DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
A lot of the Smithsonian museums host film screenings, but none have the steady stream of excellent series highlighting as many films that D.C. audiences would otherwise have no opportunity to see than the Freer. Last weekend, the museum hosted a mini-series focused on Vietnamese films. This weekend, another small series, spread out over a longer time period, begins and broadens the focus to Southeast Asia in general. First up on the agenda is At the End of Daybreak, the second and latest film from Malaysian director Ho Yuhang.
The film centers on a directionless young man who develops a relationship with a wild child from the privileged class. Note the emphasis on “child”: the girl is 15, and when her parents find out, instead of going directly to the authorities, they try to use the incident to their own financial advantage, threatening to turn him in unless they receive a payoff. With parents like that, no wonder the girl has wayward tendencies. The problem for the young man is that he’s pretty strapped for cash, as is his alcoholic mother, and things begin taking menacing noirish turns from there.
View the trailer.
Tomorrow at 7 p.m. at the Freer. Free.
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Asian Pacific American Film Festival
Also getting underway at the Freer, among a few other locations, this weekend is the 11th annual Asian Pacific American Film Festival, which, over the next ten days, features a diverse array of features, documentaries, and shorts from all over the world tied together by artists and themes important to the APA community. Things get underway tonight, with Au Revoir Taipei, a “whimsical romantic caper” that is the debut feature film from an award-winner from a previous DC APA film festival, Arvin Chen, who took home the prize for best narrative short in 2007. In addition to the films, the festival also has a workshop on DIY filmmaking for aspiring filmmakers, and a panel discussion on Korean adoption that ties into two documentaries on this year’s program.
Opens tonight and runs through Saturday, October 16, with screenings at E Street, the Goethe-Institut, the Freer and the Smithsonian’s Museum of the American Indian. See the festival website for the complete schedule and to purchase tickets.
