Author Archives: Justin

KOFFIA 2011: The Lineup

Posted on July 28, 2011 by Justin

It seems it’s festival season in Australia right now, and after MIFF the next one we’re excited about is the Korean Film Festival in Australia (KOFFIA), which has just unwrapped their lineup for this year. Eugene and I went along to their media launch, and we’re impressed: for their second year, they’ve come back with a larger list of screenings and expanded into Melbourne as well!

Their program announcement has all the details, but here’s a short … (read more)

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MIFF 2011 rolls onwards

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Justin

I do hope Melbourne readers are getting stuck into MIFF this year — there’s a lot on show, and they’ve filled out their schedule with a bunch more Asian films since I wrote up our little summary of their First Glance list. You can see the full program at the MIFF site, but there are a few films of interest that I thought I’d make particular mention of.

Firstly, for those who want a chance to catch some bona fide … (read more)

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Upcoming Asian film festival in Melbourne

Posted on July 10, 2011 by Justin

I’ve been contacted by Neil Foley of Monster Pictures, a Melbourne-based distributor who are organising an all-Asian genre film festival, pencilled in for mid-November this year at the Cinema Nova in Carlton.

Things are still being bootstrapped, but among the titles playing will be Na Hong-Jin’s The Yellow Sea, Sion Sono’s new film Guilty of Romance, and a picture or two from Sushi Typhoon (think Alien vs Ninja, Mutant Girls Squad).

Neil’s looking for volunteers … (read more)

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One Thousand Reviews!

Posted on July 10, 2011 by Justin

I’m delighted to announce that as of Eugene’s review of Wu Xia the other day, Heroic Cinema now has precisely 1,000 reviews up on the site.

It’s been a long time since we started — even I, a Johnny-come-lately compared to some of the team, can remember when we used to review films on videotape and couldn’t wait for SBS to program something fun… say, all of Jackie Chan’s HK movies on successive Friday nights. Nowadays, we get Australian DVDs … (read more)

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‘Wu Xia’ comes to Australian cinemas

Posted on July 3, 2011 by Justin

Continuing with their series of Chinese cinema releases in Australia, China Lion are bringing us Peter Chan Ho-sun’s new film Wu Xia this week. It’s nice to see they’ve resisted the urge to re-title it — it’s apparently going to be titled Dragon for its release in the USA.

Fans of Chinese cinema will be familiar with the name: wuxia describes a whole genre of film and literature, in which heroic swordsmen (and women) compete for mastery of the martial … (read more)

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KCO (Sydney) screens ‘Welcome to Dongmakgol’ this Thursday

Posted on June 21, 2011 by Justin

Sydney readers interested in Korean cinema and able to make it to free screenings on Thursday evenings may be very interested to hear that the KOFFIA team are running a film night at the Korean Cultural Office in Sydney. They’ve actually been doing it for quite a while, with a good mix of films — and who can say no to a free screening of fine cinema?

According to the schedule, this Thursday’s film is Welcome to Dongmakgol, … (read more)

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Detective Dee and Reign of Assassins on Aussie DVD

Posted on June 19, 2011 by Justin

Fans of titanic Hong Kong directors Tsui Hark and John Woo, rejoice — the most recent film from each director hits both DVD and Blu-ray here in Australia this week!

Pinnacle are releasing Tsui Hark’s Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame, an action-magic-mystery-history thingummy as Alan quite accurately puts it, and a good deal of fun. We’ve already talked about it a fair bit here, so I won’t repeat myself — but if you’re a Tsui … (read more)

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SFF 2011 Update: ‘33 Postcards’

Posted on June 8, 2011 by Justin

My SFF rundown the other day contained a pretty serious omission, one that’s particularly of interest given HC’s mission statement — Australian-Chinese co-production 33 Postcards, from director Pauline Chan. Mea maxima culpa, everyone.

33 Postcards is only the second film to be produced under 2010’s co-production treaty between our two countries, after Mario Andreacchio’s The Dragon Pearl. Starring Guy Pearce and Zhu Lin, it’s a drama about a Chinese girl who finally gets the chance to visit … (read more)

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