Dragons & Tigers, breathing fire in Vancouver

Many festivals around the world offer enough features to fill an encyclopedia, but an elite few brand themselves with a specialty. Sundance is known for its American indies and Telluride for its tributes. The Vancouver International Film Festival — weighing in at 16 days, featuring 350 films — could be known for a variety of things: its hospitality, its rain, its scope. But it’s best known for its East Asian programming, presented from its perch on the Pacific Rim, and for more nearly two decades, selected by British critic and curator Tony Rayns.

Last year, Rayns announced, would be his the final year at Vancouver. But while he did, in part, hand over the reins to Chinese-language film expert Shelly Kraicer, it was no surprise to many to see, on awards night for the Dragons & Tigers competition last Thursday, a sanguine Rayns recalling the “choked-up farewell speech” he gave the previous year before introducing the jury for the Dragons & Tigers competition films he once again curated.

[SF360.org editor’s note: This article appeared originally in indieWIRE on Oct. 9, 2007.]

The Dragons & Tigers program collects films from a variety of Asian countries — this year, films from China, Malaysia, Japan, and South Korea were particularly prominent. Among those 40-plus features (also programmed are a large number of shorts), eight compete for the “Dragons and Tigers Award for Young Cinema,” a prize upped this year from $5,000 to $10,000, and awarded in the past to promising filmmakers like Jia Zhangke (“Xiao Wu,” 1998) and Kore-eda Hirokazu (“Mabarosi,” 1995) who’ve often proceeded on to much international fame.

It was two Chinese films the jury (Korean filmmaker Jang Sun-Woo, Bangkok Post critic Kong Rithdee, and filmproducer/critic Colin McCabe) chose this year: Robin Weng’s “Fujian Blue,” tragicomic diptych that the jury found to be “an extremely realistic film about contemporary China, showing why and how so many present-day Chinese try to emigrate illegally from the southern coastal province of Fujian,” and Zhang Yuedong’s “Mid-Afternoon Barks,” a surrealist series of stories tripping off modernization motifs that the jury found “witty” and “well-observed.” A Jury Special Mention went to “Obbah: A Girl’s Elder Brother,” by Kim Jong-Guk. The South Korean film was created in one long 63-minute take outside the old Seoul Station, and was honored for its formal invention and insight into the complexity of contemporary Korea.

All three films were certainly discoveries, and their directors employed ingenuity with what looked to be low-budgets and technical limitations. While many festivals fill their coffers with cherry-picked selections straight off the circuit, or delivered via the generic means through the Internet, Vancouver’s outreach to young cinemas across the ocean is certainly something to be lauded. New curator Kraicer, who’s been writing about Chinese language cinema since 1994, and is based in Beijing, told me he uses networks of young filmmakers, producers, academics, and supporters of independent films to find films before they hit the circuit. His Dragons and Tigers offerings — from not only mainland China, but also Malaysia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore — attempt, he said, to show the widest spectrum of unexpected Asian images, from commercial films to those that arrive via alternative routes. He avoids certain clich

topics: asian cinema, film festivals, vancouver international film festival