By At the beginning of every screening at the New York Asian Film Festival, the good folks at Subway Cinema handed out little slips of paper with ratings of 1-5 on them, ranging from “Worst Film Ever” to “Awesome.” At the end, those who hadn’t lost the slips during the screening (i.e. not me) got to rate each film and have their opinions heard. Now that festival is over and the votes have been cast, the winner has been revealed…
And it’s Hentai Kamen: Forbidden Superhero.
Really, guys?
New this year was the Daniel A. Craft Award for Excellence in Action Cinema. Daniel, a member of Subway Cinema, passed away earlier this year and this seems like an appropriate way to honor him. Although Hubert wasn’t in love with Ip Man: The Final Fight, he says that the choreography was nonetheless impressive.
Our own awards, which will cover both NYAFF and the still-running Japan Cuts, are coming some time late next week. We’ve still got some movies to see and reviews to write. It’s been a crazy couple of weeks, and we’re not done yet.
Full PR (which includes the vastly superior list of runner ups) can be found below.
[For the next few weeks, we will be covering the 2013 New York Asian Film Festival and the 2013 Japan Cuts Film Festival, which together form one of the largest showcases of Asian cinema in the world. For our NYAFF 2013 coverage, click here. For Japan Cuts 2013 coverage, click here.]
New York, NY, July 17, 2013 – The New York Asian Film Festival 2013 ended Monday night with the sold-out North American Premiere of Jay Chou’s THE ROOFTOP, but there is still news to report.
Every year the New York Asian Film Festival gives an Audience Award. This is voted on by the audience who fill out ballots after each eligible screening. Then our team of top scientists go to work and use complicated math to figure out the most popular movies at the festival.
The audience has spoken and the winner of the NYAFF 2013 Audience Award is…HENTAI KAMEN: FORBIDDEN SUPERHERO (Japan, 2013)!
Based on a popular manga series, and directed by Yuichi Fukuda, this motion picture about a young man born to a dominatrix and a masochist, who uses perversion to fight evil while wearing panties over his head and a mankini was originally intended to be a direct-to-DVD release in Japan. Accidentally unleashed in theaters by a hentai-liberation group, it became a box office hit and turned out to be the most popular film of this year’s festival.
Previous Audience Award winners include: ACE ATTORNEY (NYAFF 2012), A BOY AND HIS SAMURAI (NYAFF 2011), CASTAWAY ON THE MOON and GALLANTS (NYAFF 2010), THE MAGIC HOUR (NYAFF 2009), FINE, TOTALLY FINE (NYAFF 2008), MEMORIES OF MATSUKO (NYAFF 2007), ALWAYS: SUNSET ON THIRD STREET (NYAFF 2006), THE TASTE OF TEA (NYAFF 2005), PLEASE TEACH ME ENGLISH (NYAFF 2004), PING PONG (NYAFF 2003), and MY SASSY GIRL (NYAFF 2002).
The runners-up for this year’s audience award were:
HOW TO USE GUYS WITH SECRET TIPS (South Korea, 2013)
THERMAE ROMAE (Japan, 2012)
COMRADE KIM GOES FLYING (UK/Belgium/North Korea, 2012)
THE LEGEND IS BORN: IP MAN (China, 2010)
RUROUNI KENSHI (Japan, 2012)
EUNGYO (South Korea, 2012)
In addition, this year the New York Asian Film Festival has initiated another award. The Daniel A. Craft Award for Excellence in Action Cinema is designed to celebrate the memory of longtime Subway Cinema member, Daniel Craft, who passed away this January, and to celebrate kick ass action movies, a genre too often dismissed or looked down on by the kind of people who usually give out movie awards.
This year, the inaugural Daniel A. Craft Award for Excellence in Action Cinema goes to Herman Yau’s IP MAN: THE FINAL FIGHT, written by Erica Li and choreographed by Nicky Li Chung-Chi and Checkley Sin Kwok-Lam.
This is the third film Checkley Sin Kwok-Lam has choreographed, the other two being Herman Yau’s THE LEGEND IS BORN: IP MAN and THE WOMAN KNIGHT OF MIRROR LAKE. Nicky Li Chung-Chi was a longtime member of the Jackie Chan Stuntman Association and he was the action choreographer on 50 films including SHAOLIN (2011), LET THE BULLETS FLY (2010), NEW POLICE STORY (2004), GEN-X COPS (1999), RAPED BY AN ANGEL (1993), and PROJECT A II (1987).
And that’s it for 2013! This year saw us take on a double-barreled blast of movie madness with the “Jackie Chan Experience” event right before the New York Asian Film Festival, which was probably unwise from a logistical point of view, but we’ve always wanted to bring Jackie to NYC and give him an award. As things turned out, tons of people showed up, nothing caught on fire, and no one lost any major body parts. In other words, it was an outrageous success.
So sit back and enjoy spending the rest of the summer melting and we’ll see you next year for the New York Asian Film Festival 2014!!! (and possibly for another edition of the Old School Kung Fu Fest next April).
ABOUT NYAFF & SUBWAY CINEMA
The New York Asian Film Festival (NYAFF) is North America’s leading Festival of popular Asian cinema, which the New York Times has called “…one of the city’s most valuable events…” Launched in 2002 by Subway Cinema, the Festival selects only the best, strangest, and most entertaining movies to screen for New York audiences, ranging from mainstream blockbusters and art-house eccentricities to genre and cult classics. It was the first North American film festival to champion the works of Johnnie To, Bong Joon-Ho, Park Chan-Wook, Takashi Miike, and other masters of contemporary Asian cinema. The Festival has been produced in collaboration with the Film Society of Lincoln Center since 2010.
For more information, visit www.subwaycinema.com, www.facebook.com/NYAFF and follow @subwaycinema on Twitter.