Before the final film screening at the eighth annual Asian Film Festival of Dallas, the staff of the AFFD spoke briefly about the philosophy underpinning the festival. The all-volunteer staff really has only one purpose: to bring enjoyable Asian films to a wider audience in a theater setting. They don’t really care about world premieres or visiting celebrities. This down-to-earth outlook translates to a variety of genres and unique films on display, a relaxed atmosphere, and great crowd dynamics.

Fortunately, most of the films that screened at this year’s AFFD can be found on DVD. Here are a few films from the festival worth checking out, if you missed the rare opportunity to see them on the big screen.

The opening night film this year was The Beast Stalker, a Hong Kong police thriller directed and written by Dante Lam. The story concerns a police captain whose quest to find a kidnapped child is also a quest to banish his personal demons, and that’s the most I can say without spoiling the plot. A more populist choice than other festivals might make, The Beast Stalker fits in smoothly with Hollywood examples of the genre while managing to surpass most of them because of the tautness of its script. Lam understands that plot flows from characterization and vice versa, meaning that the complex plot never becomes unnatural. Another consequence of this unity is that action sequences are much more intense as the viewer understands and sympathizes with all the characters involved, even the demonic, one-eyed child abductor. My only serious complaint is the uncreative and jerky camera work, which seemed more at the level of a television show than that of a feature film. Regardless, The Beast Stalker is enthralling and exciting, a fun ride that won’t make you feel silly for enjoying it.

Some of you may have had the good fortune, like me, to have caught The Twilight Samurai when it played at the Angelica six or seven years ago. Directed by Yoji Yamada, the film is a beautiful evocation of the dilemmas that arise in any complex moral system, there the conflicts between societal and familial responsibilities. Yamada’s latest film, Kabei: Our Mother, deals with similar conflicts, as a mother must strive both to protect her two daughters during the years of Japanese World War II militarism and to be true to her professor husband who has been jailed for political “thought crimes.” Sayuri Yoshinaga plays Kabei with a quiet strength in concealing her emotions, a common motif of Japanese cinema here intensified by the knowledge that any break in her facade could lead to terrible consequences for her family. The acting as a whole is excellent, particularly the clumsy, endearing student played by Tadanobu Asano, a vast change from his recent performance as Genghis Khan in Mongol.

The small defeats, betrayals and victories that come with living under an oppressive regime are all well captured in Kabei. Mutsuo Naganuma’s cinematography is unobtrusive, rich with long sequences that allow the viewer to downshift into the rhythm of the Nogamis’ daily life. Because the film is a paean to motherhood and wifehood, it concentrates on the rituals of domestic tasks and the details of family relationships. I particularly remember a moment when the littlest daughter begins to mimic the student’s hand movements as he sings Schubert badly, but I expect each viewer will be touched by a distinct occurrence. The central question for the critic is whether a film that causes the majority of its audience to weep is powerful or merely overly sentimental, but I have to join the former camp. Kabei: Our Mother is wonderful.

One look at the title of the AFFD’s Friday midnight movie, Samurai Avenger: The Blind Wolf, and you probably know whether it’s the type of movie for you. The film concerns a blind swordsman who must fight seven assassins before reaching his family’s murderer, and it is unabashedly grindhouse in spirit, gratuitously sexual and violent. As one of the lead actors, present for the AFFD screening, put it: “Don’t worry, you won’t offend anybody if you laugh. You’re supposed to.” A good thing – his acting got the most laughs, and he looked like he could benchpress the whole crowd.

Grindhouse films can be endearing in their utter lack of limits, and this freedom can lead to a boundless if low creativity, some of which is on display in the variety of the assassins or the way all the characters pay with Japanese gold ryo in the middle of the American desert. The blindness of the swordsman himself, parodying Zatoichi, is played for cheap laughs, as when he walks into a tree immediately after skillfully taking down opponents. Politically correct this ain’t. The film isn’t a great example of the style, however, because it’s too self-conscious and too messy in all the wrong ways – for example, the narrative is broken repeatedly and at inopportune moments by flashback sequences. Nevertheless, the viewing experience was improved by the festival atmosphere, as the audience – some of them brought by Dallas Cinemania ( http://dallascinemania.com/ ) – laughed and clapped in appreciation at Samurai Wolf’s more ridiculous moments.

The AFFD chose the martial arts film Ip Man to finish out the festival. The movie is a heavily fictionalized version of the early life of Ip Man, the first public teacher of the Southern Chinese martial arts style Wing Chun. The story is told in broad strokes: Ip Man is a reluctant fighter known by his entire hometown of Foshan as the greatest master of the art. After defending the town’s honor from uncivilized upstarts, Ip Man exchanges local pride for national when the Japanese invade China. Though starving, Ip Man is again reluctant to fight in the duels set up by the Japanese general in charge of the local occupation. The characters are almost entirely one-dimensional and stereotypical, to the extent that the villainous Colonel Sato looks like a Western propagandist’s version of Tojo. At least Donnie Yen, perhaps best known from Hero, manages to bring some depth to his portrayal of Ip Man. Historical accuracy is exchanged for jingoism, too: in the epilogue, China (and by extension Ip Man) gets sole credit for defeating the Japanese forces.

But this is a martial arts epic, and none of that matters if the fight scenes are good – so are they? Yes, almost without exception. All of the scenes are unique, doubtless thanks to Sammo Hung’s choreography, and Donnie Yen’s prowess is magnificent to behold. Wing Chun is a style of close-in fighting combining attack and defense which turns out to be much more cinematic than one might think. The sold-out crowd clapped the most when Yen would finish off his opponent with a flurry of punches, beginning as his adversary stood and following him to the ground, hitting dozens of times in less than a minute. The scene in which Ip Man demolishes ten Japanese black belts is a worthwhile addition to the hero-triumphant-against-overwhelming-odds convention as well as the best scene in the movie. Ip Man is big-budget, blockbuster, martial arts enjoyment, and of course the sequel is already in the works.