Reel Asian and imagineNATIVE are joint community partners for all the films being presented this weekend at TELUS TAIWANfest.  Subtitled CROSSOVER: Rise of Indie Nation, this is the Vancouver-based organization’s second year in Toronto. I headed down to the Studio Theatre at Harbourfront Centre to do the intros for today’s films.  A huge crowd filled the site to enjoy the sunshine by the lake; their numbers boosted by busload after busload of suburban seniors arriving throughout the day.  But before all that, there was brunch…

Brunch with good friends is the best way to nurse a karaoke hangover (RA volunteer coordinator Gina Rim has the telltale photo proof here), so I kicked off my Saturday on the Wheat Sheaf patio:

That’s Renata Mohamed (LIFT), Christina Sit Yee (The Learning Partnership) and Rebecca Gimmi (Justina M. Barnicke Gallery), from left to right.  Rebecca and I couldn’t decide between eggs benny and steak-and-eggs, so we each ordered one and split them between us.  Yum!

Fortified with brunch, I met up with my imagineNATIVE counterpart, Jessica Fleming, and her volunteer Bryan Wright. The lineups for the matinée of E Sha Age took us by surprise, stretching all the way down the hall in what seemed like the blink of an eye!

It’s a good thing Jessica and Bryan were also there doing outreach – I would’ve been totally overwhelmed if I had been there all by myself.  Gong-ke, the winner of our audience draw, laughed and promised the prize (a Reel Asian water bottle) to his grandson.

There will be an encore screening of E Sha Age tomorrow (Sunday) at 4pm if you missed it today. Crowds were less busy for the 6pm show of Viva Tonal – The Dance Age, but the air-conditioned venue provided welcome relief on a hot August evening.  Congratulations to our second water bottle winner, Francine, who was visiting Toronto from Reston, Virginia, with her husband and mother.  ”We don’t have anything like this back home!” she said.  Glad you enjoyed the film, Francine – you should check out our friends at the DC APA Film Festival though, it’s not far from Reston!

This is Reel Asian’s second year supporting the film programming for TELUS TAIWANfest and we plan on being back again for many more years.  It’s a great opportunity to reconnect with our contacts in the Taiwanese community, and reach out to a key constituency of our festival fanbase.

Check out the Indie Lounge Talent Lab at the Grand River Film Festival. Download the application here.

Indie Lounge Talent Lab is an artistic development programme that takes
place during the Grand River Film Festival and provides
emerging talent from Ontario with an unparalleled education, experience and an
introduction to the global community of filmmaking.

Over an intense 1 day period, accredited participants have the opportunity
to interact with and learn from acclaimed filmmakers. Using the festivals
outstanding relationships with world class filmmaker,Talent Lab fulfills a
tremendous need in the film industry, providing invaluable and incomparable
artistic mentorship and development opportunities to a new generation of
filmmakers

Previous Talent Lab guests have included directors Bruce McDonald, Derek
Vanlint, and Yojiro Takita; screen writers JF Lawton and Tony Burgess;
key note speakers Denis Coyne (The Nightingale Company), Peter Tuovi
(Copyright), Tarek Yassine (Rogers Wireless), Sebastian Chorney (InterActive
Ontario), and Stan Davidson (New Media); acclaimed below-the-line technicians
Keith Murphy (Steadicam), Simon Fon (Combat Choreography), David
Thompson (Editor), Paul Day (Editor), Paul Winestock (Editor), Paul Whitehead
(Editor), Stephen Roque (Sound Editor) Randy Butcher (Stunt), and Blair
Johannes (Stunt); as well as demonstrations on new camera technology
featuring Micro Lens (Vistek) and the Red One (Sim Video).

The Indie Lounge Talent Lab initiative is run by Ken Nakamura, CEO / Producer
The Nakamura Group Advantage and Benjamin Rouse Director / Producer
Resolve Films.

Check out the new Sharpie commercial by Jeff Chiba Stearns (done in the style of his short film Yellow Sticky Notes that screened at Reel Asian in 2007)

Download application at Planet in Focus’ website.

Cuong Ngo (The Golden Pin, 2009) has just returned from Vietnam where he and his Canadian crew shot Oriental Pearls for 32 days over 6 months. This film follows the tales of 5 women and their stories of unattainable love, disappointment, expectation and forbidden sensual desire. Looking forward to it!

My iPhone pic doesn’t really do it justice, but a great crowd came out on Friday night for the Canadian premiere of The Killing of a Chinese Cookie, a light-hearted doc by Japanese American director Derek Shimoda. The film helped kick off the Fortune Cooking Food Festival, part of Harbourfront’s World Routes series.  This is Harbourfront’s first pan-Asian food and culture festival.

