REEL | Tony Leung Makes A 'Silent Friend' x SIFF 2026

"I want to find out what plants sense."

1-2 Special / Films We Like

Silent Friend (aka Stille Freundin), a strange but affecting historical tale by visionary Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi, follows Hong Kong superstar Tony Leung as a Chinese neuroscientist studying a beguiling gingko tree on the grounds of a medieval German university town in 2020. It's a uniquely engrossing two-and-a-half-hour film essentially about a professor befriending an old tree through science.

SCREEN | Swimming Past 'Numakage Public Pool' x DOXA 2026

"Once the pool is gone, it'll be too late."

Hydroblast

Numakage Public Pool, director Shingo Ōta's peaceful eighty-minute observational documentary chronicling the eponymous landlocked suburban Tokyo public swimming pool complex's final months of operations, details the much-loved location through its ten-thousand daily patrons, from the elderly, families, and children, as they fight to keep it open against looming urban development.

CABLE | Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan Age Their 'Beef' – Netflix Season 2

"She has appalling taste in interior design."

A24 Television

Back for another melodramatic spin at tormented domestic rivalries, season two of Beef's anthology series, created by Korean-American writer/producer Lee Sung Jin, takes a turn towards the affluent country club crowd in a personal feud between members of its staff, management, and new ownership.

SCREEN | 'Spring After Spring' Parades Around Chinatown x VAFF 2025

"She wanted to see us thrive."

Vancouver Asian Film Festival

Chinese-Peruvian-Canadian local filmmaker Jon Chiang, making his feature debut, directs Spring After Spring, a Vancouver Chinatown-based documentary following three remarkable dancer sisters, Anabel, Val, and Lisa Ho. They reunite to lead the annual Lunar New Year Parade after the death of their mother, dedicated community leader and dance teacher Madame Maria Mimie Ho.

VIFF 2025 | Bi Gan Dreams A Cinematic 'Resurrection'

"The secret to eternal life is to no longer dream!"

Vancouver International Film Festival

VIFF 2025—Resurrection (狂野时代 aka Wild Times), visionary Chinese artist turned filmmaker Bi Gan's ambitious dreamscape odyssey of surrealist sci-fi slow cinema, is structured into six disparate but interconnected chapters, each revolving around one of the Buddhist senses, including the "mind." Set in a far future where most people no longer dream and, as a result, can live forever, things start off in a German expressionist style before transitioning into distinct twentieth-century cinematic eras in China.

CABLE | Wong Kar-wai Colours 'Blossoms Shanghai'

"Neon signs glowed like a sea of flowers."

Jet Tone Films / Tencent Pictures

Blossoms Shanghai, Chinese auteur Wong Kar-wai's first television drama series, broadly romanticizes 1990s Shanghai in the lushly complementary vein of what his cinematic masterpiece, In the Mood for Love, did for 1960s Hong Kong, but only on the small screen. Created and directed by Wong, scripted by Qin Wen, and based on author Jin Yucheng's award-winning 2013 novel, Blossoms, it tells a vaguely historical yarn of late twentieth-century Eastern capitalism wrapped in melodramatic intrigue.

GENRE | Finally 'Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair' – Pure Uncut Revenge

"Tear that bitch apart!"

Lionsgate / Cineplex Pictures

The one and only Quentin Tarantino finally reassembles his fourth film (split in half but counted as one by its director and star), the two-volume Uma Thurman-starring revenge actioner into one four-and-a-half-hour magnum opus of uncut martial arts ultraviolence, retitled Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair.

VIFF 2025 | Park Chan-wook Refuses to Make 'No Other Choice'

"There's nothing I won't do."

Vancouver International Film Festival

VIFF 2025—No Other Choice (aka Eojjeolsugaeopda), acclaimed South Korean auteur Park Chan-wook's sharp economic thriller satire, uses the threat of murder as an amusing metaphor for how capitalist structures pit workers against each other. It's a stark but absurdist conception of a desperate future where the suburban family's dreams of an idyllic everyday existence are quickly fading away.

REEL | Top 10 Films of the 21st Century So Far

"We won't be like them."

Janus Films / Jet Tone Films

Click on each film title to read its corresponding review:

1) In the Mood for Love ¹ (dir. Wong Kar-wai, 2000)

2) Mulholland Drive ² (dir. David Lynch, 2001)

3) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (dir. Michel Gondry, 2004)

4) Ghost World ³ (dir. Terry Zwigoff, 2001)

5) The Social Network (dir. David Fincher, 2010)

FEAST | Global Flavours x Bar Asra x South Granville

"We want to celebrate the connection between cultures, ingredients, and people."

Tokyo Silk (sake, Calpico, pomegranate, and vodka) + Nigata Paper Plane (bourbon, spritz, grappa, and lemon)

South Granville—(May 9, 2025) Bar Asra, the brand new cocktail bar and restaurant, comes from seasoned Sirka chefs Kanwardeep Ahluwalia and Baldeep Singh (also co-owners) and occupies the original hundred-year-old location of the legendary Vij's and later its sister restaurant Rangoli.

SCREEN | Hiring A Chinese 'Mistress Dispeller' x DOXA 2025

"When a fish takes the bait, your heart will beat with the fish."

