Asian cinematography keeps winning over audiences, alluring juries, revolutionizing the filmmaking industry. Asian film festivals are held worldwide. Given the cultural, economical and political peculiarities of this production, Asian cinematography has established itself with its new imagery, enticing an ever growing number of western audiences.

This fifth edition of Asiaticafilmmediale aims at illustrating the realities of some Countries which, because of or despite the conflicts they withstand, are a fertile ground for directors whose power and daring are nurtured by the firsthand experience of the extremely serious situations of their homelands: war, particularly in Afghanistan, Iraq, along the boundaries of Iran and, in a different way, the ethnic and religious clashes that upset the Indian subcontinent.

Chaos and grief rule over Afghanistan; Earth and ashes by Atiq Rahimi, our first guest, is remarkably tragic, caustic and devoid of solace. In an arid and waste land, in the mountainous region that stretches north of Kabul, an old man and a child set out on a long journey down a dusty road, a passageway to overcome the despair of a whole nation. Atiq Rahimi, a writer, was able to establish himself as a director in his own right as well, and to become a spokesman for those who cannot be heard.

Through these movies, our hope is to help regain a positive look at the future our children will inherit. We cannot but acknowledge the state of hopelessness which, nowadays, is undergone by millions of children who are torn away form their families, put to hard work day and night, exploited, abused, even abducted by loathsome human organ traders, as Afghan director Timor Hakomyar tells us in his Wandering eyes. Little refugees who had to learn how to live their childhood in the midst of death and ravages, in the precarious conditions of all exiles, as we learn form The Boy who Plays on the Buddhas of Bamiyan, a poignant portrayal of Mir who is told by his elders about the hardships and hopes as experienced by their own Country in twenty-five years of war.
We dedicated the opening of this festival to the children of Afghanistan, with a view to break through indifference and a hope that our gaze upon the East may soon become more attentive, sensitive and sympathetic.
In the USA-Iraq war scenario kids are the innocent victims whose vicissitudes are narrated, with enormous sensitivity and bewildering clearness, by Bahman Ghobadi, a Kurdish-Iranian director who, in 2005 was an Academy Award nominee for the movie Turtles can fly. The Riverside, too, directed by Ali Reza Amini, illustrates the exodus of Kurdish refugees bound to the Iranian border, the horrors of bombings, and the sufferings of a young pregnant woman who is badly injured by a mine concealed at a short distance from the borderline.
War as experienced by the inhabitants of Baghdad in their daily lives is told by two outstanding and remarkably meaningful and effective documentaries: Daily Baghdad daily by Romain Goupil and Forget Baghdad by Samir Naqqash, born in Baghdad, an Israel-resident Jewish writer and one of the most prominent authors of books in Arabic.
Clashes between different religious groups make even India, “the greatest democracy worldwide”, a very fragile country. No Indian director can boast a deeper awareness than Govind Nihalani, born in Karachi, in 1940, whose commitment to social justice is unmistakable ever since his earliest films, such as Mother of 1084 (1977), an adaptation of Mahasweta Devi’s novel regarding the leftist revolutionaries shook Calcutta in the early ’70s, otherwise known as “Naxalbari” or “Naxalite Movement”.
Aakrosh (1981) deals with the issue of corrupted police, much in the same way as Dev, a movie that stirred up the controversial reactions of Indian audiences and critics alike, on account of such an embarrassing subject as the religious intolerance fostered by politicians who, until very recent times ruled the Country. The cast was made up of celebrated “mainstream” movie-stars from Bombay, a key-city in the frame of politically tolerated clashes between the Hindu community and the Muslim minority.

With the documentary Final Solution, Rakesh Sharma denounces the policy of intolerance pursued by an Islam-hostile nationalism, showing how the right wing fostered and conducted the anti-Muslim carnage that ravaged throughout Gujarat, during the electoral campaign of 2002.

A true “Asian Hollywood”, Tokyo experienced its golden age throughout the ’20s, ’30 and ’50, followed by a waning period that today’s new directors are very effectively stopped.
In this edition, Tokyo is seen through the ayes of Japanese master filmmakers, such as Hiroshi Shimizu (who directed 163 films between 1924 and 1959!), Mikio Naruse, Kenji Mizoguchi, Nagisa Oshima, Masato Haradasu and, last but not least, the groundbreaking director Kyoshi Kurosawa, a special guest of Asiaticafilmmediale, the internationally acclaimed “Dark Prince” of the Japanese new wave, and Junji Sakamoto one of the most prominent artists of contemporary cinematography in Japan.

Tokyo has become, in the span of a few decades, a multi-ethnic and multilingual metropolis. Therefore, contemporary Japanese film industry could not but acknowledge the work of Japan-born Korean Directors. The Korean-Japanese minority has been subject to a sort of discrimination that, during the ’80s, had got a hold of the Japanese star-system, in which Korean actors and actresses performed without revealing their ethnic identity.
As from the ’90s, director Yochi Sai, born in Korea, has made a name for himself with a movie centered on his fellow Koreans’ everyday life in Japan, All under the moon, a love story between a Tokyo taxi driver and a Filipino waitress. All of his works deal with the embarrassing theme of such a difficult coexistence and with the complex dynamics of emarginated microcosms, from that of mobsters depicted in Marks Mountain to the daily life of inmates in a Hokkaido prison in Doing Time, up to the relationship between a man and a dog as narrated in his 2004 movie Quill.

Asiaticafilmmediale is pleased to showcase less known film industries as well, such that of Uzbekistan, which has a yearly production of just about five or six movies but can boast a highly lyrical value, as shown by Djahongir Kasimov’s The Giant and the Squab, a remarkably ironical film, full of hopes and imbued with a truly heartfelt love for life. Another noteworthy example is the Cambodian film Moto Thief. Inspired by Ladri di biciclette, H M Lo’s film was carried out by an NGO, with a 550 dollar budget, and is the first in the number of movies we will screen during our festival. Opening the film is the image of a beautiful Cambodian child who holds a caption in his hands reading “make movie no war”.