From September 2 to 5, Electric Shadows organizes its first festival at De Cinema in Antwerp, Belgium. After a successful online event about Taiwanese film in April, this time it's the cinema screen that forms the playground for singular Asian films.
Sensual and smart. The Electric Shadows festival welcomes Asian cinema that makes you reflect and roam. The festival opens on Thursday September 2nd with “Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains” and closes on Sunday September 5th with Tsai Ming-liang's “Days”. Between the first fiction film by the young maker Xiaogang Gu and the most recent film by a modern master, Electric Shadows offers a trajectory of discovery and rediscovery.
Following up on April's online event ‘Voices of Youth. Unseen Taiwanese films of the 1960s' there is a tribute to the unjustly forgotten Richard Chen, a contemporary of Mou Tun-fei. This follow-up program now revolves around his restored short films amongst which “The Mountain” (1966), in which Mou Tun-fei and two of his friends talk about their aspirations as upcoming artists. In its Taiwanese retrospective, Electric Shadows also shows the recent restoration of the classic “Typhoon” (1962) by Pan Lei (1927-2017).
A second retrospective program focuses on the image of Vietnam and its inhabitants. In “Vietnam the Movie” (2016), film essayist Nguyen Trinh Thi reconstructs the wartime past of her homeland through a montage of clips from Hollywood, European and Asian cinema. In “Eleven Men” (2016), Nguyen Trinh Thi brings a short story by Franz Kafka to the screen using existing footage featuring Vietnamese actress Nhu Quynh. “Letters from Panduranga” (2015) and “Fifth Cinema” (2018), bring us a reflection on the position of men and women, on cultural legacy, and on her own role as an artist-researcher. The Vietnamese section of Electric Shadows is rounded off with a selection of new short films by young directors: “The Unseen River” (2020) by Lan Pham Ngoc, “The Eternal Springtime” (2020) by Viet Vu and “Les attendants” (2021) by Minh Quy Truong. The latter two will attend the festival to talk about their explorations of family ties, friendships and sensuality.
There is also room for more current feature films such as the deceptively light-hearted “Three Adventures of Brooke” (Sissi Deng, 2018), “Come Here” (Anocha Suwichakornpong, 2021) that shows four Thai twenty-somethings searching for who they are. From Chinese artist Lei Lei both his short film “A Bright Summer Diary” (2020) and “Breathless Animals” (2019) are shown, in both of which memories takes center stage. Urgently in the here and now is “Ushiku” (2021), in which Thomas Ash uses a hidden camera to film asylum seekers who are being held without perspective in the Ushiku immigration center, near Tokyo. Determined to put human rights violations on the map politically, Ash and the imprisoned migrants put their finger on Japan's cynical migration policy.
More information about Electric Shadows can be found on the festival website and on the Facebook page.
