JoRafCinema: Far East Film Festival 2005

Motivated by the upcoming Far East Film Festival in Udine and the recent article in which [Raf] describes his first encounter with the festival, I [Jo] have decided to write about mine, which was one year earlier.

From the movie Beyond our Ken.

Several events concurred to make me discover this festival. I have been reading about it for a few years in the Mad Movies magazine, and when I talked about it to my office-mate around May 2004, it turned out he was born and raised in Udine, so we evoked the idea of going there the following year, together with two other friends.Then during the same summer I got further motivated after watching several good Asian movies at the Munich Fantasy Filmfest: Azumi, Arahan, Infernal Affairs, The One-armed Swordsman, Save the Green Planet and last but not least: Memories of Murder, which is the movie that made me think: Waw, this is where good thrillers are made nowadays, I should stop looking West (Hollywood) and get more interested in the East, which I did in May 2005.
For my first year at the FEFF I stayed only four days and booked a hotel room (in the later years we would rent flats with a fully-equipped kitchen!).

The FEFF entrance by night.

During that very first visit we discovered Udine, its city center and castle, and very importantly its restaurants that we have visited many times since: having pasta + pizza at the Due Palme, frico + polenta at Alla Ghiacciaia, a glass of wine at the Pappagallo, a quick bruschetta at the Udinese Cafe in front of the theater, a plate of prosciutto at Manin, wine from the tap at the Osteria all’Aventino, a late beer at I Piombi, a FEFF menu at the Asian Wok, a quick 1-euro espresso at the FEFF bar.
We have also discovered the workings of movie festivals in general (as it was our first) and of this one in particular. I remember that we arrived late for our first movie: Lady Snowblood, it took us time to get our accreditation, we had to sit on the front row and we missed the beginning of the movie which was moreover in original language with German subtitles! Not the best of starts.

Udine's central square.

But then we quickly got it: the inaugural feast, the queue to watch the movies (that we avoided some years later thanks to the Black Dragon accreditation), the bike trips to get to movies on time, the late-night FEFF parties followed by early-morning retrospective projections, the sound of simultaneous Italian translation in the headphones of half the theater (people not understanding the English sub-titles) and the sound of a radio receiver falling on the floor, the theater floors opening one at a time, the backstage interviews with the directors... We have also learned some names of people we would meet again: Francesco, Sabrina, Philippe, Julien, Mark Shilling...

The exhibition dedicated to photographer Jupiter Wong.

Between all those discoveries, we didn't forget to watch movies. Letter from an Unknown Woman was our first 2-hour long boring Chinese movie. In the same style was Peacock that we didn't see but that won the vote of the public. We discovered Hong Kong cinema with the nice romance Beyond our Ken, the light polars Crazy'n' the City and One Night in Mongkok, and a big event of the festival: Yesterday Once More, directly by Johnny To who was discovered at the FEFF (I liked his previous Breaking News), starring the famous Udine guests Andy Lau and Sammi Cheng, and most importantly that was partly shot in Udine! Nice touch, but in the end the movie was very boring.
I discovered the cinema from Thailand with the very funny comedy Pattaya Maniac (when I started to realize that there is a Karaoke scene in every Korean, Thai or Japanese movie) and the ass-kicking Born to Fight with its unbelievable stunts. I bought it already twice on DVD but I am still trying to find it in Blu-ray, uncensored (some stunts look incredibly violent) and with the original soundtrack, not the one added by Luc Besson's company for the European public.

A stunt that can be seen in Born to Fight.

Lorelei, the Witch of the Pacific Ocean, directed by a specialist of Digital Effects, promised to be good, but ended up to be extremely long and boring, with special effect looking like a Playstation 1 game (it was already an insult ten years ago for a movie).
The retrospective on that year was entitled No Borders, No Limits, The World of Nikkatsu Action, in respect to the cinema studio Nikkatsu unknown to me at that time but which is now more than 100 years old! I think we watched only one movie: Black Tight Killers (1966) but its martial art techique of the Octopus Pot made us speak about it for the years to come. As guest to the festival was the super-star in Japan Joe Shishido next to whom I had the honor to wash my hands in the bathroom!

Joe Shishido saluting the FEFF public.

When I think back, I find it amazing how many things we have discovered in just a few days, and how much we loved them, enough to go back to Udine year after year.