‘A New Old Play’ and ‘Mediterranean Fever’ Claim Firebird Awards at Hong Kong Film Festival

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief South Indian star Varun Tej is to head the cast of a patriotic air force action thriller backed by Sony Pictures International Productions. The untitled picture will begin filming from November. Tej, known locally as ‘Mega Prince,’ has his roots in the Telugu-language regional film industry and achieved fame with the Krish-directed “Kanche” in 2015. With the new picture, he will be making his debut in a film in Hindi, the default language of Bollywood. Production will take place in Hindi and Telugu versions. Jointly produced by SPIP and Renaissance Pictures, the film will be directed by Shakti Pratap Singh Hada – a seasoned commercials maker, cinematographer and VFX aficionado who will be making his directorial debut with this film. Written by Shakti Pratap Singh Hada, Aamir Khan and Siddharth Raj Kumar, the movie will be shot in Telugu and Hindi simultaneously. A release is expected in cinemas in 2023.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Comedy drama film “Give Me Five” held on to the top spot at the mainland Chinese box office with a weekend score of just $7.4 million (RMB50.8 million). The film is the story of a young man who is helping his father rediscover his lost memories. As he does so, he is transported back in time and accidentally alters his parent’s pasts. That means he must reunite the pair or risk never being born. It stars Ma Li Chang Yuan and Wei Xiang and is directed by Zhang Luan.

Olivia Wilde is looking stunning on the red carpet!

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Veteran film, theater and opera director Julie Taymor has been set as the president of the competition jury at next month’s Tokyo International Film Festival. Taymor (“The Lion King”) will head a small group that selects the winners from the 15 competition titles that unspool in Tokyo between Oct. 24 and Nov. 2, 2022. The other four members of the jury will be announced later. Taymor is the second woman to head the jury in as many years and follows Isabelle Huppert in 2021. There was no competition in 2020 due to COVID. And in 2019, the jury was headed by China’s Zhang Ziyi.

While the Emmys drew mixed reviews, the film festivals closed to strong applause this week, not only for their movies (we’d forgotten some) but for their star turnout (forgot a few of them, too).

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Jack Neo, who is by far Singapore’s most commercially successful filmmaker, has begun production on “King of Musang King,” a comedy that he envisages being ready for release at Chinese New Year in January. The narrative gives prominent position to durians, the smelly Southeast Asian fruit that most people either love or hate. Neo (“Money No Enough,” the “Ah Boys to Men” franchise) will co-star, direct and produce through his J Team Productions. The film will be presented by J Team, mm2 Entertainment and Cathay Cineplexes. The story revolves around a man (played by Mark Lee), his abandoned Malaysian wife (played by Yeo Yann Yann), and childhood friend Mao Shan (played by Jack Neo).

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief For Asian media operators, the death of Queen Elizabeth II occurred in the middle of the night — Buckingham Palace made its announcement at 6.30 p.m. BST on Thursday — which meant some needed to play catch-up. That was achieved quicker by online and TV outlets than print media. In Australia, a Commonwealth country which has also lost its monarch, public radio and TV broadcaster Australian Broadcasting Corporation newsreaders dressed in black. Programming has switched to reflect the Queen’s life and seven decades of reign. News Corp., which operates major print news brands in Australia, said it will publish souvenir issues on Saturday. These will include the Herald Sun, Daily Telegraph, The Courier-Mail and The Advertiser.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Family comedy “Table For Six” has set an opening day local record for a comedy film in Hong Kong, to the relief of producers who were forced to digest a releasing delay of six months. The Sunny Chan-directed film opened Wednesday in Hong Kong and Macau at 61 theatres, playing a total of 608 sessions. That gave it an accumulated box office of HK$1,986,701 ($255,000). “Table for Six,” which chronicles a family’s holiday gathering where food, love, friendship, jealousy and relationships are on the menu, had originally been planned as a dish to be served at Chinese New Year, in February. And producers had assembled a cast of major Hong Kong and regional talents, including Dayo Wong, Stephy Tang, Louise Cheung, Ivana Wong, Lin Min-Chen and Chan Charm Man.

Eugene Hernandez has been set as the next Director of the Sundance Film Festival, as well as the Sundance Institute’s Head of Public Programming. The film and media industry veteran joins the Institute as its fourth official Festival Director after spending 12 years at Film at Lincoln Center, most recently as Senior Vice President of FLC, Executive Director of the New York Film Festival and publisher of Film Comment.

