East Asia Film Festival Ireland 2020 – IFI@Home presents the 4^th edition of the festival, and its first online edition.

As always, the festival brings innovative, diverse, independent and inspiring films from East Asia together with rich and otherwise unavailable contributions from both newly established and renowned filmmakers. We are especially proud to present interviews and Q&As with filmmakers including Kôji Fukada (A Girl Missing) from Japan, Cambodian-Chinese director Hong Khaou (Monsoon), and Jia Zhangke (Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue) from China.

Movies are available to rent for €5.99 | 6 film EAFFI 2020 festival package is available for €32.99

A Girl Missing (2019)
Ichiko (the wonderful Mariko Tsutsui) leads an honest, quiet existence working as a home-care nurse. For years she has cared for Tôko, the elderly grandmother of the Oishi family. Ichiko has become like one of the family, especially to Tôko's granddaughters, Motoko (Mikako Ichikawa) and Saki (Miyu Ogawa). One day though, Saki disappears and it seems Ichiko's nephew is involved. Ichiko feels helpless as the stability of her work and private life slips away. Japanese filmmaker Fukada (Harmonium) crafts a slow-burn, suspenseful drama unravelling social conventions and exploring human complexity in a tense portrait of a woman caught up in a spiralling crisis. Tsutsui's performance captures the complex internal suffering of Ichiko's plight, and her burgeoning dread of what is to come.

Monsoon (2019)
30-something Kit (Henry Golding, Crazy Rich Asians) returns to Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon for the first time since he was six, his family having fled to England in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. He arrives ahead of his brother to seek out a place to scatter their parents' ashes. He visits his cousin, Lee (David Tran), who helps him piece together hazy memories from his fractured childhood. Kit meets Lewis (Parker Sawyers), a handsome African American clothes designer whose father fought in the war. Romance sparks as Lewis introduces Kit to the more vibrant parts of the city. Writer-director Hong Khaou (Lilting), Cambodian-Chinese by birth, lived in Vietnam until he was eight, his family having fled the Khmer Rouge. This is an intimate meditation on cultural dislocation and the search for belonging.

Heavy Craving (2019)
30-years-old and overweight, Ying-Juan (a stellar Tsai Jia-Yin) is the chef at the preschool run by her slim and demanding mother. Ying-Juan enjoys nothing more than cooking for the kids (and herself) but struggles with insecurity, the children having dubbed her ‘Ms Dinosaur'. Reluctantly, she joins a weight loss programme which seems like the answer, but the real change comes when she befriends the smiling Wu, a handsome young deliveryman, and Xiao-Yu, a boy at the school who likes to dress in girls' clothing, and a special bond forms between them. Taiwanese writer-director Hsieh Pei-Ju's debut feature draws on her own experience growing up as an overweight teenager. This thought-provoking film shows the darker side of self-discovery, but is also clever, honest, and touching.

Swimming Out Till The Sea Turns Blue (2020)
Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke (Platform; A Touch of Sin; Ash is Purest White) has spent the last decade exploring social and historical dimensions of China through fiction. Here he returns to his native province, Shanxi, to the Jia Family Village, in a documentary about China's modern writers, part of a trilogy of ‘spiritual portraits'. Structured “casually as flowing clouds”, the story is told through memories of the late writer-activist Ma Feng whose most creative period was the 17 years prior to the Cultural Revolution; testimonies of major contemporary writers, Jia Pingwa (born in the 1950s) focuses on the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath; Yu Hua (born in the 1960s) speaks about China's “reform and opening up” period; and Liang Hong (born in the 1970s), whose work coincides with the present. Beautifully shot, feelings are triggered by words, archive footage and contemporary images of people. A moving journey through words, framed faces and landscapes, city crowds, montages of the new world of mega-cities and people modern life, where “writing poetry doesn't mean living a poetic life”.

Chinese Portrait (2019)
Chinese filmmaker, screenwriter and producer Wang Xiaoshuai (So Long, My Son) brings together documentary, painting and photography in this fascinating 10-year visual account of his native land in places rarely seen, during a period of tremendous change. Travelling from eastern cities Beijing and Shanghai, and to northwestern areas where nomadic live abounds, Wang simply filmed what he saw: traditional villages, crumbling old factories, new construction projects, commuters on a train, tourists at the beach, and factory workers in huge workshops or immense office spaces. Through long, often almost static shots, with no dialogue, voice over or subtitles, people stare out at us, while in the background life continues unaware.

Wisdom Tooth (2019)
Guxi and her half-brother Guliang live in Donggang, Liaoning, a city on China's northwestern border, where they depend on each other financially and emotionally. Guxi works as a hotel maid, Guliang as a local fisherman. When an oil spill contaminates the coastal waters, Guliang loses his livelihood. Qingchang, an attractive and wealthy woman, appears in their lives, and her growing romance with Guliang makes Guxi feel like an outsider. Meanwhile, Qingchang's father, a mob boss, is accused of murder, but Guxi stumbles upon the truth. As winter sets in and temperatures plummet, things around Guxi become increasingly unclear.

Vision (2018)
Jeanne (Juliette Binoche), a French writer accompanied by translator Hana, travels to the lush but deserted forests of Yoshino in Nara, Japan in search of a rare and miraculous plant called ‘Vision’. According to legend this plant, which possesses the ability to dispel human weakness, agony and pain, appears only once every 997 years under special conditions. Jeanne stops off for a few days at forest ranger Tomo’s (Masatoshi Nagase) house. For Tomo, Vision is not just a myth, and so he and his mentor Aki (a blind keeper of the forests) join Jeanne in her quest. Acclaimed Japanese director Naomi Kawase (Suzaku; The Mourning Forest; Still the Water; Radiance) once again sets her film in her native region of Nara, a rural area of one of the ancient capitals of Japan. Composed of stunning imagery, this is a world of subtle visual alchemy opening to lyricism, delicate sensuality, unusual emotions and spiritual quests.

*PLEASE NOTE: This exclusive premiere screening of Vision is available to view for ONE HOUR from 8pm – 9pm IST on Wednesday, August 5^th only. All rentals must be started between 8pm and 9pm.

East Asia Film Festival Ireland would like to thank the Arts Council, RTÉ Supporting the Arts, Dublin City Council, the Irish Film Institute, and all its sponsors and partners for their invaluable support.