SUBWAY CINEMA and the IMAGINASIAN PRESENT NEW YORK ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL 2006 (June 16 - July 1, 2006)

At Anthology Film Archives (32 Second Avenue, at 2nd Street) in Manhattan (June 16, ­ June 25, 2006) and at The ImaginAsian (239 E. 59th Street, at 2nd Avenue) in Manhattan (June 23, ­ July 1, 2006 )­

The New York Asian Film Festival is five years old!

While many film festivals are little more than billboards for their corporate sponsors, the New York Asian Film Festival is the only 100% audience-supported film festival in the world. Every year the five of us in Subway Cinema watch about 200 movies and select 25 of the highest-grossing, most crowd-pleasing, award-winning films from China, Malaysia, Thailand, Korea, India and Japan. And every year an audience of thrill-seekers and movie-lovers jam the screenings, forcing us to get bigger. So come celebrate our fifth birthday with us by watching the latest and best movies from Asia, hand-selected for your viewing pleasure. No arthouse cynicism. No trendy gloom and doom. Just futuristic motion picture entertainment set on hyperdrive and mainlined directly into your brain.

This year we have two venues ­ the historic Anthology Film Archives in the East Village and the new Asian American theater, The ImaginAsian, on the Upper East Side. Also, we'll be presenting a special screening Gu Changwei's Silver Bear winner, PEACOCK in conjunction with the Brooklyn International Film Festival (on June 11 at 7pm) as a gesture of goodwill, peace and reconciliation between the boroughs.

We're awaiting confirmation on a few titles, but we've got 20 on tap right now and you'll need to keep your eyes on http://www.nyaff.org/ and http://www.theimaginasian.com/ for updated information. Advanced tickets go on sale May 26th. Screeners are available upon request.

Many distributors choose the New York Asian Film Festival over more established festivals because they know that it's the best launching pad for their movies. We've premiered work from Suzuki Seijun, Park Chan-Wook, Kim Ki-Duk and Johnnie To before most American festivals even knew their names and this year is no different. Come watch tomorrow's great directors before everyone else discovers them and cramps your style.

"No Singing. No Dancing. No Mercy: The Films of Ram Gopal Varma" is a sidebar of four movies from India's most accomplished director, including the world premiere of his latest film, SHIVA. RGV has remade the Bollywood film-scape with his hard-hitting crime and horror flicks and we're very proud to present his films to New York audiences. Takashi Miike weighs in with his Lord of the Rings-sized GREAT YOKAI WAR, and Malaysia's box office hit, GANGSTER, featuring super popular Malay actor Rosyam Nor in the three lead roles, will be served up hot, as will Thailand's crunky horror hit, ART OF THE DEVIL 2, directed by seven filmmakers known as The Ronin Team.

FUNKY FOREST: THE FIRST CONTACT is the latest movie from Katsuhito Ishii whose The Taste of Tea won last year's Audience Award and it's the strangest movie to hit screens since Eraserhead. In 2003, New York critics raved about Ryuichi Hiroki's Vibrator when we showed it at that year's festival and this year we're excited to screen his latest masterpiece, IT'S ONLY TALK. Wildly influential Korean director, Lee Myung-Se, will be screening his controversial swordplay romance, DUELIST, and in case you were worried that there weren't enough masked wrestlers both OH! MY ZOMBIE MERMAID and BEETLE, THE HORN KING feature helicopter-kicking wrestlers, masked and otherwise. And don't miss SKI JUMPING PAIRS - ROAD TO TORINO 2006 a slyly surreal send-up of sports documentaries in the spirit of This is Spinal Tap.

Line-up to date is below:

CHINA

PEACOCK (China ­ 2005)
Whereas most Chinese arthouse movies do actual medical damage to viewers with their chic nihilism and long boring shots of people riding around in trucks, PEACOCK is a balm for your soul. A two-hour plus movie about a family making their way in the world after the Cultural Revolution sounds deadly, but in the hands of Gu Changwei (Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige's cinematographer) it becomes essential viewing for the dejected, downtrodden and just plain weary.

INDIA

NO SINGING. NO DANCING. NO MERCY: THE FILMS OF RAM GOPAL VARMA
Rejecting the formulaic musical romances of Bollywood for a slew of sleek, stylish horror and crime films, Ram Gopal Varma is India's superstar director. These days he runs The Factory, where dozens of directors turn out movies that he produces and where he keeps his own productions under tight control. Unknown in the West, RGV is a brand name around the world and we're proud to introduce his work to a New York audience, like a bullet to the head.


