Given the media frenzy over "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," Western interest in Asian cinema may be news, but it's hardly new. Back in 1998, the organizers of Udine Incontri Cinema, a small film festival in a quiet Italian town near the Austrian and Slovenian border, shifted their focus to commercial films from Hong Kong -- Jackie Chan instead of Wong Kar-wai. The response was encouraging (turn-away crowds at many of the screenings), and the decision to specialize in Asia was easy. A year later, the festival moved into a civic auditorium used for staging operas and filled all three of its balconies by showing films from various parts of the region, in what it was now calling its Far East Film showcase.
This year, the festival used two locations, the auditorium and the festival's old digs in a theater near Udine Station, to present an eclectic program of 72 films from seven Asian film-making centers: Hong Kong, mainland China, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines and Singapore. Most were released in the past year and most were aimed at mass audiences. During its 10-day run, from April 19 to 28, the festival once again drew large crowds. The screening of the new documentary "Bruce Lee: A Warrior's Journey" and "The Kid," a 1950 film starring Lee as a child, were so packed that organizers scheduled a second.
But many of the films getting the biggest critical buzz and rounds of applause were not the martial arts action flicks the region is best known for, but family dramas (Jung Ji-woo's "Happy End," Naoto Takenaka's "Quartet for Two"), political thrillers (Herman Yau's "From the Queen to the Chief Executive," Park Chan-wook's "Joint Security Area"), love stories (Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai's "Needing You . . . ") and comedies (Sabu's "Monday" and Kim Jee-won's "The Foul King").