Have Penis Gun, Will Travel: New York's Coolest, Weirdest Indie Film Festival

They say the glory days of 42nd Street grindhouse are long gone. But intrepid Manhattan moviegoers know that all they have to do is aim a little further downtown on the subway map. Every summer, the IFC Film Center hosts two weeks of kamikaze cinema known as the New York Asian Film Festival. This eclectic survey of what’s new across the Pacific and beyond—from Japan, Hong Kong and Korea, as well as Indonesia, Thailand, Taiwan and the Philippines—shuns high-minded drivel.

“Most New York film festivals say if a movie is entertaining then it can’t be art,” says Grady Hendrix, who covers Asian film industries for Variety, and is one of five NYAFF co-directors who fund much of the fest out-of-pocket, hoping for boffo box office. “Our thing is, it has to be entertaining before it can be art.” Over the past seven years, the festival has championed cult auteurs like Takashi Miike (Ichi the Killer), Seijun Suzuki (Tokyo Drifter) and Koji Wakamatsu (whose United Red Army had its American debut there last year).

The event also introduced New Yorkers to Park Chan-wook and Johnnie To—now international brand names. Even programmers at the New York Film Festival now follow the NYAFF’s lead. “There may be this misconception about the festival, that it’s this crazy, woolly, wild thing like a rabid sheep jacked up on moonshine, which it is,” Hendrix says. “But we’ve almost become respectable.”

Though each year’s film bonanza is packed with demonic babies, ghost sagas, yakuza musicals and the occasional homicidal mutant wielding a penis gun, there’s also plenty of delicate, introspective fare—like shambling, melancholy 2008 favorite Adrift in Tokyo. “We’re sort of like a prostitute who gave up street-walking,” says Hendrix, reaching for an analogy that would serve in old Times Square as surely as in Tokyo’s sleazy Shinjuku district, “and now we’re in our own apartment, giving full-body massages with a happy ending."