2010: Yet another great Far East Film Festival has gotten underway in
Udine, now at its 12th edition!
The Giovanni da Udine theatre is once again packed every night with fans anxiously awaiting a deluge of Asian movies, not to mention the odd film director who's also braved major air disruptions thanks to that crazy volcano in Iceland.
Festival director Sabrina Baracetti has again outdone herself by bringing to tiny Udine some great, great Asian movies (in the pic of Sabrina with Udine's mayor, Furio Honsell!
The final count for the Far East Film Festival organizers were some 50,000 spectators. Most of the time the Giovanni da Udine theatre was full right up to the top practically every evening, thus confirming the festival’s great popularity!
The last evening gave movie buffs two nice movies, Korea’s “Castaway On The Moon” (which one 1st prize as the audience’s favourite. A nice “Tom-Hanks-Castaway” kind of movie) and “Ip Man 2”, a Hong-Kong/China production on Bruce Lee’s instructor of Wing Chun martial arts, Ip Man.
The fight scenes were quite terrific and the final one between Man and a traditional British boxer was spectacular and rather reminiscent of “Cinderella Man”, with Russell Crowe, the true story of America’s heavy-weight boxing champ J.J. Braddock who managed to defeat one mean and utterly devastating Max Bear (who not only had killed two boxers on the ring but he had also knocked down a certain Primo Carnera—who hails from not too far away from Udine—a whopping 12 times to defeat him for the heavy-weight crown). Man at the end ends up winning, thus vindicating the death of a rival master who is killed at the hands of this brutal Max Bear-style British boxer and who had along the way also derided Chinese martial arts.
The ending of this movie was touching and a particular joy for me as a young 10 year-old kid is introduced to Man. He’s got one mean look on his face and is totally determined to learn this martial art from Master Man. Man looks at him and smilingly asks his name? “Bruce Lee”!, answers very defiantly the young boy. A treat as some 36 years ago while growing up in Winnipeg me and the buddies would go up to 5 times to the same movie theatre (no VCR machines or DVDs back then) to see Lee’s phenomenal movies, such as perhaps his best, “Enter The Dragon”! And it’s for this reason and only this reason that I took up first kung-fu and then taekwondo. The effects of what Lee did on stage had certainly had quite the powerful impact on me, as they were on Lee himself when Man began training him at the age of 16. And no doubt if Lee were alive today, he’d be certainly proud to see the incredible steps forward that Asian films, especially the martial arts ones, have made since he had acted in them in the early 70s before his untimely death at age 33!
