The New York Asian Film Festival (NYAFF) 2023 is the 22nd edition of the festival, which will be held from July 14–30, 2023, at Film at Lincoln Center (FLC), with a special weekend of screenings (July 21–23) at a new venue, the historic Barrymore Film Center in Fort Lee, New Jersey. The festival will feature 70+ new and classic titles, a greatly expanded selection of short films, and an exciting slate of celebrated guests from Asia and the diaspora. Here are the 15 most anticipated films from NYAFF 2023:
1. I Love You, Beksman
Director: Percival Intalan
Cast: Christian Bables, Iana Bernardez, Keempee de Leon
Languages: Filipino with English Subtitles
Year – 2022, Runtime – 107 min
Fashionably androgynous Dali is the premier glamour guru in his family’s super-gay salon. Naturally, everyone assumes he is on the same team, but when a clumsy mishap with gorgeous beauty pageant contestant Angel leads him to save her day, the truth finally comes out: He’s a straight guy with a queer eye! As Dali falls head over heels in love with Angel, he must overcome a multitude of obstacles on the path to true romance. This brilliant conceit riffs buoyantly on ‘Romeo and Juliet’ for a modern-day fairytale in flamboyant attire. Wearing campy corniness on its self-aware pop-art sleeve, no stone is left unturned. Identity, machismo, feminism, femininity, stigma, social conditioning, discrimination, inclusion, prejudice, acceptance, sexuality, and gender — are all taken to task with gay abandon. Christian Bables (Big Night!, NYAFF 2022) and the entire cast bring this whole affair home with pitch-perfect fabulousness.
2. #Manhole
Director: Kazuyoshi Kumakiri
Cast: Yuto Nakajima, Nao, Kento Nagayama, Haru Kuroki
Languages: Japanese with English subtitles
Year – 2023, Runtime – 99 min
Young sales executive Kawamura leads a picture-perfect life. He’s handsome, well-liked, has a great job that he excels at, and is about to marry the CEO’s daughter. On his way home from a surprise party the night before his wedding, bizarre happenstance lands him in a desolate manhole amidst a driving downpour, with no easy way out. This being 2023, he is armed with a trusty cell phone, but who will answer his calls for help, and how will he ever get out of this dire situation in time for the big day? As this fantastical edge-of-your-seat thriller unfolds, all is not as it seems, revealing a sinister, twisted tale of betrayal and revenge most foul.
3. Motherhood
Director: Ryuichi Hiroki
Cast: Erika Toda, Mei Nagano, Mao Daichi, Junko Takahata
Languages: Japanese with English subtitles
Year – 2022, Runtime – 116 min
This sweeping tale of maternity is exquisitely mannered yet also colorfully tinged with a seductive scent of mystery and ripe bursts of melodrama. Springboarding off a news item about a 17-year-old girl’s attempted suicide, the details behind two generations of fraught mother-daughter relationships unfold with stirring twists and turns aplenty. The intense psychodrama of emotional blackmail and betrayal reveals a philosophical rumination on the titular concept that is as thought-provoking as it is compelling. Seasoned director Ryuichi Hiroki (Vibrator) exhibits his patented cinematic insight into female hearts and minds in this sublime adaptation of the shocking novel by Kanae Minato (Confessions).
4. Mountain Onion
Director: Eldar Shibanov
Cast: Esil Amantay, Amina Gaziyeva, Zhazira Kaskey, Kuantay Abdimadi, Laura Tursunkanova
Languages: Russian, Kazakh, Mandarin with English Subtitles
Year – 2022, Runtime – 90 min
11-year-old Jabai and his younger sister Saniya find out the hard way that their parents’ marriage is on the rocks. Desperate to keep the once-happy family together, they embark on a journey to the strange and mystical land of China in quest of a magical item that will save the day. Director Eldar Shibanov looks to the eyes of children for a wryly imaginative satire of adult foibles, filling his deceptively quotidian Kazakh boondocks with lively oddballs as colorful as their quirky costumes and other random devices. And wait till the kids reach their destination! From makeshift ninjas to black-market sexual enhancers, this triumphantly anarchic ride is as hilarious as it is astute.