AB TAK CHHAPPAN (India ­ 2004)
A ruthlessly realistic film about an encounter specialist, a cop who is given the job of illegally executing criminals. Played by Nana Patekar in a gob-smacking performance, this exercise in affable evil is, incredibly, based on a real life encounter specialist in Mumbai with 83 kills under
his belt.

COMPANY (India ­ 2002)
As cold as the flicker of a cobra¹s tongue, COMPANY is the epic saga of the rise and fall of a global criminal cartel and the men and women who built its marble halls on a mountain of corpses. Combining Francis Ford Coppola's panoramic sweep and Martin Scorsese's delicate touch with actors, Ram Gopal Varma delivers the greatest crime story to hit the screen since GOODFELLAS.

EK HASINA THI (India ­ 2004)
A gothic women's revenge film, EK HASINA THI, starts like a heavenly romance and ends up in hell, making stops at all points in between. The highlights from every female action movie ever made are stitched together into this insane Frankenbeast of a film, produced by RGV, that comes screaming at you with blood under its nails and a mad, empty gleam in its eyes.

SHIVA (India ­ 2006)
RGV remakes his first movie, SHIV, as SHIVA a big-budget action movie about corrupt cops that is one of the most anticipated Bollywood movies of the year. Subway Cinema is honored that Ram Gopal Varma has chosen the New York Asian Film Festival to host the World Premiere of SHIVA. Don't miss it.

JAPAN

BEETLE, THE HORN KING (Japan ­ 2005)
In Japan there is a wrestler. His name is legendary. His sombrero is enormous. His mask is cool. His name is BEETLE: THE HORN KING. Like a bizarro broadcast of MIGHTY MORPHIN' POWER RANGERS filtered through Jack Black's NACHO LIBRE this is the ultimate collision of masked Mexican wrestlers, Japanese sci fi, and bug-loving weirdness.

CROMARTIE HIGH SCHOOL (Japan ­ 2005)
A send-up of Japan's popular juvenile delinquent movies, CROMARTIE HIGH SCHOOL was a runaway anime and manga hit before it reached the silver screen. Turning stupidity into a high-level martial art, CROMARTIE HIGH SCHOOL tells the tale of upright student Kamiyama, enrolled at Cromartie by mistake, who must battle robots, demonic possession, masked wrestlers, the dangers of smoking and mind-controlled Shaolin monks to recover Cromartie's school spirit and defeat an alien armada of Space Monkeys.

FUNKY FOREST: THE FIRST CONTACT (Japan ­ 2005)
Not since David Lynch crept onto the scene with ERASERHEAD has a more singular vision broken out of one man's skull and run riot across the silver screen seducing audiences with its sugary strangeness. Director Katsuhito Ishii (who directed the animation in KILL BILL VOL 1 and last year's Audience Award winner THE TASTE OF TEA) and a crew of ace comic actors including Tadanobu Asano as the laconic Guitar Brother) have made a movie that invites you to drink the Kool Aid, take the red pill, show us your dancing and to break the chains of reason and logic that bind your brain.

THE GREAT YOKAI WAR (Japan ­ 2005)
A LORD OF THE RINGS-sized epic from Takashi Miike, this deranged monster movie returns Miike to the front ranks of Japanese directors after years of disappointments. Delivering massive battles, non-stop special effects and a story that's as tight as a drum, Miike makes a masterpiece out of suspect materials. But he also delivers the kind of truth that Peter Jackson shied away from in THE LORD OF THE RINGS: every quest has an ending and no childhood lasts forever.

IT'S ONLY TALK (Japan ­ 2005)
From the director and star of VIBRATOR (which was in the 2003 NYAFF, where Time Out New York called it Probably the best Japanese movie of 2003) comes this intimate portrait of sex, suburban life and manic depression. Yuko (Shinobu Terajima, VIBRATOR) is a thirty something woman living an aimless life supported by the insurance settlement from her parent's death. A manic depressive, she picks up stakes and moves to the decidedly un-chic burb of Kamada, a depressing little hood on the fringes of Tokyo, and begins to hook up with people she meets in a manic depression chat room. IT'S ONLY TALK asks for nothing more than your patience and an open mind. In exchange, it will show you one human life in all its messed up glory. And that's worth the entire world.

LINDA, LINDA, LINDA (Japan ­ 2005)
With a leisurely pace, laid back attitude and nearly plotless narrative, LINDA X 3 sneaks up on your slowly before taking you by surprise. All about a group of high school girls (and one Korean exchange student played by Korea's Bae Doo-Na, SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE) who form a band to perform three songs at their school talent show, this is an addictive, mesmerizing ode to rock and roll. With music by James Iha of the Smashing Pumpkins.

