CBC, 19 Oct 2005
Action vies with art films for Golden Horse awards

Hollywood-backed comedy Kung Fu Hustle has grabbed 10 nominations for Golden Horse Awards, the Chinese-speaking world's equivalent of the Oscars.

Another Hong Kong action film Election, directed by Johnny To, took 11 nominations.

Hong Kong comedian and star of Kung Fu Hustle Stephen Chow smiles during a charity event in Hong Kong. (AP File Photo/Kin Cheung)

The 42nd annual Golden Horse Film Festival celebrates achievement in films made in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Hong Kong has long dominated Chinese-language filmmaking, but fewer films are being made in the expensive Hong Kong market. Instead, Chinese movie-makers are moving production into China and collaborating with partners from other Chinese-speaking markets.

This year's Golden Horse awards heap recognition on mainland Chinese films and Taiwanese art films, as well as numerous co-operative productions involving artists from Taiwan, Hong Kong and the mainland. Kung Fu Hustle, about a hapless gangster in 1940s Shanghai, is a collaboration between Hong Kong comedian Stephen Chow, Beijing Film Studio and Columbia Pictures Film Production Asia Ltd.

Cantonese action stalwart Jackie Chan came up empty with his epic The Myth, and Andy Lau, star of Infernal Affairs and winner of the Golden Horse for best actor in 2004, failed to receive a nomination for best actor or supporting actor, despite appearing in four movies in the competition. However, one of those films, A World Without Thieves, the story of a swindler couple, took a best film nomination.

Instead, many little known stars and productions earned nominations. The Golden Horse ceremony will be on Nov. 13 in the northern Taiwanese port of Keelung.

Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien's romance Three Times took eight nominations including best film, best director, best actor for Chen Chang and best actress for Shu Qi.

Initial D, a movie based on a Japanese comic about street car races, won six nominations, including best supporting actor for Hong Kong's Anthony Wong, and best original song for Taiwanese pop star Jay Chou.

Chen Khen will contend for best actor for Yim Ho's A West Lake Moment, a movie set in modern China about a young woman's two love affairs.

Chen Shiang-chyi is a best actress nominee for The Wayward Cloud, a sexually explicit Taiwanese film.

Hong Kong pop star Miriam Yeung is another best actress candidate for Drink, Drank, Drunk, a romance in which she plays a beer promoter who falls for a chef. Another Hong Kong pop star turned actor, Aaron Kwok, got a nod for the crime thriller Divergence.

Seven Swords, a visually stunning kung fu epic by Hong Kong director Tsui Hark, was nominated for seven prizes, including best art direction and best cinematography. It was a Hong Kong-China co-production.

http://www.cbc.ca/story/arts/national/2005/10/19/Arts/goldenhorse_051019.html

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Brandon Sun, October 19th, 2005
Andy Lau, Jackie Chan, Sammi Cheng don't make Golden Horse cut

HONG KONG (AP) - Jackie Chan, Andy Lau and Sammi Cheng didn't get nominated for Taiwan's Golden Horse Awards - the Chinese-speaking world's equivalent of the Oscars - as some of the region's biggest stars failed to impress a panel of judges with an academic bent.

Chan - a two-time best actor at the Golden Horses - came up empty with his epic The Myth, the story of a reincarnated ancient general who pursues his lost love from a previous life. Two other movies that Chan invested in - House of Fury and Everlasting Regret - also weren't nominated for any awards.

The prolific Lau had four movies in competition - Yesterday Once More, Wait 'Til You're Older, A World Without Thieves and All About Love - but didn't notch any individual nominations.

However, A World Without Thieves, the story of a swindler couple, bagged a best film nomination.

Lau's poor showing came a year after he won his first Golden Horse best actor award for the crime thriller Infernal Affairs III.

Pop star Cheng didn't make an impression in her breakthrough role as a melancholy Shanghai beauty in Everlasting Regret, which Chan helped produce.

The decision to shun the big stars may have to do with a panel of judges heavy on academics. Of the eight judges for feature films, three are current university teachers, one is a former university lecturer. Another judge does stage work.

But the judges haven't ignored mainstream commercial fare. The big winners in the nomination stage were Hong Kong director Johnny To's gangster film Election and the Hollywood-backed Stephen Chow comedy Kung Fu Hustle. They had 11 and 10 nominations, respectively.

Taiwanese pop star Jay Chou is up for best new performer and best original film song for Initial D, a movie based on a Japanese comic about street car races. The film notched four other nominations, including best supporting actor for Hong Kong's Anthony Wong.

Hong Kong director Tsui Hark's visually stunning kung fu epic Seven Swords was nominated for seven prizes, including best art direction and best cinematography.

Still, art-house movies are well represented. Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien's Three Times has eight nominations, including best film, best director for Hou, best actor for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon star Chang Chen and best actress for Shu Qi. Chang and Shu play a couple in three different eras.

Chang also appears in Wong Kar-wai's instalment in Eros, which was nominated for best short. Chang plays an apprentice tailor who's guided to sexual enlightenment by a prostitute played by Gong Li.

