Edmund Yeo

Today is Father's Day. Happy Father's Day, dad. Dad is going to be at a TV shoot today, accompanied by Mom and my sister, it's going to be a good one. (my dad is a judge in a AMERICAN IDOL-like Chinese singing show, however, unlike idol, the contestants are restricted to 45 and above. Quite a popular show that recently turned my dad into a celebrity of sorts) Since my lifelong love for cinema was influenced by Dad, and I would never been a filmmaker if he were indifferent towards films, I think it's fitting that I try to commemorate this day by listing out a number of great Father's Day films that you might not have seen (I know I haven't). To make things simpler for me, I'm restricting this list to only Asian films . (I'll do another list if this goes well, haha)

This is very late, since the Asian Film Awards ended two weeks ago. So you probably already knew that the Oscar-winning A SEPARATION was the night's major winner. (full results here ) But I haven't been updating this blog much these days, so please bear with me. You might remember that I mentioned directing a series of interviews with a few major Japanese film figures last month while suffering from a hideous food poisoning as part of the ROAD TO AFA (Asian Film Awards) program hosted by Janet Hsieh. A month earlier, in January, I was in Taipei for these interviews. I didn't exactly blog about my Taipei escapades, so I'll post up some of my old tweets related to it.

I came back to Tokyo on the 8th, arriving early in the morning. As the day went on, I knew something was wrong.

Went to the opening ceremony of Skip City International D-Cinema Festival 2010 . My short film, KINGYO, is in competition . 10 shorts were in competition, it's supposed to be a domestic competition for Japanese shorts only, KINGYO was a Japanese short, but its director ain't a Japanese, so that makes me the token foreigner among the nominees, awesome! I was actually late, missed all of the opening speeches from the ceremony, but I arrived just in time to be introduced on-stage. When I walked into the place, the conversation between me and the staffer was like that:

My second day in Hong Kong began just as uneventfully as the one before. Attempting to get more information from the Film Festival Hospitality Center (it's one of the hotel rooms), I was shocked that it's closed. Not knowing what to do, I took another walk back to Causeway Bay, and ended up at another traditional Hong Kong restaurant for brunch.

I've talked about Quentin S. Crisp before - he's one of my favorite living writers. His 'demented fiction' is unrivalled for its poetic quality and general, um, dementedness, and I suspect it won't be long before he has a major mainstream breakthrough - not that there's anything particularly 'mainstream' about him, but his stories and novels are certainly of world-class quality. Anyway, I sat down with him recently to discuss his writing, his favorite films, pop music, the meaning of Mishima's death, the real reason why most people study Japanese, and other relevant topics. Suffice it to say that this is probably the most important thing I have yet posted to this site, and it certainly touches on more or less everything Swifty and I have put up here at some point. It is thus mandatory reading . Apart from that, it's probably the last substantial thing I'll post for a while, time constraints being what they are. Read on and learn more.