Korea’s Busan International Film Festival (October 5-14) has announced its full line-up, including opening film Scent Of Wind, directed by Iran’s Hadi Mohaghegh, while Hong Kong actor Tony Leung Chiu-Wai will be honoured as Asian Filmmaker Of The Year.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Tony Leung Chiu-wai, the Hong Kong star of “In The Mood For Love” and Marvel’s “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” has been named Asian Filmmaker of the Year by the Busan International Film Festival. Leung will collect his award at the festival’s opening ceremony on Oct. 5. 2022. The festival will open with a screening of “Scent of a Wind” by Iranian director Hagi Mohaghegh. Busan organizers said that the festival will play a total of 243 films (features and shorts) from 71 countries and territories. These include 89 world premieres and 13 international premieres.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief A weekend concert by Hong Kong acting and singing superstar Andy Lau Tak-wah attracted a record-breaking 350 million viewers on Douyin, the mainland Chinese sister company of TikTok. The concert ran for two hours and attracted 100 million viewers in the first 30 minutes, with tens of millions more joining by the end. The figures beat Lau’s own previous record on the platform, which he set in July last year at a concert to celebrate his 40 years in the business. The South China Morning Post said the record numbers were swelled by a recent wave of nostalgia for Canto-pop or Cantonese-language contemporary music, though the paper also noted that Lau also performed a couple of Mandarin-language classics.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Art-house title “Return to Dust” was a surprise weekend winner, topping the mainland China box office in its ninth weekend of release. The astonishing feat occurred on an otherwise depressed weekend in which China’s cinema box office dipped to a three-month low. This reflected the summer season winding to an end and anti-COVID measures once again forcing major Chinese cities into retreat. Data from consultancy Artisan Gateway showed “Return” grossing $5.3 million (RMB36.2 million) between Friday and Sunday. Those three days accounted for nearly half of the $12.7 million (RMB87.4 million) cumulative total it has earned since release on July 8, 2022.

Film premiere and headlines spilling from a trio of fests in full swing (Venice), just starting (Telluride) and queued up (Toronto) have indie exhibitors and distributors the most hopeful since Covid hit that a stream of new films could fire up the arthouse market.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Two Korean and two Indian movies make the cut in the Busan International Film Festival’s New Currents main competition section. Thet are joined by one each from Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia and Germany. The section has a track record of making significant discoveries among new Asian films and directors.The selected titles are eligible for multiple awards, including the New Currents Award, the FIPRESCI Award, the NETPAC Award, and the KB New Currents Audience Award. The selection comprises: “Ajooma,” directed by Hu Shuming (Singapore-Korea); “Blue Again” from Thailand’s Thapanee Loosuwan; “Hail to Hell,” by Korea’s Lim Oh-jeong; “Memento Mori: Earth,” by Vietnam’s Marcus Vu Manh Cuong; “No End,” directed by Nader Saeivar and flying the flags of Germany, Iran and Turkey; “A Place Called Silence,” by Malaysia’s Sam Quah; “Shivamma,” fromIndia’s Jaishankar Aryar; Japanese director Kubota Nao’s “One Thousand and One Nights”; “A Wild Roomer,” from Korea’s Lee Jeong-hong; and The Winter Within,” directed by Aamir Bashir, and structured as a co-production between India, France and Qatar.

is going to arrive in force, isn’t it?Please?That’s the feeling in the community I like to think of as Hollywood’s Kudo-Industrial Complex. That community limped through one year, 2020, in which theaters were closed, film festivals were canceled or moved online and almost all the shows were virtual; and a second year, 2021, that started out to be a cautiously muted season but was then blindsided by a COVID resurgence that forced a return to streaming and virtual events.Now, as the Venice Film Festival begins on Wednesday, followed by the three-day Telluride Film Festival on Friday and then the mammoth Toronto International Film Festival next Thursday, there’s a palpable yearning for things to return to normal.

For many people, the only thing they know about “Infernal Affairs” is that it served as the inspiration for Martin Scorsese’s beloved “The Departed.” However, over the years, the “Infernal Affairs” trilogy has gained a legacy that some would argue is more influential on cinema than what Scorsese did with his reimagining. And thankfully, for those who have yet to see the films, you’re about to have a chance to see the films in their best presentation yet.  READ MORE: ‘Power Of The Dog,’ ‘Infernal Affairs,’ ‘Malcolm X’ & More Coming From Criterion In November Thanks to the folks at Janus Films, all three “Infernal Affairs” films are getting new 4K restorations and a US re-release.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief “Coo-Coo 043,” a family drama set in the world of racing pigeons, has been set as the opening film of the 2022 Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival. The closing film is comedy “Marry My Dead Body.”  “Coo-Coo 043” is the second film directed by Chan Ching-lin (“The Island That All Flow By”) and stars Golden Bell Awards winners Yu An-shun and Yang Li-yin, along with Golden Harvest Awards best new performer Hu Jhih-ciang and emerging new talent Rimong Ihwar. Chan was previously nominated for Golden Horse Awards best short film for “A Breath From the Bottom,” and as best new director with his feature debut “The Island That All Flow By.” As a work in progress, “Coo-Coo 043” previously participated in the 2021 Golden Horse Film Project Promotion.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief More than 600 buyers from companies in 30 countries are expected to be in Seoul, South Korea from Wednesday for the in-person return of the Broadcast WorldWide convention, better known as BCWW. Although BCWW bills itself as Asia’s largest broadcasting content market, given the strength of the Korean wave, much of the focus will be on Korean content and the business of working with Korean companies. Registered buyers and potential partners include Amazon Prime, Warner Bros. Discovery, NBCUniversal, PCCW the Hong Kong-based owner of Viu, and China’s iQiyi, all of which have already become purveyors of K-programming. “For the past 22 years, BCWW has served as a foundation for K-content to garner the global attention it is getting today,” said Cho Hyun-rae, president of the government-backed Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA). He added that he expects KOCCA and BCWW to “provide continuous support for K-content.”

For many people, the only thing they know about “Infernal Affairs” is that it served as the inspiration for Martin Scorsese’s beloved “The Departed.” However, over the years, the “Infernal Affairs” trilogy has gained a legacy that some would argue is more influential on cinema than what Scorsese did with his reimagining.