People started arriving well in advance, which is pretty cool for a Friday evening where so much else was going on.

We handed out prize ballots to the lineup, introducing ourselves and the festival.  It was nice to hear a lot of people saying they were there BECAUSE they heard about it through Reel Asian!

After an introduction from Harbourfront’s Rodrigo Fritz, executive director Sonia Sakamoto-Jog made some opening remarks before drawing the winning prize ballot. Barnett Chow was the lucky winner of his own DVD copy of the film to share with friends and family, courtesy of Cherry Sky Films and Reel Asian. Congratulations Barnett!

The film’s title is a reference to the under-appreciated 1970s crime flick The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, by director John Cassavetes.  Shimoda’s film is a playful, wide-ranging look at the origins of the familiar crescent-shaped biscuit.  Fortune cookies are part of just about every Chinese restaurant meal in North America, yet they are completely unknown in China. Who really invented fortune cookies? And why? The answers might surprise you!

Reel Asian is excited to be a community partner for the Fortune Cooking Food Festival. Events continue all weekend long at Harbourfront Centre, with tons of FREE activities to do for the whole family: cooking demos, food tastings, kids crafts, dance performances, live music, comedy shows, and of course MORE FILMS! Don’t forget to fill out a prize ballot – you could win a grand prize worth more than $500 or one of 15 other festival prizes! (Click thumbnail to see larger pic with prize descriptions)

Just before the screening of Killing of a Chinese Cookie this evening, Chris and I scoped out the food pavilion looking for potential vendors for the festival… and found Spring Rolls (long-time RA supporter) offering a little Dim Sum 101! Recently, I have had more than a couple of friends confess that they had never tried dimsum because the whole ordering process was too much of a mystery – so [at the risk of this posting sounding like too much of a blatant plug] I was happy to see that Spring Rolls is attempting to de-mystify dimsum for the un-initiated with a glossy menu and big shiny pictures.   I can’t vouch for the taste, since we had to run back in to greet the audience at the screening, but process-wise, it can’t get much easier than this.  Dim sum 201: Rol San?

After watching the trailer of Thai film PHOBIA 2 (which gave me serious heart palpitations by the way), I didn’t think I had the courage to sit through the entire screening.  So I was pleasantly surprised when I managed to sit through all 5 short stories AND enjoyed the experience at Toronto After Dark tonight. [Warning: spoiler alert...do not continue reading if you plan to watch the film]

In three of the five stories – “Novice”, “Backpackers”, “Salvage” – there is the underlying theme of redemption and karma.  Don’t kill your Daddy or you will turn into a tree.  Don’t feed narcotics to little kids or you will be attacked by zombies.  Don’t sell lemons or you will…ok, I think you get the point.  This was like the ‘fear factor’ version of Life Lessons 101.  In the second story, “Ward”, a master who has been vegetated in the hospital is reincarnated into his fellow inpatient’s body.  Of course, all of this is not without gore and excessive red splatters.  My favourite had to be “In the End”, where Dir. Banjong Pisanthanakun reenacts a film crew playing a film crew who are shooting a horror film sequel (sound familiar?).  In an effort to create an ending with a twist that has never been done before, they end up combining every possible twist you could imagine.  I jumped and laughed so much by the time it was all over, I had a new appreciation (and thicker skin) for horror.

For me, there is something about Asian horror that is so much more terrifying than horror films coming out of Hollywood.  Perhaps, it’s because you often get the unexpected.  Or  maybe it’s the commonly used themes of Buddhist principles that one can relate to.  Or all the supposedly true haunted tales I grew up hearing from the far East.  Or maybe it is just the long-straggly-black-hair-draped-in-face look.  Heck, put a sweaty black wig on a watermelon and I would probably jump.  All I know is, I have now added caves, car dealerships, and hitch-hiking to my running list of phobias.

The National Post reported this week on the recent boom of film activity in Toronto, including the newest festival to the scene, Open Roof Films (ongoing, with a screening of LOVERS OF HATE this Thursday at Amsterdam Brewery).

I’m often asked about how it is to compete with so many film festivals in Toronto (85 and counting), but my answer is that they only help to build interest and excitement for movies, and for festivals in general.   This is a great city to be a cinephile, and to be a film presenter.  Bring it on!

The skies cleared up just in time for After Dark’s presentation of Junko’s Shamisen and Robogeisha last night. Junko’s Shamisen (directed by Sol Friedman) was a nice surprise for audience members who may not have been expecting this playful but macabre short work. I have to say that the After Dark audiences are so much fun – the cheering begins with the film festival trailer and the energy stays strong through the whole screening! This is what film festivals are all about. Alien vs. Ninja has more in store tonight!