How Kani Releasing Is Revising Western Notions of Asian Cinema
Ariel Esteban Cayer, Pearl Chan, and Aaron Hunt on their approach to independent distribution and what’s exciting them in modern Asian filmmaking.
Hello! Welcome to Nothing Bogus, an Indie Film Listings+ newsletter. The + is commentary, interviews, dispatches, tutorials, and other groovy stuff. I’m going to start with the +. If you subscribed for the listings and only the listings, scroll as fast as you can to the bottom of this email. If you came for the +, no scrolling necessary :)
Ariel Esteban Cayer and Pearl Chan, the duo behind Kani Releasing, will tell you that when they started their distribution company their goals were modest. They weren’t trying to change the world or even reinvent the wheel. Instead, the company was borne out of a shared sense of frustration — Cayer in his capacity as a programmer at Fantasia International Film Festival and Chan as an independent sales agent with Good Move Media (each with a focus on Asian films). “We'd see films we really liked do the circuit for a year, maybe get into a couple festivals, and then fizzle,” says Cayer. “And we felt like maybe we could contribute our voice to giving those films a bigger life” and be more effective working “from the ground up.”
They named the company after Yasujiro Ozu’s custom-made, tatami-level tripod, a symbol of their goal of “leveling the gaze and furthering the understanding of Asian cinema in North America.” And though the company is still small and young, their mission has blossomed into something fairly profound: A revision and expansion of Western notions of Asian cinema. They’re taking a multi-pronged approach: The company distributes both contemporary Asian films and restored repertory ones through Blu-ray releases packed with thorough supplemental materials; and — with the help of U.S.-based filmmaker and critic Aaron Hunt — it also brings its films to select theaters. (This week, you can catch Lawrence Lau’s incredible, genre-defying 2000 teen flick Spacked Out at Metrograph.) With each release, Kani is creating access, giving context, and, hopefully, expanding the canon.
This week, I spoke to Cayer, Chan, and Hunt about the company, their approach to independent distribution, and what’s exciting them in modern Asian filmmaking.
Before you started Kani, you were frustrated with the limited lifespan of some of the great Asian films you were seeing. Were you able to diagnose why those films were having that limited lifespan?
Pearl: On my end, I was working primarily with Southeast Asian films. And it's not necessarily a problem to diagnose as it’s that these were just not films people were willing to take a risk on. But we found that when we do take the risk on them, the audience is basically there. But they might not make enough financial sense for another distributor to take on.
Ariel: There's a value that's ascribed to things that makes people risk averse. And people have other priorities that are perfectly valid in their own right. But we just tried to trust this instinct that the things we liked could find an audience — even in a modest way, at our scale. And we're not the first to do this. We've been inspired by Third Window Films, dGENERATE Films, Kimstim, and Mondo Macabro, in being hyper-focused and putting the work in.
Could you expand on how you were able to find and connect with the audience for these films?
Pearl: We started with home video, which allowed us to try out films that we thought were really good. And I guess I just thought, I'm not special: If I like this, there must be other people out there. I grew up partially in Canada, and Asian representation has been a huge discussion there. But rather than waiting on Hollywood to make films with Asian representation, you could just turn to Asia, where there are so many films. I love Tremble All You Want, which is one of the releases we've done. I think it's the perfect fucking rom-com. And everyone in it is Asian, and you don't have to fight for that.
Ariel: I think it's also a matter of creating a coherent identity for these films by stacking one on top of another and creating this space that also creates more space for other distributors to embark on whatever micro-trend we might've wedged into a door. This is something we're very aware of in the home video space because it's kind of how it works. A company starts doing Shaw Brothers films and kung-fu films and then everybody's off to the races. And we're aware of our position as a very small company and trying to leverage that and the nimbleness that allows. We want to take risks. Instead of doing another '50s or '60s Japanese film — which I love — let's try to do a contemporary rom-com, which there are a lot less of on the market. We've worked with many Filipino films, and before we started I think I could count on two hands the amount of Filipino films on home video in North America. So my hope is that in doing that it creates more space for other people to see that it's doable.
Can you locate through-lines in your curation between these different films, which are coming from different countries, different time periods, different genres?
Pearl: A lot of our work falls into this idea of transnationality.