Individual performances in some little-known art-house movies won critical acclaim.

Unheralded Chen Khen will contend for best actor for Yim Ho's A West Lake Moment, a movie set in modern China about a young woman's two love affairs.

Likewise, unknown Chen Shiang-chyi is a best actress nominee for The Wayward Cloud, another sexually explicit film by Taiwan's Tsai Ming-liang.

However, some nominees are surprising and offbeat.

Hong Kong pop star Miriam Yeung is another best actress candidate for Drink, Drank, Drunk, a flat romantic comedy in which Yeung plays a beer promoter who invests in a restaurant with a chef whom she eventually falls for.

Aaron Kwok, one of the Hong Kong pop music's Four Heavenly Kings in the 1990s, got a nod for the crime thriller Divergence, which generated little buzz. Kwok's music career has faded and he has never been known for his acting.

One trend that has emerged from this year's pictures is pooling resources - both money and talent - from across Greater China and abroad.

Kung Fu Hustle is a collaboration between Hong Kong comedian Chow, Beijing Film Studio and Columbia Pictures Film Production Asia Ltd. Among the investors in A World Without Thieves are Hong Kong star Lau's Focus Films Ltd. and China's Huayi Brothers & Taihe Film Investment Co. The movie stars Lau and Taiwanese actress Rene Liu.

The Golden Horse awards will be handed out Nov. 13 in the northern Taiwanese port of Keelung.

http://www.brandonsun.com/story.php?story_id=7452

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The Asahi Shimbun, 10/15/2005
A rogue lens sheds light on ordinary folk in North Korea
By RYO SASAKI

It's not a Hollywood production, and probably all the better for it.

"Dear Pyongyang" offers a realistic slice of life in a nation that has put much of the rest of the world on edge.

Documentary filmmaker Yang Yonghi tells the story of how second-generation Koreans living in Japan deal with their heritage.

Yang's brothers were handed a harsh life by deciding to settle in impoverished North Korea, while her father became disillusioned with the propaganda that had sustained him for years.

Yang herself embarked on a quest for identity that took her to New York and back.

Given North Korea's reputation as a "rogue state" and part of the "axis of evil," Osaka-born Yang, 40, said she realizes that many people view the reclusive state as frightening or strange.

"But I want audiences to find common denominators in the ordinary people (in my film)," she said. "And I hope that will serve as the beginning of understanding and coexistence."

The film focuses on her father, a first-generation Korean in Japan who had been a senior member of the pro-Pyongyang General Association of Korean Residents in Japan (Chongryun), and her three Japan-born brothers who relocated to North Korea.

Yang's film is currently being screened at film festivals both in and outside of Japan. It is scheduled for release in movie theaters next year.

Yang's father was born in Cheju Island and became an active member of Chongryun in Japan. He felt his mission was to work for the unification of the Korean Peninsula and end discrimination against Korean residents of Japan.

Yang, the youngest among the siblings, grew up being told she should be like her father and brothers in showing loyalty toward North Korea.

Yang said she was always a conscientious student at the Korean schools she attended in Japan.

But deep down, she said she wanted to live life on her own terms and be freed from being zainichi, the Japanese term for a Korean resident in Japan.

When she visited Pyongyang in 1983 for the first time, she was allowed to meet her brothers-but only in the lobby of her hotel and only for a while.

Of that time, Yang said she did not feel affinity toward her homeland as she had been taught but rather a sense of incompatibility.

Yang worked as a teacher at a Korean school in Japan and as a radio host before turning to filmmaking. She filmed for long periods in Japan, China and Thailand and spent six years in New York.

"I learned that being free doesn't mean running away but facing things upfront," Yang said.

Over a decade, she shot more than 100 hours of film to create the 107 minutes of the finished project.

Her camera closely follows her parents' visit to Pyongyang, where they see a city plagued by blackouts and of high-rise buildings abandoned before completion.

There was no hiding the reality that her brothers survived solely because of financial support from Japan.

The film also captures in one of her visits to the North a family reunion over home-cooked food, with her smiling parents handing out presents to the grandchildren and a sister-in-law giving a massage to the tired mother-in-law from Japan.

It was an everyday scene that would be common anywhere, Yang recalled.

When they parted, Yang and her brothers exchanged the usual word of encouragement in Japanese, ganbatte (hang in there and do your best). But she realized the meaning had a completely different meaning for someone living in North Korea.

Yang's father was always fond of telling outsiders the importance of remaining loyal to the homeland.

He insisted that his daughter marry a fellow Korean. He would sing old Korean songs when he was in the mood and went out of his way to care for Koreans in his neighborhood after he retired from Chongryun.

But in private, her father was distraught that he had allowed his sons to settle in North Korea.

The film gave Yang a chance to ponder the lives of her father and brothers. She realized that they were individuals affected by the circumstances of a particular age.

"Only then were we able to understand each other," Yang said. "I came to feel that it (Pyongyang) is a city where people dear to me live, just like Osaka and New York."
(IHT/Asahi: October 15,2005)

http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200510150147.html

 

 

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