The Asian Film Festival Barcelona (AFFB) will kick off its eleventh edition tomorrow, Wednesday, with the inaugural film Yangzi's Confusion, the debut feature by Chinese filmmaker Li Jue, at the Phenomena theater in Barcelona. The event, a benchmark for Asian auteur cinema, will offer until November 5 a program that includes more than a hundred films from 25 countries in Asia and the Pacific with the aim of bringing the public closer to daily life in this extensive region of the world.
Most titles talk about the problems and conflicts of its people, the daily experiences and emotions and the feeling of belonging to a certain territory.
This year the AFFB will put special emphasis on Chinese cinematography, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Spain, with a total of 22 films. And he will dedicate a retrospective to the renowned Chinese director Wang Chao, who will be in the Catalan capital coinciding with the screening of the eight most relevant films of his cinematographic career.
For its part, the feminist thriller The Royal Hotel, directed by the Australian Kitty Green and which competed in the last edition of the San Sebastián festival, will close a festival that is also committed to giving visibility to the works of young filmmakers, such as This is the case of the inaugural film. Yangzi's Confusion tells the story of a ten-year-old girl who discovers in her mother's diary that she was abandoned at a very young age, a circumstance that causes communication between mother and daughter to become conflictive from that moment on. The director hopes that everyone who sees the film, which she shot in just 27 days, will "care about the children."
Also from distant Australia comes Blaze, by Del Kathryn Barton, a drama that addresses how a young woman becomes catatonic after accidentally witnessing the rape of a woman. The cast includes Simon Baker, popular for his character in the series The Mentalist. "This year we have controversial and controversial films, that is really what the festival has to do: show so that the public can give their opinion," says the director of the festival, Menene Gras Balaguer. As a novelty, this year the AFFB has decided to promote emerging talent with the incorporation of a new call open to new or unknown authors where 10 films of the 100 presented will be screened.
For Gras Balaguer, "the eleventh edition of the festival arrives this fall with a program that aims to be the most representative possible of recent experimental and independent cinema from the Asian continent." The viewer will find works that respond "both to the interest of an audience familiar with these films and to those who wish to get started in a not so new cinema, whose diversity preferably responds to the different narratives it exposes."
The headquarters of AFFBCN 2023 will continue to be the Cinemes Girona, where most of the programming will be distributed. The Filmoteca de Catalunya will host three films (of the 8 that will be screened in total) from the Wang Chao retrospective, and the rest will be distributed at CaixaForum and Zumzeig. While the online programming can be seen on the Filmin Platform and on Betevé.
As usual, the festival is divided into five sections, all competitive: Official, Official Panorama, Discoveries, NETPAC and Special, each of which has its corresponding juries made up of directors, film critics and writers. And it will award a total of fifteen prizes, for the best film, best director and best script for each of the competing sections. Among the titles available in the official section are Perfect Days, by Wim Wenders, Slow Fire, by the Vietnamese Tran Anh Hung with Juliette Binoche as the protagonist, and Evil Does Not Exist, by the Japanese Ryusuke Hamaguchi, deserving of the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice festival.
