March, June, October...

Cooking up all sorts of trouble...

The difficulty with writing these things is that, by the time a film is announced/ released, we’re knee / neck deep in upcoming releases, to the point where I have a hard time keeping track of whether we’re in March— when we delivered everything for Spacked Out; June — where of course, we are; or September — which is the release I’m currently trying to figure out.

But! This month brought both Spacked Out and A New Old Play into the forefront of our attention. On June 9th, the Fresh Wave Film Festival here in Hong Kong opened with a screening of Spacked Out on 35mm, with the director Lawrence Lau, assistant director, Tse Loh Tse, and actors Angela Au and Debbie Tam in attendance. And yours truly:

The cast, who had last seen the film in 2000 when it was released (or not at all because they were underaged and this is a category III film), was giddy and very sweet about being anxious at seeing themselves again at this age. They explained “S-Language” to us, rendered in the subtitles as pig-latin, which was a 2000s modification of Cantonese used by the cool kids.

An audience member brought printed posters for those who posed questions and Lawrence Lau offered to autograph these for them after the screening (from which we darted because we were trying to make the last ferry home). All in all, just a complete delight of an evening to see the film with a full house, most of whom stayed for the Q&A which ran till midnight. Freshwave runs until July 2nd for those of you in, or visiting Hong Kong.

We had to rush home because the very next morning, we were taking the train up to Shanghai. From Hong Kong, this is an eight hour ride and was Ariel’s first time to China. We got into Shanghai just before 7:30pm, checked in, and went off looking for a cab to take us to dinner… except it’s now impossible to flag a cab in Shanghai because everything is on an app, so we took a bus, and ended up a bit late to meet an old friend— Dingding, the producer of A New Old Play, and a new friend, the founder of the marvellous Chinese label Disk Kino.

Dingding took us to some sort of cafe where they were serving sliders, so we quickly insisted on going to something, anything else. We turned the corner and ended up eating at a restaurant known for their de huò jī, a northern-style one-pot dish that was new to us.

A New Old Play is one of the last film on our initial list (the list we made right after getting off our first call with Justin, which also featured Being Natural, Ode to Nothing, Videophobia, Sell Out!, and two films that may or may not ever come together) and the main reasons for this are:

1) it’s a fantastic, unique, and beautiful movie about memory and history (both of which are elusive, especially in this context)

2) Dingding is one of my favourite people in the world and

3) she and the director own the film (though they do have other investors), and so we made a deal with them wherein they benefit directly from the film’s success. Our mandate includes supporting living filmmakers, and so very happy to be able to work with this film.

Dingding & Qiu Jiongjiong’s cat, the final beneficiary of your hard-earned cash.

The film is released otherwise in North America by Icarus, so there are other ways to see it should you be a subscriber to our newsletter but not a Blu-ray person, and I encourage you to see it in cinemas if it’s ever playing near you.

A New Old Play is now sold out, but we should be seeing the standards back in stock real soon. Thank you everyone for the support. Here’s Ariel in one of the film’s T-shirts, which are still in a sampling stage.

Disk Kino is a Chinese Blu-ray and UHD distributor of a great number of Chinese films, including personal favourite The Black Canon Incident (now out of print, I’m told I have the last copy!) as well as more contemporary affairs, such as their fully-decked out release of the animation film Deep Sea. The work they do is unparalleled for Chinese cinema due mostly their founder Wang Bo’s persistence with the state-owned studio apparatus.

He gifted us two beautiful editions this trip, Xie Jin’s 1964 classic Two Stage Sisters and Wu Yigong 1983 adaptation of the same name, My Memories of Old Beijing. Both have English subtitles… do with that information what you will 😉

The beautiful cover art for the Disk Kino edition of Two Stage Sisters.

Which brings us back to the present, working on our fall releases simultaneously. We were able to meet the director of one of these films this trip. Here’s what we had with the director in question:

Crab on rice— on the left is the “correct ratio” the restaurant recommends, but the table decided to order extra bowls of rice, an order the waitress took with a winking smile.

While I have those releases on my mind, all I want to do is talk about them (!!) So I’m glad to say that Plastic, the latest feature from Videophobia director Daisuke Miyazaki is premiering internationally at Japan Cuts in New York City. The screening is on July 28, 9:00PM at Lincoln Centre. More news to come.

And finally, we’re sorry to hear of the passing of Marie-Pierre Duhamel, a great ally of cinema, in particular Chinese independent cinema, a friend especially of A New Old Play. She was always insightful, kind and marvellous to spend time with and will be sorely missed.