5. Glorious Ashes
Director: Bui Thac Chuyên
Cast: Le Cong Hoang, Bao Ngoc Doling, Phuong Anh Dao
Languages: Vietnamese with English subtitles
Year – 2022, Runtime – 117 min
Profound and lyrical, the first film in over a decade from cinematic poet Bui Thac Chuyen (Adrift) spins a mesmerizing tale of life, love, loneliness, and pyromania in yesteryear’s Mekong Delta. Based on short stories by renowned female author Nguyen Ngoc Tu, ‘Glorious Ashes’ intertwines the fates of two young wives and their deadbeat husbands with an older woman who begins living with an ex-con. Breathtakingly beautiful and heartbreakingly poignant, the saga is nearly ethnographic in the authenticity of its details, with fire and water depicted frequently and magnificently in all their extremes and visual power. Both transgressive and transcendent, the film is a triumphant reflection of the resilience of womanhood in a less modern world and a scorching condemnation of the inequities of the patriarchal society.
6. Mountain Woman
Director: Takeshi Fukunaga
Cast: Anna Yamada, Mirai Moriyama, Masatoshi Nagase, Toko Miura
Languages: Japanese with English subtitles
Year – 2022, Runtime – 100 min
As ‘Mountain Woman’ opens, Rin goes about the job of helping a family dispose of a newborn. Her Tohoku village is in its second year of a devastating famine, and babies are being discarded because they are simply extra mouths to feed. Rin’s family are outcasts, and she is obliged to do the other residents’ dirty work. When a local seer declares the village cursed, Rin is chosen as the first offering to appease the gods.
Fortunately, she flees to the forbidden realm of Mt. Hayachine before she can be trapped. There, her quest for survival gradually transforms into a journey to self-actualization. This haunting film (atmospherically shot in all-natural lighting by cinematographer Daniel Satinoff of “Tokyo Vice”), may be set in the late 18th century, but its existential tale of man vs. nature, rural human cruelty, generational shame, and individual resilience in the face of impossibly harsh discrimination resonates across the centuries.
7. The Abandoned
Director: Tseng Ying-ting
Cast: Ning Chang, Ethan Juan, Chloe Xiang, Sajee Apiwong
Languages: Mandarin, Taiwanese, and Thai with English Subtitles
Year – 2022, Runtime – 128 min
The discovery of a woman’s corpse ironically saves the life of Wu Jie, a down-on-her-luck police detective whose life is falling apart. Soon more bodies and ominous clues emerge, revealing the work of a vicious serial killer targeting illegal migrant workers. With a local broker for the immigrants as a potential suspect, Wu Jie tenaciously pursues the case and finds herself vaulted from her own dire existential crisis into a harrowing realm of madness. Director Tseng Ying-ting (The Last Verse, NYAFF 2018) masterfully blends the police procedural with psychological themes and social issues into a transcendently insightful examination of the human psyche. Painting the world of ‘The Abandoned’ with haunting cinematic strokes, deftly reflecting the modern malaise of a world gone wrong, he also offers a shining glimmer of hope.
8. Abang Adik
Director: Jin Ong
Cast: Kang Ren Wu, Jack Tan
Languages: Malay, Mandarin, Cantonese, Sign Language with English subtitles
Year – 2023, Runtime – 115 min
Undocumented orphans Abang and Adi adopted each other as brothers growing up. Their bond is inseparable, yet they could not be more different. The slightly older and deaf Abang is an altruistic do-gooder, while Adi is an unrestrained rascal. Abang tries to walk the straight and narrow path while their social worker strives to get them the documentation they need to move their lives forward. Adi, however, gets involved in the fatal treachery of immigrant smuggling. When his pent-up aggression leads to an unspeakable act, he’s roped in, and the brothers’ fates are sealed. Director Jin Ong’s remarkable award-winning debut achieves the verisimilitude and pathos of neorealism while offering a rare glimpse into Malaysian street life.
9. Okiku and the World
Director: Junji Sakamoto
Cast: Haru Kuroki, Kanichiro, Sosuke Ikematsu, Koichi Sato, Renji Ishibashi
Languages: Japanese with English subtitles
Year – 2023, Runtime – 90 min
Edo-era Japan is remembered for many things — brutal nation-building, isolationist foreign policies, and the last samurai. Leave it to veteran auteur Junji Sakamoto to remind us that it also marked the culmination of a truly sustainable ecosystem. In his audacious, aesthetically brilliant new jidaigeki, ‘Okiku and the World’, the director achieves a perfect blend of potty humor, cutting social commentary, and budding romance set amidst the fecal ubiquity of the mid-19th century.
As playful as it is soulful, the film focuses on two unlikely protagonists, “manure men” Yasuke and Chunji, who collect human waste from tenement outhouses and resell it to farmers in the countryside. Chunji longs to woo lovely schoolteacher, Okiku, who longs to see the world but cannot because she must support her father, a fallen samurai. To see Sosuke Ikematsu energetically scooping out latrines; to hear Koichi Sato delivering a treatise on love to his real-life son, Kanichiro, as he battles constipation; to view the ever-demure Haru Kuroki complaining about farting — these are delights you never knew you needed, but will never forget.
