Asia & Pacific

Jason Rosette reports from Cambodia in another installment of his Filmmaker's Journal, four years after his last update. Here he chronicles the ups and downs of getting what he calls his most ambitious project yet, the feature narrative Freedom Deal, off the ground in Cambodia, including the unique ways he's approached casting and fundraising.

"I think every doc director is an activist, their army is visual images," says director Seung-Jun Yi. His film, Planet of Snail, about the blind and deaf poet Young-Chan, just won the best feature-length documentary award at IDFA. Seung-Jun Yi has made documentaries for Korean television and is among a growing movement of filmmakers to break out and expand the form.

Shot entirely in Singapore as part of the NYU Tisch Asia MFA program, Delilah, Before marks the directorial debut of filmmaker Melanie Schiele. Here, she talks about the program and the film, as the film screens at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival.

Filmmaker Jason Rosette checks in from Thailand on the status of his film Freedom Deal in the second part of this filmmaker journal. His first entry Filimmaker's Journal: So Much for Taking a Break chronicles how he went from a stopover in Cambodia to organizing a local film festival and a production company.

Jason Rosette made two films in the U.S.—Bookwars and Susan Hero—before moving to Southeast Asia. His original plan was to travel a bit and learn how to teach English as a second language. But on a stopover in Cambodia, Rosette found himself infatuated with the country and its people. And since the once-troubled nation lost a generation of artists and journalists, he also saw an opportunity and even a responsibility to put his media-making skills to good use. So he organized a film festival and started a production company that works for a number of NGOs. He chronicles his work in this first journal entry for The Independent.

The 5th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival kicks off in March at a time when the work of Thai directors such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Thunska Pansittivorakul is gaining worldwide acclaim. But even as Thai independent cinema reaches a creative pinnacle, it finds itself bumping up against serious new censorship at home. The Independent's Denise Burrell-Stinson recently travelled to Southeast Asia, and files this report. You can view a clip from Sud pralad (Tropical Malady), and trailers for Sud sanaeha (Blissfully Yours) and Sang sattawat (Syndromes and a Century), Weerasethakul's censored film, on our Watch page.

Unlike most documentaries about music, Rock 'n Tokyo is not entirely a reflection of the filmmaker's passion for the artists—although Pamela Valente is certainly a big fan of the acts that appear in the film, including Guitar Wolf, Nine, The 5678s, and the Jet Boys (featuring front man Onoching, shown at left). Instead, Valente's film is really about Tokyo, a city she adores, especially for its strange comingling of rowdy punk kids with women who still wear kimonos and those dark-suited corporate “sararimen." Leah Hochbaum Rosner talks with the filmmaker about her passion project. You can see scenes from the film at our "Watch" page. (Photo source).