Asian film festival offers quality movies, tough choices
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Music flows throughout "The Piano in a Factory," starring Wang Qian-yuan.
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The sixth annual Silk Screen film festival will cast a wide net with movies from far-flung Asian and American locales.
It opens at 7 p.m. Friday at the Harris Theater, Downtown, with "I Am" (not to be confused with the Tom Shadyac documentary of the same name) from Indian filmmaker Onir. "I Am," which also launched the London Asian Film Festival in March, is about people with fractured lives held together by unbroken dreams.
Shot in four Indian cities, it presents an unmarried woman who longs for motherhood, two friends separated by long-simmering conflict, an adult survivor of sexual abuse and gay men targeted for harassment and blackmail.
Tickets for the opening night film are $20 at the door with $125 admission to a gala immediately afterward at the Omni William Penn Hotel, Downtown. The party will feature dress, food and entertainment with an ethnic accent.
The festival will close May 15 at The Warhol with "Women Without Men," a winner at the 2009 Venice Film Festival, from Iranian visual artist Shirin Neshat. Go to www.silkscreenfestival.org for more information and see accompanying schedule.
A sampling of reviews:
Her husband already dead, her 7-year-old twins trapped beneath the rubble of the family's apartment, her city crumpled around her, a Chinese mother faces a question that will rent her heart in two: Who to save, her son or her daughter?
Frantic rescuers insist if they lift a concrete slab pinning the children, one will die but one will live. She hysterically pleads for both but relents lest she lose the boy and girl. "Save my son," she says, unaware that her daughter can hear her.
She also doesn't know that the girl, although placed among the corpses, survives and is adopted by a childless couple who believe she has no memory of the calamitous quake.
First Published May 5, 2011 12:00 am
