The point is, once you pluck the Asian heart out of VIFF, even guillotine its Cannes-leaning head, the thing still has legs – mostly muscle and little fat, fit for more than simply ambling in the film forest. Indeed, it is the festival within the festival which, come awards time, releases its captive audience to both regret its negligence (note to self: the Abel Ferrara doc about the Chelsea Hotel can wait) and pursue other exotic destinations outside of Asia – such as reliable, Italian (dis)organised crime (Matteo Garrone’s Gommorrah) or the Proustian power of dormant objets d’art (Olivier Assayas’ L’heure d’été / Summer Hours), and worlds way, way beyond. few, like the number of those who turned up for a Portuguese film the festival dubbed “freaky”, as a compliment no less ), Dragons and Tigers is a given: plenty of ink has been deservedly spilled extolling the virtues of the program’s scope, vision and influence as shepherded by the estimable Tony Rayns (joined now by the Beijing-based scholar and curator Shelley Kraicer). The festival is unimaginable without its program Dragons & Tigers: The Cinemas of East Asia, now in its fifteenth year running with the juried competition of “Young Cinema”.
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Frustrated projectionists or print traffic coordinators may scoff, but maybe the host committee of the 2010 Olympic games should take a cue from VIFF on how to run a tight show, without irrevocably ruining the neighbourhood.
It also doubles as an involuntary ethos of a certain style of filmmaking that – in the more gratifying films at least – found broader expression by way of the 27th Vancouver International Film Festival, by now a compulsory survey of the international state of cinema (with its provisional map as ever positing Asia as the capital). Simply stated, offhanded, the comment nonetheless consolidates the film’s abiding concerns of generational conflict and familial dependence with an Ozu-like affirmation of the obvious and immutable.
Such are the first words, uttered by a vivacious grandmother reigning over the kitchen at a family reunion, in Aruitemo, Aruitemo ( Still Walking), Kore-eda Hirokazu’s latest, surprising domestic drama.
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