(Still from Nina Wu, © Luxbox Films)
By LINDSAY R. BELLINGER
If only the films in Competition and those films in other sections such as Un Certain Regard, where Midi Z's ambitious and somewhat disorienting film Nina Wu premiered could also be up for the best actor awards. If that were the case, then Ke-Xi Wu's dynamic turn as Nina Wu would have hands-down gotten the best actress award, especially since I watched the winning actress's performance and wa...
(Midi Z, cast and crew before the world premiere of Nina Wu, © Lindsay Bellinger 2019)
By LINDSAY R. BELLINGER
Nina Wu is an interesting film that hits a hard punch, and it's clear that Midi Z has enjoyed his share of Quentin Tarantino films in addition to other filmmaking greats. It made its world premiere in the Un Certain Regard section today. It's no surprise to this film journalist that QT showed up for this screening. This is the kind of film that one might thin...
16th Third Eye Asian Film Festival: IV
Screenings continued on Day 4, 5 and 6, and two films were memorable. One was a blast from 1956, made by an all-time great, and the other a laudable 2011 effort, shot in his home country, guerrilla style, by a returning prodigy, without permission
I managed to attend nine shows out of the 15, which is a reasonable score. But here I will speak of just two films, since there is much to say.
Return to Burma, 2011, 84 min
So now we know that Ice Poison ...
16th Third Eye Asian Film Festival: III
Of the 10 feature films screened at the 16th Third Eye Asian Film Festival (TEAFF) during the first three days, I caught four and opted out of a fifth because I had seen it, albeit decades ago. Two of these were Indian, one Egyptian and one from Taiwan-Myanmar.
Ziprya, based on the Arun Sadhu novel and chosen as the inaugural film, was big let-down. Made in amateurish style, full of tropes and stock screenplay, it did great disservice to the memory of ...
16th Third Eye Asian Film Festival opens in Mumbai on 21 December
Prabhat Chitra Mandal, one of India’s oldest and most active film societies that is celebrating its golden jubilee this year, in collaboration with P.L. Deshpande Maharashtra Kala Academy, is holding its 16th Third Eye Asian Film Festival in Mumbai, supported by the Department of Culture, Government of Maharashtra. The festival will be inaugurated on Thursday, the 21st of December, 2117. The inauguration will be followed ...
The New York Asia Society presented from March 6 – 13 Homecoming Myanmar, the first US screening of the films by Midi Z, a Burmese-Taiwanese film maker.
Under the military dictatorship the once vibrant Burmese film industry was destroyed and is now slowly recovering; overcoming the obstacles of having no film infra-structure and competing with pirated films. Midi Z was born in 1982 in Myanmar to ethnic Chinese parentage and raised there. He left at the age of 16 for Taiwan where h...
