San Diego Asian Film Festival Spring Showcase

A week-long presentation of Asian cinema
A Production of Pacific Arts Movement, presenters of the San Diego Asian Film Festival

Schedule of Events:

5:30 pm - 108 mins - Village Rockstars 2

Kim Jiseok Award, 2024 Busan International Film Festival
Official Selection, 2025 Berlin International Film Festival

Seven years after we first met her, Dhunu is no longer a kid and she knows it. “I want to be small again,” she tells a friend. While she can roam the fields and climb familiar trees, she knows that growing up is around the corner, an adulthood she sees in her mother, herself older, and the other women of the village who tend the crops. There is no promise that what worked for a previous generation will work for hers. Corporations are creeping in from beyond the horizon. And her teacher reminds the class that increasing floods are the village’s top concern.

Yet, some things remain. Dhunu still harbors music dreams. The breeze still makes her smile. As external and internal worlds shift, director Rima Das lingers on these golden hour moments, and the window they open to the enduring lives of Assamese women: the tenderness between mother and daughter, the camaraderie between women in the fields, the friendships of girls approaching womanhood. There are rituals and ceremonies, goats and river leeches. All while Dhunu quietly imagines a life ahead. She once carved guitars out of styrofoam. Now, she will carve a future of her own. Like Das’ brilliant snapshot of her beloved Assam village, it will surely be luminous.

7:45 pm - 116 mins - Blue Sun Palace

Didi and Cheung share the kind of puppy love best experienced in the diaspora: a Taiwanese construction worker and a Mainland masseuse, stealing free hours to sing Faye Wong songs in karaoke. Meanwhile, Didi and her co-worker Amy share a different kind of love: a friendship bound by dreams of moving out of the shadow economy and starting their own restaurant together. A tragedy derails all plans though, and the unique numbness of being in between homes, families, friendships, and life stages envelopes those who remain.

As performed by Taiwan cinema veterans Wu Ke-xi (of Midi Z’s films) and Lee Kang-sheng (of Tsai Ming-liang’s), that numbness is never devoid of feeling. Their characters are yearning, romantic, and quietly proud, seeking nocturnal pleasures and never passing up the communal joys of a Chinese meal together. Director Constance Tsang finds these moments in stairways and backrooms, the makeshift palaces of Flushing immigrants with much self to discover despite much to lose.

–Brian Hu

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