Six teen Asian films that will be screened at the “We Are One: A Global Film Festival”, an unprecedented 10-day online film festival organized by more than twenty major international festivals together with YouTube. The screenings will available for FREE for a limited time from May 29th until June 7th, 2020.

Last month more than twenty major international film festivals* announced that they would team with YouTube to create the biggest online festival with the idea that the film community can come together in times of crises – both in celebration of films and in support by providing much needed relief for COVID-19 efforts. This unique 10-day festival will run from May 29th to June 7th on http://www.youtube.com/weareone . All screenings are FREE, you will be able to donate to raise funds for COVID-19 relief. There will be a DONATE BUTTON or link on every film program page. You can make a difference by contributing any amount – large or small. If we all contribute even a small amount our collective efforts would make a huge impact. Donations will go to World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF, UNHCR, Save the Children, Doctors Without Borders, Leket Israel, GO Foundation and Give2Asia, among others. We think it’s a great opportunity to watch movies from around the world and donate to the cause. As we all say, we are one and together we will fight against Covid-19.

* – Annecy International Animation Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, Cannes Film Festival, Guadalajara International Film Festival, International Film Festival & Awards Macao (IFFAM), International Film Festival Rotterdam, Jerusalem Film Festival, Mumbai Film Festival (MAMI), Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Locarno Film Festival, Marrakech International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, San Sebastian International Film Festival, Sarajevo Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Sydney Film Festival, Tokyo International Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, and Venice Film Festival.

For more information about the schedule and other films please go to the official website of the festival: http://www.weareoneglobalfestival.com/

The Asian programme will feature 7 short films and 9 feature films…

Short Films:

Awake by Atul Mongia – India | 2019 – 23 minutes

Professional photographer Sameera (Ishika Mohan Motwane) is happily married to Vikram (Yudhishtir Urs), who has a peculiar condition. All seems well until it isn’t in this tense exploration of patriarchy and power dynamics within a marriage.

Schedule: Starts at 7:00 am (EST) on June 7th, 2020

East of Jefferson by Koji Fukada – Japan | 2018 – 21 minutes

In a love hotel somewhere on the edge of the city, a man and a woman are about to make love, but happen upon an unexpected, ethereal connection in this moody memory piece.

Schedule: Starts at 12:30 pm EST on May 30th, 2020

Genius Party: Happy Machine by Masaaki Yuasa – Japan | 2007 – 15 minutes.

After an innocent baby’s nursery crumbles away before his eyes, he enters into a surreal world in this head trip from Masaaki Yuasaka, part of an omnibus film created by STUDIO4˚C and 7 filmmakers.

Schedule: Starts at 7:00 am EST on June 3rd, 2020

INABE by Koji Fukada – Japan | 2013 – 38 minutes

In Koji Fukada’s (Harmonium) 2013 short, pig farmer Tomohiro’s (Matsuda Hiroaki) sister Naoko (Kurata Ami) suddenly returns to their pastoral home city with her new baby after a 17-year absence. She’s evasive about why she left, but as they reminisce, they resolve to dig up “something” they buried long ago.

Schedule: Starts at 8.00 am EST on June 1st, 2020

Lonely Encounter by Jenny Wan – Hong Kong | 2019 – 23 minutes

On the Winter Solstice night—traditionally a time to celebrate family—Keung, a taxi driver on the verge of losing his home, seeks customers on the gloomy street. He escapes his loneliness for a moment when he happens upon Hei, a foreign student feeling lost and estranged from his family, in this winner of the Best Short Film Award at IFFAM 2019.

Schedule: Starts 7:30 am EST on June 3rd, 2020

The Brat by Shaan Vyas – India | 2019 – 33 minutes

One evening, seven-year-old Sonu (Sanika Patel) casually alludes to a ghastly act that he committed in school. Horrified and determined to correct his course, his doting mother Surekha (Vidya Balan) decides that she won’t let him go down the same path as the other machismo-obsessed men in his family. Through her bedtime stories, she teaches Sonu the true virtue of equality.

Schedule: Starts at 7:00 am EST on June 2nd, 2020

The Yalta Conference Online by Koji Fukada – Japan | 2020 – 40 minutes

Just before the end of World War II, the Yalta Conference was held by the “Big Three” Allied leaders: Franklin Delano Roosevelt of the United States, Winston Churchill of Britain, and Joseph Stalin of the USSR. Japanese theater company Seinendan reimagines their conversations about postwar rule and power as a darkly humorous satire.

