. The film raises questions about what Shakespeare himself might have written about had his society been more accepting of his own sexual orientation.

Day 2: 200 Cigarettes from Now, directed by Ma Tianyu of China

200 Cigarettes from Now follows two Chinese-American film students in Boston. Xia, a screenwriting student, crashes at the chaotically messy apartment of acting student Jie. While Xia writes shitty soap opera scripts and drinks away thoughts of her ex, Jie tries to land TV gigs and make a living. Much like Chung-King Express or Inherent Vice, the horribly hollow lives of the characters clash with the deep colors and overwhelming sounds of the film, making their lives all the starker. It is little wonder that sex is their only bliss, and they have lots of it in this forty-five-minute short film, sometimes with each other, sometimes with others.

Ma depicts queer sex life in a similarly toned-down way to the apparent alcoholism and loneliness of his characters. It is just another fact of life, one which Xia and Jie slide through as they go through clouds of smoke and colored light. It is not a big deal that they are queer because to them, nothing is a big deal, a state of mind I found deeply terrifying.

Day 3: Sinkhole, directed by Kim Ji-Hoon of South Korea

Sinkhole follows the Park family after they achieve middle-class success, marked by their new homeowner status in a recently renovated Seoul neighborhood. Everything is going wonderfully until their building and its residents fall into the eponymous sinkhole. Quite honestly the most entertaining of this week’s films, Sinkhole is equal parts heroic, thrilling, heartwarming, and absurdly hilarious. The comedy of the movie is amplified by the middle-aged and classed crowd, which laughed harder at the middle-class jokes than any under-thirty crowd would have.

Sure, some of the cliches are there: the separated father and son, dirt-covered faces, crisis-inspired romance, and survival tactics learned from reality tv, but where other disaster movies take themselves too seriously, with clunky exposition about what caused this or that disaster, Sinkhole gives us office workers performing amusing antics as they try to survive their own disaster. There are no muscular men saving hurt women, or doctors MacGyvering first aid in this movie. The cast is closer to that of The Office if they had to survive a horrific natural disaster.

Day 4 Double Feature: Kim-Min Young of the Report Card by Jisum Lim, and Jae-eun Lee of South Korea and Inside the Red Brick Wall by Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers of Hong Kong

Detailing the lives of Korean high school graduates Jeonghee and Kim-Min Young as they apply for university and attempt to become successful college students, Kim-Min Young of the Report Card is a look into the lives of South Korean young people in the twenty-first century. Instead of depicting the rough lives of disillusionment that middle-aged workers have in South Korea, Jisum Lim and Jae-Eun Lee show us what life is like for teens facing the pressures of taking the national entrance exams, getting into a prestigious university, and applying all of yourself to your studies.

Rather than a tale of triumph over adversity, studying hard, and getting into a great college, the film shows us the truth we all know: the romanticization of college is a load of smoke and mirrors. The film is quiet, and deeply internal, showing us a drama of disillusionment rather than one of newfound love or aspiring genius a la Good Will Hunting or something along those lines. If you want something upbeat to leave you excited for next quarter, this is probably not the film for you, but if you want a heartfelt look into the lives of two young women beginning to understand the reality of their lives, look no further.

After a brief intermission, during which my phone stopped working and I had to get someone to figure out how to factory reset it so that I could pull up my tickets, I got in line for the headliner of the festival, Inside the Red Brick Wall. The documentary, which is a work of reportage filmmaking, follows the police siege of Hong Kong Polytechnic University during the Hong-Kong protests over the annexation of Hong Kong to the Chinese government. The student protests, which turned violent and horrifying during the pandemic, are filmed up close by the anonymous Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers group. Filmed by these fellow protesters like a fly on the wall, the documentary doesn’t cut to interviews or voiced-over commentary. Instead, it shows raw footage and audio of the chilling events which took place inside the university while it was besieged by the police for sixteen days, leaving hundreds hospitalized and over a thousand people arrested.

It is hard to describe the horror of the documentary itself, or how hard it hits you, if you haven’t seen it because the conviction, emotion, and raw passion for the protesters’ cause is so purely shown by the camera. Phrases, such as “We can’t afford to be afraid” or “You have lethal force but I have lethal faith,” are uttered by protesters whose faces are covered for fear of gassing by the police. All people are anonymous, and the film itself is being shown as a limited feature because many of the people shown as well as some of the filmmakers may be facing criminal charges at the moment or may yet face them.

The mood of the film begins with a sense of triumph and passionate conviction as the students begin their protest at the university. The police have formed their line, but a full siege is not yet in effect. The police play pop songs with names, like “Ambush from Ten Sides” and “Surrounded By,” and the students play Chinese versions of “Fuck the Police.” So far, the protest is relatively peaceful, but there is an atmosphere of apprehension, as both sides know their treaty is shaky at best, and violence will break out.

Soon the protesters are hit with tear gas and fire hoses from armored trucks, and the police begin advancing on the barricades the students set up. They have body armor and heavily armored SUVs, while the students protect themselves from rubber bullets and tear gas canisters with umbrellas, scarves, and swimming goggles. Despite the horrifyingly uneven odds, the students push them back, and the police siege sets in.

Injuries are common among the students. First responders are on the scene, marked by green vests, but they too wear gas masks and cover their faces, for the reasonable fear that the Hong Kong police won’t respect their protected position. Students huddle together amidst the rubble, and watch in anticipation from the barricades, waiting for the next wave of police to approach them.

Several days into the siege, students begin to try to escape with sickening results. Four or five head-on escape attempts are made. The protesters rush the line of police and try to break out into the city of Hong Kong and blend into the thousands of other protesters in the city, who they’ve called upon to march on the university and help them escape. Police officers shoot rubber bullets into the crowd and tackle it in teams of three or four, beating them as they scream their names at watchers filming them with their phones, hoping that their families will know that they are arrested and not live with the fear of a disappeared child or sibling. That fear of being disappeared is a recurring one in the film, as students worry less that they will be killed and more that their families will never know about it, which was a demonstration of conviction for their cause and caring love for their families that brought people into the theater to tears. Journalists too are tackled by police officers, and their cameras are knocked to the ground so that they cannot report on the scene playing out before them. First responders are taken too, and you can see them with their hands zip-tied behind them next to other student protesters, as the police deny vehemently that they are tied up at all.

With each escape attempt, the police arrest or take more and more of their dwindling numbers, and soon the students stop trying, for fear that there will be none left. A commotion rises at night as a group of motorcyclists sneaks below a campus bridge, and students begin climbing down ropes, some falling ten or fifteen feet in an attempt to be saved by the bikers. By about the tenth day, the marchers outside the university are pushed back too far for the students to reach them and they begin to fight over how to escape. Some sneak through claustrophobic sewage tunnels and into the city, though many who took that route disappeared in the sewers or found police waiting for them.

After some sixteen days of torturous and brutal besiegement of the university, the police call off the strike, and the students are allowed to go home. The number of people reported arrested is over one thousand, and it is suspected that many more have simply disappeared. The genuine evil of the police officers and the government that commanded them to commit such atrocities cannot be overstated in this film, which leaves you feeling the full brunt of its impact, and understanding the unwavering conviction with which the students demand their rights.

The Triton will cover the 2022 interaction of the SDAFF, stay tuned for more coverage!

Tate McFadden is the Arts and Culture Editor and the Opinion Editor for The Triton