The 2022 Fantastic Fest is upon us taking place in-person and online! Our programmer Josh Martin has compiled this awesome guide of all the Asian and AAPI films that will screen this year. Click here to take a look at the schedule and to purchase tickets. Fantastic Fest takes place September 22 - 29 at Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar and September 29 - October 4 if you prefer the comfort of your couch. Get your genre and horror viewing on!
AATANK
Bollywood tough guy Dharmendra (Sholay) made a habit of squaring off against large, four-legged beasties on-screen, but Aatank brought things to a new level by gussying up its tale of vicious pearl smugglers with a megalodon-sized shark. This famously ill-starred production—filmed mostly in the mid-’80s but only finished and released a decade later—gets a rare revival as part of FF’s “Shark Attack” sidebar.
Directors: Prem H. Lalwani, Desh Mukherjee
Screenwriter: Sachin Bhowmick
BAD CITY
Veteran screen badass Ozawa Hitoshi (Dead or Alive, Gozu) marks his 60th birthday in appropriately bone-crunching fashion, teaming with stunt wizard-turned-director Sonomura Kensuke to bring back the spirit of the 1990s direct-to-video action flicks that made Ozawa a favorite with genre fans. He doesn’t let age hold him back in Bad City, as an imprisoned ex-cop released to head up a secret anti-mob task force that makes the Dirty Dozen look like a Quaker meeting.
Director: Sonomura Kensuke
Screenwriter: Ozawa Hitoshi
BLOOD FLOWER
Teenage exorcist Iqbal tries to renounce his psychic powers with the help of his father—something they’d know could only end badly if they’d seen more horror movies. Sure enough, their efforts inadvertently unleash a vengeful spirit, and things go downhill from there. Fans of the new wave of Southeast Asian folk horror—think Munafik, Roh, Impetigore, etc.—will be in their element here.
Director: Dain Said
Screenwriters: Dain Said, Nandita Solomon, Ben Omar
DECISION TO LEAVE
The latest from Park Chan-wook is a twisty thriller about a woman suspected of killing her husband (Tang Wei of Lust, Caution) and the detective who falls for her (The Host’s Park Hae-il). But really, does anything we could say after “Park Chan-wook” actually matter? What if we added that FF will also screen Park’s 2000 breakthrough hit Joint Security Area? How about now? Whatever.
Director: Park Chan-wook
Screenwriters: Park Chan-wook, Chung Seo-kyung
DEMIGOD: THE LEGEND BEGINS
Chris Huang, fourth-generation scion of a renowned pò͘-tē-hì (Taiwanese glove puppetry) family, has been at the forefront of attempts to modernize the centuries-old art. With Demigod, he’s created a big-screen prequel to his long-running Pili franchise, relating the backstory of its “half-immortal” master swordsman Sò͘-hôan-chin (voiced, like all of the characters, by Huang’s late brother Vincent). Expect stunning handicraft with elaborate martial-arts choreography, augmented by up-to-date CGI effects.
Director: Chris Huang
Screenwriters: Chris Huang, Huang Liang-hsun
GAMERA VS. ZIGRA
Everyone’s favorite giant turtle/friend of all children joins FF’s “Shark Attack” section with his 1971 adventure—a bizarre environmentalist parable that moves from the Moon to the Pacific depths to all points between, as Gamera defends Earth from a goblin shark-inspired alien that seeks to harvest us for food. Bring the kids!
Director: Yuasa Noriaki
Screenwriter: Takahashi Nīsan
HOLY SPIDER
Ali Abassi’s follow-up to Border (2018) was perhaps the most controversial entry at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where Zar Amir Ebrahimi won Best Actress for her performance as a dogged journalist covering the early-aughts murders of Iranian sex workers. Abassi’s based-on-fact account explores the broader misogyny revealed by the incident (including widespread valorization of the killer) without sparing the gory details.