Schedule: Starts at 7:00 am EST on June 1st, 2020

Feature Films:

A City Called Macau by Li Shaohong – China | 2019 – 127 minutes

In the gambling underworld of early 2000s Macau, a casino VIP client servicing manager is swept up into a high-stakes melodrama amid epic-scale historical change.

Schedule: Starts at 7:00 am EST on June 6th, 2020

Trailer:

Eeb Allay Ooo by Prateek Vats – India | 2019 – 97 minutes

Anjani (Shardul Bhardwaj), a young migrant in New Delhi, shoos away hordes of monkeys as a contractual monkey repeller, a newly created job to disperse infestations of the animals, who tend to gather near government buildings. His job description entails mimicking aggressive langurs, the pests’ natural enemies, with sounds that are supposed to be scary—”eeb,” “allay,” and “ooo.” But Anjani has difficulty working up a frightening enough delivery, and it soon becomes obvious that he is genuinely frightened of monkeys. With that revelation, and as the film’s scope expands to encompass Anjani’s pregnant sister (Nutan Sinha) and brother-in-law cop (Shashi Bhushan), the charming absurdity of the premise morphs into a socially engaged drama of a disenfranchised workforce. Propelled by quietly revolutionary currents that call to mind the films of Ken Loach, Anjani and his family come to emblematize a generation of marginalized workers walled off from an unforgiving job market.

Schedule: Starts at 7:00 am EST on May 30th, 2020

Trailer:

Ice Cream and the Sound of Raindrops by Daigo Matsui – Japan | 2017 – 74 minutes

Daigo Matsui’s mesmerizing shape-shifter compresses a month in the life of a theater troupe into a serpentine 74-minute single take, whose fluidity evokes the dissolved boundaries between the actors’ real lives and their roles. In a small town in Japan, a theatrical premiere is planned for the British play “Morning” by Simon Stephens, which centers on two teenagers who share a grim, violent secret. The director (Matsui himself) casts six local teenagers and pushes them through emotionally demanding rehearsals: they throw themselves into every aspect of the production, but weak ticket sales and a general lack of public interest lead to the abrupt cancellation of opening night. Instead of wallowing in disappointment, though, the cast decides to rehearse the play anyways. Anchored by a star-making lead performance from Kokoro Morita, this unconventional coming-of-age tale probes the subversive possibilities of performance in a world that claims to have no place for it.

Schedule: Starts at 3:30 pm EST on June 4th, 2020

Trailer:

Mary is Happy, Mary is Happy by Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit – Thailand | 2019 – 125 minutes

Mary (Patcha Poonpiriya) is a high school senior whose life is spinning toward the unexpected. With graduation only a few months away, she faces sudden, drastic changes in life, love, and friendship. She confides her uncertainties to her level-headed close friend Suri (Chonnikan Netjui), but amid this flux, strange things keep happening—she’ll flash to faraway locales in dream sequences, or decide to impulse-buy a jellyfish. As she tries to preserve the present day in her class yearbook, Mary zigs and zags through her secret questions and imaginary whims on her Twitter feed.

Schedule: Starts at 2:20 pm EST on June 3rd, 2020

Trailer:

Nasir by Arun Karthick – India, Netherlands | 2019 – 79 minutes

Nasir, a middle-aged street salesman (Koumarane Valavane), is a nimble romantic against crushing odds. He works tirelessly to scrape by and support his family, even skipping meals to do so, but keeps up a lyrical side in the poetic and passionate love letters he writes to his wife Taj (Sudha Ranganathan). His Islamic community in Coimbatore, a largely Hindu city in southern India, faces anti-Muslim state propaganda on a daily basis, and racist customers constantly demean him when he arrives to work at his textile shop. All the same, Nasir marshals a humble generosity to pull together something resembling a life well lived, especially to support his mother (Yasmin Rahman) and mentally challenged nephew (Sabari). The winner of the NETPAC Award at Rotterdam, Arun Karthick’s richly textured sophomore feature applies a subtle expressionism to an ordinary day in Nasir’s life, and stays quietly observational until nationalist bigotry explodes the routine.

