‘Fujiko’, ‘My Name’ Win Top Awards At New York Asian Film Festival
Taichi Kimura’s Fujiko, about a single mother navigating personal freedom in 1970s Japan, was presented with the Uncaged Award for Best Feature Film at the close of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival (NYAFF, July 10-26).
The jury praised the film, saying: “With remarkable confidence, vision, and style, this film embraces the full expressive power of cinema. Through its vibrant visual language and inventive use of animation and music, it tells a deeply heartfelt story centered on a refreshingly complex woman whose messy, imperfect journey through motherhood pushes against the expectations placed on women in 1970s Japan.”
The jury also presented a Special Jury Mention to Turgaud, directed by Kazakhstan’s Adilkhan Yerzhanov, calling it “a film that surprised us with its bold, muscular visual storytelling, exhilarating and whimsical writing, and mesmerizing performances that felt uniquely poignant, darkly funny, and propulsive”.
The NYAFF Audience Award went to My Name, directed by Korea’s Chung Ji-young, about a high school student grappling with identity and school violence while his mother relives long-suppressed trauma from the Jeju 4.3 Uprising.
Runners-up were Lan Hongchun's Dear You, the Chinese hit family drama that played as the closing film of the festival; and Xiaodan He's Montreal, My Beautiful, starring NYAFF Star Asia Lifetime Achievement Award recipient Joan Chen.
In the Shorts Showcase, Best Short Film went to Hao Zhou’s Correct Me If I'm Wrong, a collaboration between Germany, China and the US. Special Jury Mentions went to Cami Kwan’s stop-motion animation Paper Daughter and Yijian Shan’s Still Water.
In addition to Chen’s Star Asia Lifetime Achievement Award, other awards handed out at the festival included the Extraordinary Star Asia Award to Gianna Jun; the Star Asia Award to Joseph Chang; the Best From the East Award to Daniel Wu; the Daniel A. Craft Award for Excellence in Action Cinema to Na Hong-jin; and the Screen International Rising Star Award to Angela Yuen and Sara Minami.
“After seventeen days, the New York Asian Film Festival closed its 25th edition with record growth and spectacular attendance numbers,” said NYAFF president and executive director Samuel Jamier.
“Mainstream outlets like The New York Times looked elsewhere; New York did not. New York wants Asian cinema in its full range: vast, unruly, joyful, confrontational, always changing.
"It does not need that cinema filtered through the gaze of fanboys or safely mummified by the museum establishment. We present it on its own terms, as it exists now. Twenty-five years in, we carry our history proudly. The work is all about what comes next. Exciting times lie ahead.”
