The 8th edition of the Asia House Film Festival has revealed its line-up in London for 2016, opening with Kazakhstan’s official submission at the 2016 Academy Awards for the Best Foreign Language Film, Yermek Tursunov’s “Stranger (Zhat).”Taking place from February 22 through March 5, the festival is this year focused on “Breaking Boundaries” as it presents 19 films, all of which are being shown for the first time in London.Beginning with its opening screening at the Ham Yard Hotel in Soho, Tursunov and the producer film’s producer, Kanat Torebay will sit in for a Q&A session after the screening of “Stranger (Zhat).” The film follows one man’s struggle for freedom in 1930s Kazakhstan. Another of Tursunov’s films, his latest thriller “Little Brother (Kenzhe)” set in modern times, will also show at the recently reopened Regent Street Cinema on Thursday February 25.The Far East is well represented in this year’s festival, with notable productions from each of Korea, China and Japan. The romantic teen comedy “Seoul Searching” by Benson Lee, with a diverse cast including Japanese singer Crystal Kay, will show on February 27. An examination of the ‘Made in China’ hallmark, “Factory Boss” by Chinese director Zhang Wei, will show the preceding day, having won the Best Actor Award accolade at the 2014 Montréal Film Festival for Yao Anlian.Also on February 27, the festival will show “The Case of Hana and Alice,” an anime by Japanese director Shunji Iwai. The film is notable for having been first shot as a live action movie with actors and sets, then retraced using a digital rotoscope to create the animation. It tells the story of two schoolgirls investigating an urban myth about a former classmate the supposedly vanished.Further films including several shorts have been selected from Myanmar, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, India and Armenia, with the event closing on March 5 with a selection of movies from 1960s and 70s Singapore, screened at The Cinema Museum, Kennington.“The films selected as part of the 2016 program represent a world in which culture, politics and economies are transcending national boundaries. There will be a number of films from countries often completely overlooked by followers of Asian cinema, giving audiences a chance to experience the lives and landscapes of such a dynamic and multi-faceted continent,” said Jasper Sharp, the Festival’s Artistic Director.
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