Celebrating links to Asia

By PETER CALDER

Our strengthening links with Asia are celebrated in a 10-day festival of Asian cinema which opens tomorrow in Auckland's Sky City Theatre.

The 10-day, 12-feature programme includes movies from Hong Kong, India, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Japan and Taiwan.

New Zealand is home to some 250,000 Asian migrants, 60 per cent of whom live in the Auckland region.

Niche film festivals are a frequent part of Auckland's arts calendar these days and their proliferation threatens at times to dilute the impact of the main, mid-winter festival which is plainly the most thoughtfully programmed.

At least some of the festivals are hard to see as anything other than vanity projects mounted by embassies to boost the profile here of the countries they represent. Others, like the Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and Beck's Incredible Film Festival may seem to exist mainly to stir the Society for the Promotion of Community Standards into a frenzy of legal challenge, but can genuinely claim to be specific in their aims.

The Asia Film Festival Aotearoa is certainly the latter although the quality of the titles is hard to judge since few have been screened or reviewed in major markets abroad and festival organisers have not previewed any.

Programming manager Alex Lee told a launch function last month that he wanted the festival to be "a positive celebration of New Zealand as a world nation with links to Asia".

Notable titles: Song of the Stork, a semi-documentary reflection on the Vietnam War told from the point of view of Viet Cong conscripts; a quartet of sci-fi tales called Robot Stories; Hotel Hibiscus, a coming-of-age story which has made a splash at fests in Hong Kong and Hawaii as well as in its native Japan; and the closing-night attraction, Aparna Sen's Mr and Mrs Iyer, a cross-cultural love story.

On screen

* What: Asia Film Festival Aotearoa

* Where: Sky City Theatre

* When: from tomorrow

Asia Film Festival Aotearoa 2004