On November 9th, 7pm at McConomy we are hosting a very special event called Asian-Made Short Films, featuring shorts by Asian filmmakers from around the world. The lineup includes but is not limited to:

First Timers by Jee Hoon Seo - An advanced surfer encounters a beginner surfer struggling on his first session and is reminded of his own beginnings.

NYU Sports Film Festival Official Selection

2022-2023 MEET EU EMERGING FILMMAKER
In partnership with the Jean Monnet Center of Excellence at Florida International University, Center for European Studies of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and University of Pittsburgh’s European Studies Center, this year's MEET EU Emerging Filmmaker Residency goes to Vida Skerk from Zagreb Croatia.

The European Studies Center will be featuring her 2022 short film Night Ride (Noćna vožnja), a discussion with the director and reception to follow in the Frick Arts Cloister.

Unwell is a gothic horror podcast set in a small town in Ohio, created by HartLife NFP. A podcast with conspiracies, ghosts, and unusual families of blood and choice, Unwell demonstrates how the horror genre can be a tool for explore issues of identity, health, disability, time, and nostalgia. Unwell was named the Best Podcast or Online Audio Drama in the 2021 BBC Audio Drama Awards, and has won four 2020 Audio Verse awards, including Production, Writing for a Production, Director of a Production (Jeffrey Nils Gardner), and Supporting Actor in a Production (Marsha Harman as Dot).

The White Vault is a found footage horror fiction podcast created by K.A. Statz that features an international cast and crew, with special ties to the University of Pittsburgh. Noted for its diverse cast, immersive soundscape, and multi-lingual approach to storytelling, The White Vault has won the 2018 HEAR Now: Audio Fiction and Arts Festival, and it has been a 2019 & 2020 Webby Award Honoree for Best Original Music / Sound Design in Podcasting.

Directed by Panah Panahi, son of the acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, Hit the Road presents a tonally elusive but ultimately crowd-pleasing spin on the Iranian road-trip movie, swinging from comedy to tragedy as it tracks a family’s drive across the Iranian countryside. The vehicle’s passengers—two middle-aged parents, one reticent older son at the wheel, and a chatty, karaoke-belting six-year-old son in the back—form the film’s narrative and emotional core, riveting attention and winning hearts as the purpose of their journey is gradually revealed.

Chisato and Mahilo are two high school girls who are about to graduate. They also happen to both be highly skilled assassins. When the organization they work for orders them to share a room, the relationship between the pair quickly turns sour. However, when they find themselves targeted by the yakuza, the girls quickly realise that they will have to find a way to work together.

For more information about the festival, click here.

Having just moved from Beijing, elderly tai chi master Mr. Chu (Sihung Lung) struggles to adjust to life in New York, living with his Americanized son Alex (Ye-tong Wang). Chu immediately butts heads with his put-upon white daughter-in-law, Martha (Deb Snyder), a writer who seems to blame him for her own paralyzing inability to focus. But when Chu begins teaching tai chi at a local school, his desire to make a meaningful connection comes to fruition in the most unexpected of ways.

Wearing radiant orange and a photogenic smile, our protagonist is a successful influencer promoting a product line called “Happiness”—an emotion supposedly guaranteed for the women consumers she is targeting. That said, blissfully composed exteriors belie a brutal reality of abuse, in not just her own home but that of her newlywed daughter. Winner of the Panorama Audience Award for Best Film at the Berlin International Film Festival, Askar Uzbayev’s searing, chilling portrait of domestic violence confronts viewers with the systemic misogyny in contemporary Kazakhstan.

Winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s Golden Eye award for best documentary, All That Breathes chronicles the story of two brothers who form a makeshift bird hospital to care for the thousands of black kite—the species of bird they have both fallen in love with—that drop daily due to New Delhi’s heavily polluted skies.

With a dragon tattoo blazoned across her left arm, Kim Hye-Yoon plays the headstrong heroine who, after her dad falls into a coma following a suspicious accident, doggedly seeks answers despite mounting resistance from a variety of corrupt forces. Faced with the additional pressures of tending to her father’s restaurant, taking care of her younger brother, and completing mandatory work training following a short prison stay, our heroine is forced to grow up fast.