Archive - 8th Five Flavours Film Festival
8. Five Flavours Film Festival
The 8th edition of Five Flavours Film Festival was held in Warsaw, from 12th to 20th November, 2014.
It was the year of the Queer Horse! The lunar Horse brought not only a splendid selection of the latest Asian features, but also the first curated programme of Asian queer cinema in Poland.
The Focus: Queer Asia section presented the eight most intriguing recent features portraying various approaches to queer issues in Nepal, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam. The film programme was accompanied by Asian Academy – a series of debates and meetings which deepened the understanding of current LGBTQ topics in Asia. Among the guest speakers were directors Eduardo Roy ("Quick Change") and Tanwarin Sukkhapisit ("It Gets Better").
It was the first year when South Asian cinema was represented at Five Flavours – not only thanks to the titles from the Queer Asia programme, but also the Indian proposal in the New Asian Cinema section, "Court" by Chaitanya Tamhane. Besides this novelty, the competition included nine other fresh indie productions from Burma, China, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam, showing a complex image of young Asian cinema. Chienn Hsiang's debut feature, "Exit," was named the Best Film by the People's Jury, and the Special Mention was awarded to Hitoshi One's "Be My Baby."
The eighth edition also introduced the Special Screenings section with opening and closing films – Jang Jin's "Man on High Heels" and Ann Hui's "The Golden Era," respectively. The section included also extreme titles from Tetsuya Nakashima ("The World of Kanako") and Gareth Huw Evans ("The Raid" & "The Raid 2"), continued the presentation of the latest Fresh Wave short films, and brought a unique drive-in screening of "Nuoc 2030" by Minh Nguyen Vo, who was among the guests of the eighth edition.
The film programme was completed by genre cinema – Asian westerns in the Wild Wild East section, and the bloodiest selection of horrors and thrillers. The audience could feel a thrill voting for the best scary movie, and selected Sion Sono's "Why Don't You Play in Hell?" as their favourite.
Radio Asia evolved into a series of three concerts of artists whose music transcends generic boundaries: Be-being (South Korea), Hiromichi Sakamoto (Japan) and DaWangGang (China).