Five Flavours Asian Film Festival
The 18th Five Flavours Asian Film Festival will again take place in hybrid form - both in Warsaw cinemas and online - from November 13 to December 1, 2024.
Five Flavours is an annual showcase of the cinema of East, Southeast and South Asia. Since 2006, it continues to premiere brand new, carefully curated films from countries in the region, as well as classic works from Asian archives, retrospectives of selected filmmakers and reviews of national cinematographies.
The Five Flavours Asian Film Festival is a unique review of cinema from East and Southeast Asia, which has been enjoyed by Polish audiences for years. It is a selection of excellent films, but also an opportunity to discover Asian pop culture, discuss art, politics and challenges of the modern world. The screenings are accompanied by meetings with filmmakers, in-depth discussions, debates, introductions and other accompanying events, with the aim of presenting as broadly as possible the contemporary face of Asian cultures, their diversity and importance. Cinema is an excellent medium to talk about this part of the world in a wise and far from orientalizing way, and allowing to build sensitivity to cultural differences.
The festival's program is primarily made up of titles unknown in Poland, unavailable in regular distribution. The wide-ranging selection includes auteur cinema, as well as high-quality genre films; daring works by independent filmmakers and commercial, big-budget productions that have made their mark on Asia's cinematic landscape. The screenings are often accompanied by meetings with guests that give audiences an insight into the broader context of the films presented at the festival and the topics they cover.
The visual identification is created by Przemysław Ostaszewski, who has been overseeing the festival's graphic design for years. As with previous editions, the visual identification of the 18th Five Flavours is based on the zodiac signs of the Lunar Calendar. The year 2024 is the Year of the Wood Dragon.
How did it start?
The idea to start a festival came to us after organizing our first film event which later came to be known as Five Flavours. It took place in Warsaw, in the early spring of 2007 and was focused solely on Vietnamese cinema. Arteria Art Foundation, which created Five Flavours, was an organization effectively promoting Vietnamese culture in Warsaw. Why Vietnamese? The Vietnamese community was, and still is, the largest immigration group representing a non-European culture both in Warsaw and in Poland. Vietnamese students first arrived in Poland as members of exchange programmes between comunist countries opereated by Polish and Vietnamese universities in the late 1950's. The biggest group was located in Warsaw. In the 1990's, after the end of communism in Poland, many former students brought their famillies to the country. Because of that, we wanted to bring more attention to Vietnamese cultural heritage to residents of Warsaw, especially their cinematography as we were and still are a huge cinema lovers. Later, festival expanded into other regions of South and Southeast Asia as we discovered there is so much to be done in terms lack of knowledge about filmmaking from this region. We continue to do so until this day. The inspiration for the name Five Flavours came from Vietnamese culture and Buddhism, where five diffrent flavours represent the five periods of Buddha's teachings.
Competition
Every year, the highlight of Five Flavours AFF program is the New Asia Cinema feature competition section, presenting fresh voices and outstanding productions that address current issues and broaden the boundaries of film imagination. We accept feature films from Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma, Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, India, Japan, South Korea, Laos, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam; no shorter than 60 minutes. Eleven chosen films compete for the Grand Prix of Five Flavours AFF. From 2015 the winning film is picked by People's Jury - a group of eleven cinema enthusiasts from all over Poland, a non proffesionals carefully selected in the competiition.
If you have any additional questions regarding your stay at the festival, please contact: hospitality@piecsmakow.pl or +48 880 628 585.