10. Pufferfish
Director: Mohamad Kamal Alavi
Cast: Taranom Kazemi, Iliya Akhavan Rad, Siavash Cheraghipour, Amineh Arani, Maryam Mohammadkhani, Abas Alireza, Fariba Sadkhosravi, Afson Namdar, Shirin Fazaeli
Languages: Persian with English Subtitles
Year – 2023, Runtime – 15 min
Ava attends a religious rite at school, where teachers sing hymns. After school, she attends her cousin Pouya’s birthday party, but with the presence of uninvited guests, the birthday takes a different form.
11. Redemption with Life
Director: Zhang Wei
Cast: Lei Kang, Peng Hou, You Zhang, Weilin Sang
Languages: Mandarin with English subtitles
Year – 2023, Runtime – 100 min
In the latest feature from NYAFF’s Filmmaker in Focus, Zhang Wei, a majestic motorcycle club snakes its way along a glorious Tibetan highway before a nested series of flashbacks reveals the plight that brought them on their profound journey. Focusing on three old friends who live by classic codes of honor and loyalty until get-rich-quick schemes threaten to tear them apart, the film plumbs the depths of capitalistic corruption and the fiercely tragic greed and hubris it ignites. As the biker buddies experience lifestyles of overindulgent excess, with nouveau riche delusions and egregious machismo marked by their brazen objectification of women and sudden bursts of violence, Zhang Wei peppers his dark meditation with exciting tropes straight out of classic Asian crime and action films and imbues this resonant saga with a distinctly Chinese moral compass and soul-crushing pathos.
12. Miss Shampoo
Director: Giddens Ko
Cast: Vivian Sung, Daniel Hong, Kai Ko
Languages: Mandarin with English subtitles
Year – 2023, Runtime – 116 min
Hand it to star auteur/director Giddens Ko to adapt one of his own wild short stories into a gangster-romcom mash-up ripe with his patented raunchy stylings. After a fledgling hairdresser (superstar Vivian Sung) inadvertently saves the life of a gang boss, he takes a shine to her, and pretty soon, she’s coifing all the young hooligan’s heads with untenable abandon. The star-crossed lovers’ courting is so brazenly frank that it revs up from zero to sixty in no time while her whole family cheers them on to do the deed. Running parallel with their refreshingly uncouth love story is mob vs. mob intrigue and a boisterous baseball backstory that renders this whole madcap venture a bloody and heartfelt showstopper.
13. You & Me & Me
Directors: Wanweaw and Weawwan Hongvivatana, Wanweaw Hongvivatana, Weawwan Hongvivatana
Cast: Anthony Buisseret
Languages: Thai with English subtitles
Year – 2023, Runtime – 122 min
Identical twin sisters You and Me revel in fooling anyone they can as they use their twinship to their own personal advantage. Soon after the shocking news of their parent’s impending divorce, they are sent to spend the summer at grandma’s in the countryside while Mom and Dad work things out. There they just happen to meet up with their schoolmate Mark, who has a crush on one of them but cannot tell them apart… yet. Love triangle shenanigans ensue as the girls have to face up to their own identities and confront the feelings of first love together. This charmingly insightful directorial debut by real-life twins Weawwan and Wanweaw Hongvivatana puts a buoyantly ironic spin on a summer romance.
14. What We Leave Behind
Director: Kang Nam-jin
Cast: Han Chang-hyun, Lee Chang-hoon, Seon U-young
Languages: Korean with English Subtitles
Year – 2022, Runtime – 11 min
A glimpse into the life of a man, from the birth of his child to the death of a loved one, told through his possessions and the place he calls home.
15. A Tour Guide
Director: Kwak Eun-mi
Cast: Lee Sul, Oh Gyeong-hwa, Park Se-hyun
Languages: Korean with English subtitles
Year – 2023, Runtime – 94 min.
Han-young, a North Korean defector, gets a license to guide Chinese tourists thanks to the language skills she acquired as a refugee in China. She works diligently but faces many challenges, from coworker rivalry to assimilation, all while desperately searching for her missing brother. The irony of Han-Young’s position is emblematic of marginalized peoples’ struggles everywhere. As a stranger in a strange land, Han-young is entrusted to show people around ancient landmarks, yet she herself often gets less than respect. Seeing her always a bit detached from her surroundings is a sobering symptom of her trauma, both from having fled her homeland as well as adjusting to a new one where the welcome is not entirely warm.
Read More: Check Out Other Coverages At the Film Festivals