Ariel: It's not something we planned for. We're trying to curate Asian cinema from a more Asian perspective, from both being here and also working closely with that industry. We’re not afraid of films that might be small and successful in Japan or the Philippines; they therefore could maybe be small and successful in the U.S. as well. We're trying to bring films that feel local in their respective places, and that translates to the themes and stories of these films. They're often accessible but a little political and hard to pin down in terms of genre. And then this transnational idea emerged because when you stick to the locality of these films, then inevitably there's a lot of these stories about how, for instance, does the Philippines perceive itself vis-à-vis U.S. imperialism?
It seems like part of your project is revising popular notions of what is Asian cinema in terms of a North American viewpoint. Does that track?
Pearl: Yeah. I think I really strive to bring a view from within the culture. I also grew up partially here [in Hong Kong]. But Hong Kong is just Hong Kong, it's not the other cultures we work with. So we try to be really careful, and make sure we're able to work with local writers and artists and historians and archivists to present the films as authentically as possible. A lot of the work I do with Kani, but also in the translation work I do with Vinegar Syndrome and 88 Films, is just trying to retranslate these films for a Western audience. So much of the humor of Hong Kong movies can be lost because humor is so hard to translate. I'm careful to make sure that the homophobia comes through and the racism comes through, and to not let it slide, but also to make sure that the humor comes through. Being true to the source rather than cleaning it up, which a lot of the subtitles used to do.
Ariel: We didn't start out with this mandate. But it's a commitment to the specificity of things. And it makes it so there's more space, and it therefore revises what's available.
In terms of creating context around these films, you're taking a few different approaches at the same time — whether it's the distribution of these films, the bonus features that come with the Blu-rays, and then the theatrical component. So can you talk a bit about how all of these elements complement each other?
Aaron: I think the theatrical is just an extension of what Ariel and Pearl have been doing with home video. The packaging of the Blu-ray is filled with all this local context, because the films are so specific to their local audience, so we've been trying to translate that to the theatrical experience. We just had a screening of Spacked Out at Metrograph, and the Q&A, with our moderator Xueli Wang and Christy Cheung, an actress from the film, brought a lot of context. They did a great job, and you could tell the audience was really hungry to hear about the things they didn't know. Theatrical gives these films another life.
Pearl: And I think theatrical also gives the films legitimacy that home video doesn't provide. And it means a lot for living filmmakers to engage with audiences in this way.
Ariel: We're realizing that the tracks for distribution are increasingly isolated. It used to be that you couldn’t put out a home video edition before you did your theatrical, and we're not living in those times anymore. Nor are we working at that scale. So we can do things however we want and do more day-and-date and be more nimble about it.
I've read you talk about how there's certain conventional wisdom about what plays well in the West. And I'm curious, in distributing these films and doing these theatrical events, how you might've found the conventional wisdom wrong.
Pearl: The conventional wisdom is that action and horror translate, and everything else is difficult. Spacked Out, for instance, has been around for a long time — Spectrum released it in France a few years ago — but we had to put some work into contextualizing it because it was shot by non-actors and Lawrence Lau’s work is lesser known abroad. A new 2K restoration of the film helped.
Ariel: These conventional wisdoms are tied to genre a lot of the time. And I think it's about carving out space for these more unpinnable genres. And to give them a good poster and a good face, so to speak.
Pearl: The title we thought would be the most risky was New Old Play, for which Icarus had done theatrical in the U.S., they'd done VOD, DVD. And then we did a Blu-ray. And it was sold out in 24 hours. We didn't expect that. Not because it's not a great film, but because it's a three hour film about a Sichuanese opera clown walking us through the 20th century in China.
Ariel: We're being proven wrong all the time. Things we think are going to do really well do OK. Things we think are going to be hard do very well. And so on and so forth.
Pearl: It proves you can't guess. No one knows. And sometimes it's worth just taking a risk.
In terms of the contemporary filmmakers you're working with, have you noticed any exciting trends bubbling up? And who are some of the people you think are doing exciting work?
Aaron: There's a new generation of filmmakers in the Philippines. There's a lot of independent work that's pretty DIY special-effects heavy, in a way that's not just throwing something on the screen or embellishing it, but actually informing how it moves and dictating form in a way that feels really exciting and new. It seems pretty incomparable to other new waves in other countries, which often feel catered to festivals or is kind of doing a slow cinema thing that a lot of Western festivals like Asian cinema to do. I think it's very accessible at the same time. I love Glenn Barit who informed a lot of young filmmakers. Maria Estela Paiso has a film called It's Raining Frogs Outside. Whammy Alcazaren did a film called Bold Eagle and also Never Tear Us Apart.