Schedule: Starts at 9:30 am EST on June 6th, 2020

Trailer:

Sisterhood by Tracy Choi – Macau | 2019 – 97 minutes

Sei moved to Taiwan 15 years ago with her husband, but a searing melodrama of cultural alienation unfolds when an unexpected death conjures her tangled past in pre-handover Macau.

Schedule: Starts at 8 am EST on June 2nd, 2020

Trailer:

The Iron Hammer by Joan Chen – China, USA | 2019 – 99 minutes

In her rousing and personal documentary debut, director Joan Chen charts the inspiring life and career of “Jenny” Lang Ping, a fearless volleyball star who embarked on one of the most remarkable journeys in modern Chinese history. She became an international icon not just as an outstanding player—the film’s title, and her nickname, comes from her trademark, pulverizing spike—but also as an assured, fearless coach who led her national team to an historic gold medal at the 1984 Olympics. But she didn’t settle there: when Lang Ping moved abroad to the United States to coach their Olympic team, she continued to break new ground while her players cinched multiple international championship titles. Brimming with never-before-seen footage, personal interviews, and (obviously) exhilarating volleyball, The Iron Hammer explores how Lang Ping’s success coaching both Team USA and China ratcheted up the bar for female empowerment and the global ambitions of a country at a crossroads. Presented by the Olympic Channel.

Schedule: Starts at 4:30 pm EST on June 7th, 2020

Trailer:

Tremble All You Want by Akiko Ooku – Japan | 2017 – 117 minutes

For the past decade, Yoshika has had a secret crush on her middle school classmate. Her life is thrown into chaos when a colleague asks her out.

Schedule: Starts at 3:15 pm EST on June 5th, 2020

Trailer:

Wrath of Silence by Yukun Xin – China | 2019 – 119 minutes

Zhang Baomin (Song Yang) is a miner in exile: after a dispute grew so brutal that he lost his tongue in the brawl, he’s been cast off from his home village to work in a far-flung mine; it takes two days for him to travel back to his family’s humble sheep farm, deep in the mountains. One winter day, his son disappears, which calls Zhang back to town. As he surveys the townspeople, it doesn’t take long for him to connect the kidnapping to a sadistic, crossbow-wielding land tycoon (Jiang Wu, A Touch of Sin) who terrorizes the villagers through a particularly grisly mob rule.

Schedule: Starts at 7:30 am EST on June 4th, 2020

Trailer:

SCHEDULE:
May 30th, 2020 – 7:00 am EST – Eeb Allay Ooo by Prateek Vats
May 30th, 2020 – 12:30 pm EST – East of Jefferson by Koji Fukada (Short Film)
June 1st, 2020 – 7:00 am EST – The Yalta Conference Online by Koji Fukada (Short Film)
June 1st, 2020 – 8:00 am EST – INABE by Koji Fukada (Short Film)
June 2nd, 2020 – 7:00 am EST – The Brat by Shaan Vyas (Short Film)
June 2nd, 2020 – 8:00 am EST – Sisterhood by Tracy Choi (Feature Film)
June 3rd, 2020 – 7:00 am EST – Genius Party: Happy Machine by Masaaki Yuasa (Short Film)
June 3rd, 2020 – 7:30 am EST – Lonely Encounter by Jenny Wan (Short Film)
June 3rd, 2020 – 2:20 pm EST – Mary is Happy, Mary is Happy by Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit (Feature Film)
June 4th, 2020 – 7:30 am EST – Wrath of Silence by Yukun Xin (Feature Film)
June 4th, 2020 – 3:30 pm EST – Ice Cream and the Sound of Raindrops by Daigo Matsui (Feature Film)
June 5th, 2020 – 3:15 pm EST – Tremble All You Want by Akiko Ooku (Feature Film)
June 6th, 2020 – 7:00 am EST – A City Called Macau by Li Shaohong (Feature Film)
June 6th, 2020 – 9:30 am EST – Nasir by Arun Karthick (Feature Film)
June 7th, 2020 – 7:00 am EST – Awake by Atul Mongia (Short Film)
June 7th, 2020 – 4:30 pm EST – The Iron Hammer by Joan Chen (Feature Documentary)