Philadelphia Asian American Film & Filmmakers was founded in 2008 by a passionate group of Asian Americans who felt a need for a festival space that was focused on supporting the growing Asian filmmaking community. The Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival (PAAFF) is the showcase event of this non-profit organization and is dedicated to supporting and highlighting the experiences of Asian and Pacific Islander diaspora through creative community-focused programs. PAAFF is currently the third-largest film festival of its kind in the United States. In addition to our film programs, our volunteer-run organization also presents supporting programming such as live performances, chef demonstrations, panels and lectures, and educational workshops during the festival and throughout the year.

Our Mission: The Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival aims to serve as a platform to showcase and celebrate Asian and Pacific Islander diaspora storytellers and their works. In order to build a more inclusive and informed community, we collaborate with other like-minded organizations that support this mission.

Our Vision: We believe in celebrating and propelling the voices of Asian and Pacific Islander diaspora storytellers and creators to the forefront of culture by serving as a platform for them to share their vision with the world through film, theatre, and live performance.

Also visit the Official Website for more information

Is it strange that three of the Asian American features this year have the word "home" in their titles? Or that films from around the world, whether AGRA from India or CONCRETE UTOPIA from South Korea, or the classics THE FALL OF THE I-HOTEL and HITO HATA and the contemporary HOME IS A HOTEL, are explicitly about housing crises, real and imagined? Housing is on the mind, especially in a city recently named by US News & World Report as the country's most expensive city to live in. Asian and Asian American cinemas are traditionally obsessed with family, but today we can't take for granted the houses, condos, and SROs that provide the shelter and stage our domestic narratives.

This year's San Diego Asian Film Festival has a new home. After 22 wonderful years at the Hazard Center in Mission Valley, we were briefly swept asea, a consequence of Hollywood shuffles made complicated by the WGA and SAG strikes. But now we are back ashore, the new tenants of the grand Edwards Mira Mesa, in one of San Diego's most vibrant Asian neighborhoods. In a city where rent is high and movie theaters take up prime real estate, we're grateful to be here in the heart of what they call "Manila Mesa," across the street from an H Mart and by a Banh Mi Blvd. So welcome in – shoes optional – cozy up to a film and make yourself at home.

Also visit the [https://sdaff.org/2023/]Official Website[/url] for more information

Hollywood Series (A.K.A. Asia Web Awards) has an official partner LA WEBFEST, the very first web series festival in the world, and 50 International Webfests over the world.

Our goals are to expand the festival so it can become a viable provider of quality content on an international scale. Our intention is to create a place that nurtures and cultivates upcoming creators. Asia Web Awards is a festival which specifically helps independent filmmakers and creators to raise their visibility through the web.

Dates:
Official Selections - November 24, 2023
Nominations - Live Streaming November 26     
Awards - Live Streaming December 30

Important: this is a web event, check to match your time with the exact time with the local dates and times of the event. Please visit the Official Website for more information

The Asian World Film Festival (AWFF) brings the best of a broad selection of Asian World cinema to Los Angeles in order to draw greater recognition to the region's wealth of filmmakers, strengthening ties between the Asian and Hollywood film industries

Uniting through cross-cultural collaboration, our festival champions films from  over 50 countries across Asia spanning from Turkey to Japan and Russia to India.

The Festival is unique in that it predominantly screens Oscar and Golden Globe submitted films from Asia for the Best Foreign Language Film.

Since the Festival began we are proud to have screened over 70 Oscar and 50 Golden Globe submissions!

All films that participate in the Festival will have a unique chance to be guided through the challenging awards season, showcasing their foreign films to the Academy, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and all Guilds for enhanced exposure, media attention and awards consideration.*

Visit the Official Website for more information

BFI London Film Festival recorded its highest in-person attendance in five years with 195,665 attendees this year

The last edition to record more attendees was in 2018, with 205,630. The festival's occupancy levels were at an impressive 90% across its London paid-for and free in-person screenings – up from 87% last year and 84% and 83% in 2018 and 2019 respectively. 54% of ticket bookers this year were new to LFF, indicating a new generation of film audiences discovering the festival.

A further 225,577 attendees participated in the 2023 festival online. Delegate numbers were also up by 12%, from 3,254 last year to 3,649 this time, for the industry programme hosted at London's Picturehouse Central cinema. The festival has also unveiled its audience awards for the 2023 edition. George Amponsah's London-set crime thriller Gassed Up, produced by the UK's Sunrise Films and Ascendant Fox, took the audience award for best feature, having had its world premiere at LFF. Chloe Abrahams' debut The Taste Of Mango, looking at the filmmaker's family history, won the documentary audience award.

Further audience prizes went to short film Festival Of Slaps, a reflection on African parenting stereotypes, for best British work; and Murals, which juxtaposes the war in Ukraine with the murals of Banksy, for best immersive/XR.

"It was an absolute joy seeing audiences enthusiastically connecting to this year's programme which was beautifully handcrafted by our talented festival team," said Kristy Matheson, in her first year as BFI London Film Festival director. "Over 12 days we saw audiences coming together and being rewarded for their curiosity and fandom across the full breadth of what the moving image has to offer. UK artists shone bright across the whole programme, alongside some of international cinema's greatest legends and exciting new talents; our sincere thanks to them for sharing their supreme creativity with us all."

More than 800 UK and international filmmakers and immersive creators attended the festival, which features 252 titles from 92 countries across features, shorts, XR works and series. 39% of the works came from female and non-binary filmmakers.

The festival announced its 2023 awards on the closing weekend, with Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Evil Does Not Exist taking the best film award in official competition.

Visit the Official Website of the British Film Institute

Jerzy Skolimowski—An Existential Quest for Liberty

In a letter, Jean-Luc Godard famously described two figures as the greatest directors in the world: himself, and Jerzy Skolimowski.