OH! MY ZOMBIE MERMAID (Japan ­ 2005)
Like a musical production of SPLASH, mashed-up with Bruce Lee's GAME OF DEATH, performed by flamboyant fighters from the World Wrestling Federation, OH! MY ZOMBIE MERMAID is a send-up of disease-of-the-week movies and a rollicking action flick. Real-life wrestler Shinya Hashimoto plays Shishio, a wrestler who must battle zombies to build a new home for his wife, who is slowly turning into a mermaid after being injured in the smackdown that destroyed their first home. Sadly, star Shinya Hashimoto died in 2005 of a brain hemorrhage, but this rowdy movie is a perfect tribute to a larger-than-life wrestler.

PACCHIGI (WE SHALL OVERCOME SOMEDAY) (Japan ­ 2004)
Awarded the top spot in Japan's prestigious 2006 Kinema Junpo critic1s poll, this film doles out equal amounts of tender romance and bottle breaking brawling in a raucous retelling of Romeo and Juliet set amidst warring clans of Japanese and Korean students in 1960's Kyoto. Amusing at times, wrenching at others, the film is fueled by winning performances, a heady whiff of Nostalgia and an underlying human element that speaks volumes to the fact that with all of our differences we are still just people trying to do the best we can for our family, our friends and ourselves.

SHINOBI (Japan ­ 2005)
This ninja flick is like the X-MEN teaming up with BATMAN and taking on the Justice League, directed by Michael Bay who has just gotten a total blood transfusion from Tim Burton. It's a nuclear popcorn movie with a Romeo and Juliet core where ninjas don't just fly and leap and kill but shoot their fingers out, stretch, run faster than the Flash, steal your face, shoot lethal eye beams, and breathe poison clouds. SHINOBI was a critical and commercial hit in Japan when it was released last year and is being prepared for a US release. Truly, this is the ninjapocalypse.

SKI JUMPING PAIRS: ROAD TO TORINO 2006 (Japan ­ 2005)
When I saw ROAD as a judge at the Japanese Eyes section of last year's Tokyo International Film Festival, I knew next to nothing about its production history, but I immediately got its brilliant send-up of the sober-sided, po-faced NHK documentary about a heroic underdog's struggle to victory. I went from knowing grins to helpless belly laughs in record time, as did my two fellow judges. When the CG sequences started I was on the floor, barking at the moon -- and stayed that way until the end - a work of warped genius.

KOREA

DUELIST (Korea ­ 2005)
Korean director Lee Myung-Se's return to filmmaking after 6 years is a whirlwind of movement, a ballet of bloodshed and a candy-colored carnival of clashing characters but it is most definitely not an action film: it's a romance. Set in the Joseon Dynasty, it's the story of a female cop and the assassin she pursues through chaotic markets, winter snowstorms, and elaborate birthday parties, but when they cross swords you can't tell if they're fighting or dancing. A mutagenic masterpiece that rejects every convention of filmmaking and insists on rebuilding the language of cinema from the ground up, there are barely 10 pages of dialogue in the whole film, but every shift in emotion, mood, and thought is conveyed visually, zapped into your brain via your eyes at 24 frames per second.

MALAYSIA

GANGSTER (Malaysia ­ 2005)
A nihilistic blood bath from Malaysia, GANGSTER is a slab of 1980's Hong Kong criminal cool, carved off the bone and served hot. Featuring star, Rosyam Nor, in the three lead roles, it the number one movie in Malaysia last year by a landslide. Telling three overlapping stories about three desperate losers who've hit bottom and are running out of air, GANGSTER follows a hooker who plans to rip off her boyfriend, a food stall owner who's borrowed too much money and doesn't know how to pay it back, and an illegal car racer, as monomaniacal as Captain Ahab, who¹s willing to turn pedestrians into grease spots if that means he can beat the top ranked
driver.

THAILAND

ART OF THE DEVIL 2 (Thailand ­ 2005)

Forget every Japanese horror movie you've ever seen, full of dead, wet, grumpy girls with bad haircuts. ART OF THE DEVIL 2 (no familiarity with ART OF THE DEVIL 1 required) only owes a sideways debt of paternity to Takashi Miike's torture/dating film, AUDITION.

A hit at the Thai box office, this slick, sick flick is all about teachers and students and black magic. And torture. Lots and lots of torture.

Directed by a team of seven filmmakers known as the Ronin Team, ART OF THE DEVIL 2 will remind you of your special time in high school. That is, if you attended high school in hell.