Then Summer Came Opens 7th New York Asian Film Festival

The New York Asian Film Festival opens this Friday and runs until July 6. In its seventh year, the NYAFF offers its biggest line-up yet, screening 43 films and two programs of shorts at the Japan Society and the IFC Center in New York. Opening night kicks off with the world premiere of Then Summer Came, the Joe Odagiri/Yoshio Harada father-son marriage comedy directed by Japan's most respected playwright, Ryo Iwamatsu.

Other highlights include Wakamatsu Koji's jolting epic United Red Army, a mind-blowing 190-minute dramatization of the history of Japan's radical movement, masterfully blending documentary style with traditional narrative to shocking effect. We also highly recommend Sparrow, the new film from Hong Kong action expert Johnny To, in which his trademark balletic gunplay is replaced by breathtakingly choreographed sleights-of-hand. With a light, humorous touch, Sparrow follows the misadventures of a quartet of pickpockets who are contacted by a mysterious woman, and the result is cinematic bliss.

The NYAFF's ecclectic scheduling ranges from Feng Xiaogang's Assembly, set during China’s 1948 Civil War, to Takashi Miike's comic spaghetti western Sukiyaki Western Django (starring Quentin Tarantino!) to Hitoshi Yazaki's Strawberry Shortcakes, a Japanase version of Sex in The City.

The complete listing of NYAFF 2008 Films.