While Skolimowski claimed he had not seen any of Godard's films at the time he began his career as a director, his approach to filmmaking can be easily drawn parallels with the French New Wave giant: they both experiment with cinematic forms and reinvent new sets of film language. The near-miraculous combination of revolutionary aesthetics, meticulous mise-en-scene and instinctive improvisation found in Identification Marks: None, Walkover and Barrier displays the same creative impulse and independent spirit as Breathless and Band of Outsiders, though their deliverables are totally different.

Living under the communist regime, Skolimowski emerged as one of the most original voices of the Polish New Wave. Before entering Łódź Film School, he was enlisted by Andrzej Wajda to tweak the script of Innocent Sorcerers, and later collaborated with Roman Polanski on his 1962 debut feature Knife in the Water. Refusing to conform to the mainstream and censorship, he channeled his prodigious talents – as an actor, playwright, poet, painter, jazz drummer and even boxer – into a series of visually imaginative and poetically structured films that capture the ambiguous, restless and flailing vibes of the postwar generation, exemplified in his Andrzej Leszczyc trilogy. More than self-contemplation, these disillusioned portraits offer a wider reflection of the absurd reality at large, enshrouding political allegory and incisive social critique under surreal imagery.

The censorship and controversy surrounding Hands Up! in 1967 prompted Skolimowski to leave Poland and be exiled to Britain. His work became more diverse under the free rein, helming iconic films such as Deep End and Moonlighting which won high international acclaim. After a 17-year hiatus working as a professional painter in the 1990s, he made an incredible return to cinema with the extolled Four Nights with Anna. Together with Essential Killing, Skolimowski creates wildly daring portrayals of victims of circumstances, delving into the depths of the soul through wry yet poignant tales about obsession and survival. His meditative study of man and the world reaches new heights with EO, a masterful blend of fascination, empathy and violence that transcends a donkey's suffering into aching beauty.

This year, the late Godard realised his longstanding ambition in Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars; it's a fair prediction that Skolimowski will continue to stun us with his enduring passion for cinema.

To read the full program please click here

Also visit the Hong Kong CineFan Official Website for additional information about other events and information.

Talks between SAG-AFTRA and Alliance Of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) concluded on Tuesday and are scheduled to continue on Wednesday.

In a message to members on Tuesday night on the 103rd day of its work stoppage, the actors union said: "Today, the CEOs came back to the table. We are scheduled to continue talks with them tomorrow.

"We will continue to provide updates with you directly. Remember – don't believe anything you read in the press unless it comes directly from us.

"Keep showing up on the picket lines and make your voices heard around the country."

The union and its AMPTP counterparts resumed negotiations this week with Hollywood heads Donna Langley (NBCUniversal), Ted Sarandos (Netflix), David Zaslav (Warner Bros. Discovery), and Bob Iger (Disney) in attendance.

Talks stalled earlier in the month, shattering what had been an optimistic mood after days of negotiations.

On that occasion the Hollywood companies rejected a revenue share proposal by the union which it said would cost the companies less than 57 cents per subscriber each year.

AMPTP said the measure would cost its members more than $800m annually, which SAG-AFTRA said was an inflated estimate.

The parties remain some distance apart on the matters of residuals and revenue share, minimum compensation, and regulation of AI.

OUR MISSION

DisOrient is the premiere Asian American independent film festival of Oregon, celebrating films with authentic Asian Pacific American voices, histories and stories. We highlight social justice themes that translate to universal human experiences. We promote representation, diversity and inclusion to broaden the narrative of who is American, and to strengthen and build community.


VOLUNTEER RUN

DisOrient is a volunteer-run event. This festival would not exist without the time, talent, and hard work of the folks who believe in our mission and who work on planning this great festival year-round. If you would like to become part of the DisOrient team, please fill out our volunteer form and email us at volunteer@disorientfilm.org if you have any questions; we can always use more help.

For submission details and to submit your film please go to the Official Website

Filmmaker Lina Soualem follows Hiam Abbass, a Palestinian who left her village to pursue an acting career in France and later returns home with her daughter.

The film festival jury at the London Film Festival consisted of Rubika Shah, Jeanie Finlay, and Paul Tonta, said with Bye Bye Tiberias, Lina Soualem has "woven an elegant exploration of three generations of women in her family and the places that made them. She has created a poetic and intimate film that transcends the borders of their family home to interrogate grief, identity, and the energy that propels you to find yourself."

Accepting the award, Soualem thanked the BFI London Film Festival and UK audiences for engaging the film with "warmth and generosity."

"At a time when we feel unseen, and more stigmatized than ever, at a time when we don't know what tomorrow will be like, our films will always exist to remember us," Soualem said.

 Watch the Official Trailer

At the 67th London Film Festival Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi takes the Best Film award with his latest film EVIL DOES NOT EXIST.

The enigmatic pic is Hamaguchi's follow-up to the Oscar-winning Drive My Car and follows young father Takumi and his daughter, Hana, who live in Mizubiki Village, close to Tokyo. Like generations before them, they live a modest life according to the cycles and order of nature. A plan to construct a glamping site near Takumi's house, offering city residents a comfortable "escape" to nature, threatens to endanger the ecological balance of the area and the local people's way of life.  Headed by Mexican filmmaker Amat Escalante, alongside with Kate Taylor, program director of the 2023 Edinburgh International Film Festival, and English novelist Niven Govinden described Evil Does Not Exist as subtle and cinematic.

"Underscored by fully realized performances, Hamaguchi's assured drama supersedes the sum of its parts. It is both a lyrical portrait of family and community and a nuanced consideration of the ethics of land development. Amidst a strong competition, the jury is unanimous in our admiration," the jury said.

 Watch the Official Trailer