DOXA Documentary Film Festival

Director Elizabeth Lo documents the eponymous Chinese phenomenon of wives hiring professionals to save their crumbling marriages through one particular middle-aged couple in Mistress Dispeller. How she follows the raw, unfiltered emotions, feelings, and motivations of these strangers is nothing short of fascinating.

SCREEN | A Queer Romantic Comedy of Errors – 'The Wedding Banquet'

"Queer theory takes the joy out of being gay!"

Bleecker Street / VVS Films

Thirty years later, Korean-American indie filmmaker Andrew Ahn remakes Ang Lee's seminal 1993 Taiwanese queer romantic comedy, The Wedding Banquet, into a fresh take on modern romance featuring a delightful cast of Asian actors. Shot in Vancouver but set in Seattle (because, of course), the film centers on two LGBTQ couples who, comically, try to solve each other's familial, financial, and romantic problems in the silliest ways possible.

SCREEN | Recollections of a Vietnamese Rebellion – 'New Wave' Culture

"I was chasing a story about a bunch of Vietnamese-American rebels."

Photo credit | Yudi Echevarria/Angel City Press

Chinese-Vietnamese-American director Elizabeth Ai explores the immigrant experience through music in her fun but meaningful documentary, New Wave. All about the influence of the titular genre of music and its effects on the pop culture of the Vietnamese diaspora emerging from 1980s Southern California, the film takes an interesting approach to dissecting the unspoken collective intergenerational trauma of these children of refugees after the fall of Saigon in 1975.

CABLE | 'Interior Chinatown' Typecasts A Police Procedural

"Koreans are the most fun Asians."

20th Television

Award-winning Taiwanese-American author Charles Yu adapts his own bestselling second novel, 2020's metatextual Interior Chinatown, for television. Exploring the life of a generic background Asian character in a Law & Order-type '90s police procedural, the hilarious titled Black & White: Impossible Crimes Unit, stars stand-up comedian Jimmy O. Yang as a Chinese restaurant worker who longs for a lead role in his own life.

SCREEN | 'It Takes A Village: An East Van Story' Gives Back x VAFF 2024

"Community is survival."

Vancouver Asian Film Festival

Vancouver native and first-time feature filmmaker Christopher Cho tells a tale of community in his Ugandan immigrant love letter to the neighbourhoods of East Vancouver. It Takes A Village: An East Van Story dives into the Mubanda family's move to Canada after escaping the violent Ugandan civil war under the brutal dictatorship of President Idi Amin.

VIFF 2024 | Eiko Ishibashi Live x A 'Gift' Does Exist x Rio Theatre

"Water always flows downhill."

Vancouver International Film Festival

Commercial Drive—(October 1, 2024) Talented Japanese singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist composer Eiko Ishibashi performed her affecting live soundtrack score for VIFF Live's special presentation of Oscar-winning auteur Ryûsuke Hamaguchi's wordless Evil Does Not Exist companion film Gift at the Rio Theatre earlier this month.

SCREEN | After the Boy of Summer Has Gone – 'Dìdi' Kickflips Out

"You're pretty cute for an Asian boy."

Focus Features

Set in the recent past of the summer of 2008 in the Bay Area, Oscar-nominated Taiwanese-American first-time feature filmmaker Sean Wang takes his own experiences growing up to tell a tender coming-of-age story in Dìdi (弟弟, aka "little brother" in Mandarin). His small-scale, semi-autobiographical indie drama is rich with details of its time period, featuring juvenile humour about friendship, crushes, and fitting in as the son of Chinese immigrants.

IMBIBE | Good Thief x Rebellious Vietnamese x Riley Park

"It's a venture into the unexplored territories of flavour and design."

Riley Park–Little Mountain—(July 25, 2024) From co-founders/siblings Vincent and Amélie Thuy Nguyễn, the same "older brother and sister" duo behind the award-winning, authentic Vietnamese restaurant slyly named after themselves, Anh and Chi (since 2016), comes their hotly anticipated, recently opened next door culinary side project, the cheekily named Good Thief—a name purposely evoking a modern day Robin Hood.

CABLE | Rashida Jones Mourns A 'Sunny' Disposition on Apple TV+

"I'd robot murder someone for this chair alone."

A24 Television

Actress/filmmaker Rashida Jones stars in the oddball dark sci-fi comedy, Sunny, based on the 2018 novel The Dark Manual by Colin O’Sullivan. Set in Kyoto, series creator Katie Robbins establishes a vaguely tech-centric future where AI-programmed domestic robot companions (called "homebots") are commonplace throughout Japanese society but might have troubling (possibly murderous) unknown motivations when not otherwise being helpful, doing mundane tasks.

SCREEN | Digitizing the Afterlife – 'Eternal You' x DOXA 2024

"It's able to hijack the things that we love the most."

DOXA Documentary Film Festival

Directors Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck delve into the deeply troubling world of a "digital afterlife" created by artificial intelligence to extend the lives of deceased loved ones in Eternal You. This very real technology allows startups to effectively digitize those who have passed away by generating simulated versions of them in order to comfort grieving survivors.