Director: Ali Abbasi
Screenwriters: Ali Abassi, Afshin Kamran Bahrami
HUNT
Hot on the heels of his international breakthrough in Squid Game, Lee Jung-jae makes his debut behind the camera while staying in front of it as Park Pyong-ho, a South Korean intelligence unit chief tasked with ferreting out a North Korean mole. One big complication: the people he’s investigating have been assigned to seek out the mole in Park’s unit. The tumultuous backdrop of 1980s Korea adds to the high-stakes tension.
Director: Lee Jung-jae
Screenwriters: Lee Jung-jae, Jo Seung-hee
LEONOR WILL NEVER DIE
Arriving in Austin with prizes from Sundance and Toronto in tow, Leonor Will Never Die is an eight-year labor of love from first-time director Martika Ramirez Escobar, deploying an unlikely new action heroine—an elderly ex-screenwriter (Sheila Francisco) who imagines herself in one of her long-abandoned scripts—to pay tribute to ’80s Pinoy action cinema and deconstruct the machismo represented therein.
Director/Screenwriter: Martika Ramirez Escobar
MISSING
One of the hot tickets at this year’s FF is the world premiere of Kids vs. Aliens. Can we interest you in “Kid vs. Serial Killer” instead? That’s basically what you get with Missing, in which a down-on-his-luck single father searches for an elusive murderer in hopes of collecting the reward money. When he goes MIA himself, an even more improbable detective—his teenage daughter—picks up the trail.
Director: Katayama Shinzō
Screenwriters: Katayama Shinzō, Kodera Kazuhisa, Takada Ryō
ONE AND FOUR
One-man industry Pema Tseden (China’s first ethnic Tibetan director) produces the debut of his 25-year-old son Jigme Trinley, who casts some of Dad’s regular collaborators as a forest ranger and the three strangers trapped with him in a snowbound cabin—one of whom might be a poacher. Comparisons to The Hateful Eight are inevitable, but given Chinese cinema’s own history of “Tibetan Westerns” (e.g. The Horse Thief, Kekexili, Pema Tseden’s Jinpa), viewers should count on something less hateful and more allusive.
Director/Screenwriter: Jigme Trinley
PROJECT WOLF HUNTING
Can a cargo ship get waterlogged with blood? It’s not a question that keeps anyone up at night, but it’s one that might be answered by Project Wolf Hunting, which turns a boatful of murderous convicts into a Grand Guignol at sea. Then it turns out the prisoners might not be the only ones on board with an appetite for the red stuff…
Director/Screenwriter: Kim Hongsun
SHIN ULTRAMAN
After reviving Godzilla (the classic rubber-suit version, not that other version) for 2016’s Shin Godzilla, Evangelion veterans Higuchi Shinji and Anno Hideaki revisit the origin of the venerable size-changing superhero—a giant alien who merges with an unassuming member of the Earth-based Science Patrol to fend off extraterrestrials with more threatening intentions. Those who prefer more traditional tokusatsu fare can catch a screening of four episodes from the original 1966 TV series, remastered in 4K.
Director: Higuchi Shinji
Screenwriter: Anno Hideaki
TERMINAL USA
What happened when underground trash-punk filmmaker Jon Moritsugu (My Degeneration, Pig Death Machine) got $360,000 to make a movie for public television? He made Terminal USA, a gleefully impolitic mock-sitcom that put clichéd portrayals of Asian American family life right through a meat grinder, along with decades’ worth of “respectable” PBS programming. The congressman-baiting 1994 cult classic plays FF in a new restoration, followed by a remote Q&A with Moritsugu.
Director/Screenwriter: Jon Moritsugu
UNIDENTIFIED
FF’s online-only “Burnt Ends” section presents this high-concept feature debut from Korean Canadian director Jude Chun, whose 2016 short The Time Agent is in line for a Hollywood remake. With Unidentified, he trades time-travel shenanigans for an unusual kind of alien visitation: giant spherical spaceships that have hovered for decades above the world’s major cities, making no attempt to communicate… unless there’s any credence to rumors that aliens now walk among us in human form.
Director/Screenwriter: Jude Chun