Opening Film

• KIM Ki-duk
• Korea
• 2002
• 95min

While a film festival is set up as an arena where ‘pleasure’is embraced, it is also a place where we as a general audience or cinephiles celebrate the meaning of cinema and also co...

Closing Film

• KITANO Takeshi
• Japan
• 2002
• 113min

Takeshi Kitano’s films always contain intense energy hidden beneath their apparent tranquility and reticence. Sometimes that energy can be violence and, at other times, obsession. ...

A Window on Asian Cinema

• Mike DE LEON
• Philippines
• 2002
• 93min

The late 19th century figure Jose Rizal is a national hero of the Philippines. He was a renowned artist, but he is better known as the spiritual leader of the national movement aga...

A Window on Asian Cinema

• CHANG Tso Chi
• Taiwan,Japan
• 2002
• 109min

The Best of Times is a coming-of-age story that combines the depressive sensibility of film noir with conventions of the Taiwanese family melodrama. Wei and Jie are cousins who wor...

A Window on Asian Cinema

• SABU
• Japan
• 2002
• 87min

Another comedy from director Sabu, The Blessing Bell follows the trail of a man who may be the luckiest unlucky person. The factory shutdown leaves Igarashi jobless on his first da...

A Window on Asian Cinema

• Apichatpong WEERASETHAKUL
• Thailand
• 2002
• 125min

Blissfully Yours introduces the issue of Burmese illegal immigrants in Thailand. Min is one such man from Myanmar who falls in love with the Thai, Roong. As Min sets out to find a ...

A Window on Asian Cinema

• Junji SAKAMOTO
• Japan
• 2002
• 116min

Bukunchi - My House is a film by one of the foremost directors of the 90s Japanese independent movement, Junji Sakamoto. It is a bitter-sweet film about two brothers fighting again...

A Window on Asian Cinema

• Hirosi Shimizu
• Japan
• 2002
• 105min

This is the second film directed by Hiroshi Shimizu, who had worked as Takeshi Kitano’s assistant director. The film comically depicts the lives of three underdogs. Iwano, in his t...

A Window on Asian Cinema

• Liu Bing Jian
• China
• 2002
• 91min

What goes on at a funeral reveals the culture and customs of that particular region or society. Liu Bingjian’s Cry Woman looks at Chinese society through such scenes. First, the Ch...

Special Programs in Focus

• Nagisa Oshima
• Japan
• 2002
• 117min

An intelligent young Korean man, known as ′R′, faces death by hanging for committing two sex-murders in Japan. But on the day of the execution, the hanging fails: R′s body refuses ...