With October wild fires running rampant in So-Cal, the state issuing more extreme red flag warnings than ever before, and, most recently in San Diego, officials advising against doing yard work for two weeks for fear of creating even a mild fire-starting spark – events that will further fuel the debate over global warming – one irrefutable fact is that the annual San Diego Asian Film Festival (SDAFF) is one of the most successful, ethnically diverse Asian film festivals in the world. In fact, SDAFF 2019, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary and runs November 7–16, features 170+ films in 40 spoken languages in seven venues. Since starting my yearly SDAFF coverage of martial arts (MA) in 2007, each festival has either featured a famous star(s) in a known major MA film(s) or highlighted a rising actor from a smaller country who's making waves in the genre. This is the first year where I didn't recognize any star or film with MA in them. It's a sign of the times as Asian filmmakers aren't putting money into epic MA films anymore. Yet what's sparking my interest this year is how the MA representations are popping up in bits and pieces during the festival in ways I never expected.
I'm often asked what constitutes a film to be a MA movie. The need to include what many fans and writers prior to 2010 considered to be as a classic American-made martial arts movie, Chuck Norris' GOOD GUYS WEAR BLACK (1978), became that gauge. This 96-minute film featured 115 seconds of fights that included 19 kicks, eight punches and two knee strikes. The minimal length-of-time fight statistic (2% of the film) and similarly simple MA choreography of Good Guys became the criterion.
In the Gerald Ding-directed short documentary FAYETTENAM, which at the end of the day is 100% all about martial arts, the film's subject Gianna Smith discusses her first Muay Thai fight in Thailand: "This guy comes over to me with this little girl. We walk up to the ring and as the fight starts, her little face changed, going from sweet girl to going to f*** me up. I felt guilty. She then beat the sh*t out of me, snapping my head back like a pezz dispenser. I changed my game strategy and won the fight. Overall it was a bitter sweet experience. I'm 30 and had fought a 14-year-old kid. It's part of fighting in Thailand and there aren't many opportunities for females."
Smith is a biracial, straight-A student, army brat child who, after being violently beaten up by her Korean mother and abandoned, quit school, started selling drugs to make a living and became an angry young lass. As an emotional outlet for her past demons, Smith turned to the combative nature of Muay Thai and embarked on a bone-breaking fighting quest from New York to Thailand, with her sights set on a world championship in Belarus. Through the violent aspect of martial combat, she finds peace, balance and meaning in life, one of those ultimate tenets in MA that is quickly fading.
Directed by Brian Cheng, GUMMY POWER is a second short that found its way into the festival. Described as the most epic duel ever to feature gummy bears as the divine secret energy force needed for martial combat, actors Darren Deng and Bobby Reilly fight in an underground dimly lit tunnel to determine which gummy bear flavor is the strongest power booster. It's the kind of short that a filmmaker who takes the time to understand fight choreography and how to present it on film can get screened at a festival that gives newbies a break ... you never know where things can go from there.
The Jeff Fong-directed BAICHI AND THE THREE BLIND RATS, a late addition to the program, is a MA short that touts a simple wacky logline…a Kung Fu gang, a garage, and three soon-to-be-sniveling rats. Baichi is intelligently piggybacked onto the seemingly non-martial arts film Empty By Design. Yet maybe it's also tricky by design. Empty is about two 20-somethings, mixed-race Samantha and Filipino-American Eric (Osric Chau), a stunt double for action star Jun Jie, who must come to terms with being outsiders in a country that's supposed to be their home. Producer Dante Bosco shares, "As Asian Americans, we're immigrants. It's a story about displacement, not just for Asians but for many people of color in America and on how comfortable do you feel in America or in your homelands. That conversation is a big part of why we made the film."
Born in Canada to a Hong Kong dad and Malaysian mum, Chau is a Wing Chun and Wushu expert. After training for seven months in 2007 with the BSU Wushu Team at Beijing's Sport University, Chau became a member of the Canadian National Wushu Team. Though wanting to be a stuntman over an actor, in Empty, Chau's acting debut as Eric is playing the role of Chau's lifelong dream profession. Chau uses the role to wear a Jeet Kune Do Academy shirt, speak about stunts with Jun Jie (who fancies himself the next Bruce Lee), and proffers interesting thoughts on the life of a stuntman.
