Fantastic Asia Film Festival

When the director of the Fantastic Asia Festival, Neil Foley, describes its opening night film he falls into a kind of hyperbolic word salad: “Helldriver is completely nuts: a wild, colourful ride of zombies, sci-fi, horror, crazy, loud, extreme gore, rock and roll...”

It illustrates the excitement that Foley finds in the current crop of genre cinema out of Japan, Korea, China, and more. Not only are these films some of the most innovative today, he says, they’re also refreshingly uncynical. “They have a spirit of adventure and excitement that a lot of other cinema just seems to lack.”

Influenced by events like the successful New York Asian Film Festival, Foley organised FAFF to shine a spotlight on movies that might’ve “escaped the gaze” of audiences. These include genre-bending examples of martial arts noir, old west comedies, and splatter sports stories; there are also new films by fan-favourite auteurs like Sion Sono with Guilty of Romance and Takashi Miike with Ninja Kids!!! (Yes, all three exclamation points are part of the title.)

In a world of HD downloads and enormous TVs, though, what do festivals like this offer that home viewing can’t? Foley says these are precisely the kind of films that need to be seen with an appreciative audience. He recalls seeing Na Hong-Jin’s thriller The Yellow Sea in a packed cinema at Cannes and, after a particularly excellent car chase sequence, the entire audience stood up and applauded. “Obviously,” he says, “you don’t get that watching it in your living room.”

Other than Helldriver on opening night - introduced by the director and special effects guru Yoshihiro Nishimura - Foley says that Underwater Love is a particular crowd-pleaser. A quasi-mythological softcore erotica musical, it features cinematography by Australian Christopher Doyle and music by the multilingual electronic act Stereo Total. There’s also a panel who’ll be addressing whether Japanese “pink films” like these are art, pornography, or both.

Foley’s sure that Underwater Love is art, despite the fact that it’s quite filthy. “It’s a film you can’t see without cracking a smile.”