Pearl: Cleaners is one of the releases we're doing. And of course, Che Tagyamon produced Cleaners and she just came out with a short that's fantastic.
Ariel: We've found the filmmaking community in the Philippines is tight knit in terms of the films informing each other in exciting ways, even when they're in diametrically opposed traditions. There's a spark of creativity that you don't necessarily find elsewhere. And I think that has to do with the way funding works there. On the other hand, I think independent filmmaking in Japan is very difficult. Really harsh conditions, low budgets and pay. Filmmakers there don't own their films. That makes supporting films harder and the quality of the work suffers. Which is why what we get emerging from Japan is more big productions and major studio type films.
Pearl: Although, in Japan I'd shout out Daisuke Miyazaki, Nao Yoshigai, Tadashi Nagayama and Yoko Yamanaka. We're attracted to people who are playing with form and who stretch genre. In the Philippines, as Aaron mentioned, it has to do with form and community. And in Japan, it's these ways of working outside of the system.
Ariel: Each country has its own challenges. We haven't released Korean cinema yet, although we’d like to. Basically what tends to happen with the Korean film industry is a flattening effect. There are really interesting first features that might emerge and then the filmmakers are urged to integrate into the system and fall in line. And next thing you know they're writing a Netflix show or doing a web series and they disappear in that funnel and don't get to make a name for themselves in the more auteur-driven process that was afforded to the Park Chan-Wooks and Bong Joon-Hos.
Pearl: And in China, I find filmmakers are playing with censorship in ways that keep the work really exciting. It's not every film. Journey to the West is a great example. It's produced by Frant Gwo who made The Wandering Earth, which is like the biggest sci-fi movie in China. And here's Kong Dashan, who makes a tiny little movie also about space, with Frant Gwo cameo-ing as himself.
Is there anything else you want to add?
Pearl: We've started working on these "preservation copies" — as we're calling them — most recently of Miss Philippines, which was an early Filipino musical romance comedy meta film about filmmaking. And we were able to do that with the help of an archivist named Teddy Co who recently passed. So much of our work is built off of people who came before us and who've done the work. And a lot of films are pretty much gone. Like for Miss Philippines, we were only able to work off of previous telecine scans of it made by Mike de Leon. It's such a great film. So moving forward we're trying to figure out how to present these films that no longer have their elements — and especially as we move towards a home video culture geared towards pristine 4K UHD quality of films, we really want to see how to balance that with really great and important and interesting filmmaking that may be really fuzzy or where the quality of the surviving elements is no longer up to par.
Ariel: I think this gets at an earlier question: What gets allocated a budget for restoration? What gets the privilege of being passed forward to the next generation? And that question became self-evident the moment we started this project, because we're exploring areas where there hasn't been an interest in restoring, or where there hasn't been the resources to do that. So we're trying to figure out ways to do that, and one way was to sneak in a film as a bonus feature or try to do shorts and try to find creative solutions.
Listings
From Bre Thomas: Working on a new short shooting late winter / early spring. And on the hunt for a house in NYC/ Jersey / Long Island. Shoot is two days. And it’ll be a small cast/crew of 23. Paid! AESTHETIC: Decor is outdated by several decades; Colorful paint or wallpaper; Tchotchkes, drapes, homey textures. “Lived in.”; *Unrenovated, New England, Suburban*. SPECS: Separate Kitchen, Dining Room, Foyer, Bathroom, Bedroom; Kitchen, Dining Room, Foyer on same floor; Island in kitchen or space to bring one in. Email bre.thomas@gmail.com.
From Emily Korteweg: Watch This Ready, the production company I help run, has built a new space in NY called Mulberry Studios as our HQ. It includes brand new post-production capabilities, two edit bays, a podcast/ADR studio, a screening room with a very large sofa, private offices, and common areas. After spending many hours in the edit, we wanted a different design and overall experience for ourselves, our friends, and our partners. All the spaces (which you can view here) except for our personal offices are open to rent. Email emily@watchthisready.com.
If you want to promote a screening of your film, I created a chat thread here.
And for those attending Sundance or Slamdance who want to link up, I created a chat thread here.
If you would like to list in a future issue, either A) post in the Nothing Bogus chat thread, or B) email nothingbogus1@gmail.com with the subject “Listing.” (It’s FREE!) Include your email and all relevant details (price, dates, etc.).