So why three shorts? Now in his ninth year as SDAFF's artistic director, Brian Hu explains, "No one pays to see one short but a program of shorts about a certain topic or sensibility. And so we're thinking about how we build up on the sensibility. Yet what we're especially looking for is exciting new voices. We know this won’t be the last film they'll ever make. Even if the film isn't perfect – short ones usually aren't – it's okay, you're someone that we can't wait for your next movie. In a way it’s like investing in them.
"When I saw Baichi, which was submitted after Empty by Design, a film about a stuntman, the actor in it is the same actor in the short. Since the short film has action elements, it seemed like the kind of thing that the characters in Empty might be making. When I saw the short, I thought this would be fun to show before Empty."
Though some reviewers see Lim Kyeong-taek-directed South Korean film NO MERCY as a revenge-themed thriller in the vein of TAKEN (2007), with some comparing the action to Jung Byung-gil's THE VILLAINESS (2017), the trailer makes it look like a watered-down version of Veronica Ngo's Vietnamese revenge thriller FURIE.
In-ae (Lee Si-young) is a champion martial artist who, years earlier, used her brutal form of payback on a nasty dude deserving it. Yet the law didn't see it that way and sentenced her to prison. After serving her time and back on the outside, she wants to spend her time with her mentally challenged teenage sister. Just when you think life might work out, where the past is the past, In-ae finds it necessary to return to her violent ways when her younger sibling unwittingly falls in with the wrong crowd and gets sexually assaulted and abducted. Armed with a sledgehammer, spiked heels and unprincipled brawling belligerence, In-ae shows an explicit taste for crushing men.
One reviewer wrote that your mileage with NO MERCY may depend on how much sexual assault you can stomach, which makes it sound like one of those unnervingly violent Hong Kong Category III films from yesteryear.
When I ask Hu, who is a big fan of the MA genre and has a good eye for recognizing quality action, why it is becoming tougher to land the big star MA films, he laments, "It's becoming difficult to find MA films because I don't think people in Asia are asking for that. If I was financier, I'd think, 'Am I going to invest this amount of money in a MA film or I can make a soapy teenage romance movie set in the '90s, which I know has a good audience and there's a formula for them?' They're going for the soapy teenage romances. There hasn't been a lot of momentum around MA films these past few years.
"In the past, I've pursued going after these kind of films. NO MERCY was submitted to the festival. I didn't know anything about it. It feels like an independent film. You can see that the fights in VILLAINESS had a lot of special effects, it was wild and they probably put a lot resources into it. Yet, in NO MERCY, I don't think the actress does martial arts and they were just pulling something out of it [VILLAINESS], a fun idea with the same spirit. Cobbled together it was still thrilling to me. We're not watching this for the choreography but for the relentless…and that's definite. Plus she's someone to cheer for."
Another interesting film that seems to be almost secretly harboring MA is the insanely sane FLY ME TO SAITAMA. Set in some kind of alternative reality, Saitama parodies the reality of Tokyo's belittling of Saitama Prefecture in a way that NYC makes fun of New Jersey. Yet things are about to drastically change. In Tokyo, Momomi or Mom (Fumi Nikaido) is a male high school student and the son of the Tokyo governor who physically looks like a girl. When he meets the mysterious blue-haired male transfer student Rei Asami (Gackt) from America, they become attracted to each other; however, unbeknownst to Mom, Rei is from Saitama and on a mission to liberate Saitama.
Based on a 1980 manga of the same name, Saitama is plastered with gender-bender hijinks, absurdly eccentric action battles with swashbuckling samurai sensitivity, a swanky feudal-era wardrobe, and it's all acted with poker-faced earnestness. It will be a wild film to witness.
Though not a MA film per se, the closing night film, Johnny Ma's TO LIVE TO SING, about a family matriarch trying to keep the family's Jinli Sichuan Opera Group alive, features her troupe performing on stage and practicing opera-style weapon fighting off stage. In 1790, when Qing dynasty Emperor Qianlong, aka China's last Kung Fu emperor, invited all the top opera troupes at the time to Beijing to perform, his plan was to create a new style of Chinese opera…Beijing Opera. This is a rare film highlighting the Sichuan style of opera, and it will be exciting to see what parts of Sichuan opera influenced the Beijing style.
