The full programme for the 55th London Film Festival was released yesterday, and it’s another strong year for Asian film. The line-up includes: the UK première of Takashi Miike’s follow up to 13 Assassins, a neo-classical remake of the Yasuhiko Takiguchi story about desperate, impoverished ronin and implacably cruel feudal lords, Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai (don’t know if the screenings will be in 3D?); Jiang Wen’s rumbustious comedy-adventure Let The Bullets Fly, starring Chow Yun-fat, Ge You and Jiang himself; A Simple Life, director Ann Hui’s first collaboration with Andy Lau since the film that helped make him a star nearly 30 years ago, Boat People; and AnDa Union: From the Steppes to the City, a documentary by Tim Pearce, Sophie Lascelles and Marc Tiley about Chinese Inner Mongolian band AnDa Union, which might very well be the soundtrack to the year.

Also screening: Yuya Ishii follows his critically acclaimed Sawako Decides with another breathless comic drama about a girl asserting herself, Mitsuko Delivers; Hirokazu Kore-eda is back after the delightful and much-overlooked Hana and slightly disappointing Air Doll with I Wish, about two young brothers at opposite ends of Kyushu devise a magical plan to reunite their separated parents; Children Who Chase Lost Voices From Deep Below, Makoto Shinkai’s animation billed to appeal to Studio Gibli fans; Nobuhiro Yamashita’s My Back Page, about a rookie journalist in 1969 falls under the spell of a charismatic student radical, played by festival fave Kenichi Matsuyama; and the Jia Zhangke-produced Mr Tree by Han Jie, about a small-town loser who botches his own marriage but becomes a savant to his mining village in North-east China.

There’s surprisingly little from South Korea this year – I have a feeling that the London Korean Film Festival nabbed all the best titles first, as last year the competition was pretty fierce – Stateless Things by Kim Kyung-Mook, a sparky indie feature that crosscuts between the lives of two young men, one an illegal immigrant from North Korea stuck in dead-end jobs, the other the kept boy of a married businessman stifling in a swanky apartment, and The Day He Arrives, Hong Sangsoo’s latest, a typically wry and droll account of a man visiting Seoul to look up old friends and running into new ones, are some of the few you’ll see at the festival. There are, however, several films from Tibet this year: The Sun-beaten Path, a Tibetan road movie and debut fetaure by Cinematographer Sonthar Gyal; and Old Dog, a tragic tale of conflicts between a shepherd and his heavy-drinking son by Pema Tseden.

» The 55th London Film Festival 2011 will run from 12 to 27 October 2011, the full programme for can be found here.

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This entry was published by Andy H on Thursday, September 8th, 2011 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Events, Festivals, Filmmakers, News, Premieres, Releases, Screenings, UK. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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