I was honoured to be included in the panel for The Fighting Spirit Film Festival’s recent seminar on The Cultural Impact of Martial Arts Films.
This seminar is now online in three 40-minute(ish) clips on Youtube. I recommend it for the fascinating insights of panellists Andrew Heskins, Josh Toussaint-Strauss, Marlon ‘Kush’ Palmer, and our facilitator Weng Yu.
I am honoured and excited to be included on the panel hosted by Fighting Spirit Film Festival.
To quote from the event’s Eventbrite page:
Fighting Spirit Film Festival are proud to present our first online seminar, examining the cultural impact of martial arts films. Since the 1970s, martial arts films have spread across the globe – in this seminar we will look how their impact transcended film and moved into pop culture, and found unexpected popularity with minority communities in the West.
To help us with this, we have assembled a panel of experts who will deep dive into the genre and discuss how these films spread globally, and also their own personal experiences.
This is a free event, but registration is essential as we will email the zoom link to you a few hours before the event starts.
To find out more about FSFF, check out there website www.fightingspiritfilmfestival.com
And to make one of those essential registrations, go to Eventbrite.
I was recently honoured to be invited to do some guest blogging for the 36 Styles website.
My first blog is about Chor Yuen’s wuxia pian ‘Roving Swordsman’.
“I was almost fooled!” ripostes Feng Rusung (played by Kwan Fung), one of the good guys in Chor Yuen’s Roving Swordsman, when confronted by one of many sleights of hand that take place during the course of this film’s plot. While it is a throwaway line in one of the early scenes, it is also apt, for Roving Swordsman is full of trickery and deceit as its protagonists and antagonists try to outwit each other.
To read the rest of the blog, and check out 36 Styles great new website, go here.
The excellent Kung Fu Movie Guide website is giving away a copy of my book as their monthly prize. All you have to do is sign up for their excellent monthly e-mail bulletin here.
The Kung Fu Movie Guide is a treasure trove of articles, reviews, and a podcast. They are great for keeping up with the latest news about the genre and essential for any serious fan of the genre.
I was happy and proud to contribute a copy of Ask for the Moon as a reward in this month’s Gutterthon. The book has already gone as a reward but, if you like “thoughtful writing about disreputable art”, you should still definitely head on over to the Gutterthon and support it. The Cultural Gutter is chockers full of great writing about all kinds of genres – sci-fi, horror, Bollywood, comics, fantasy, videogames, romance. There are many great rewards still on offer for the next 24 days, and you will have the warm and fuzzy feeling that comes out of supporting a website to pay its contributing writers.
Later this month I will be interviewed for the Start Dis Podcast, which describes itself thusly: “The StartDis podcast is for people of conscience, who value education and who love to learn a little bit about everything.”
The “little bit” I will be contributing to the interview will be musings about the nature of creativity, using the activities of Shaw Brothers filmmakers as an example. Stay tuned for further details.
And speaking about podcasts, you can check out an interview I did for the Bedrock Games podcast. Due to internet problems on the day the audio quality isn’t great, but I really enjoyed responding to the thoughtful questions I was asked. More information here.
By the way, if you are on twitter, you can follow me at either @DangerousMere or @FuThoughts. The Kung Fu Movie Guide can be found at @KFMovieGuide, Cultural Gutter at @CulturalGutter, Brendan Davis (and his blog and podcast) at @Bedrockgames, and the Start Dis podcast at @StartDisPodcast.
Brendan from Bedrock Games recently interviewed me about my book for the Bedrock Games podcast. We did the interview via Skype and struggled with the internet connection somewhat (like most Aussies, I was quick to lay the blame on our woeful internet speeds) but otherwise it was a really fun conversation. Brendan really knows his wuxia and shared some great questions and insights.
If you are a fan of the martial arts movie genre then the Bedrock Games blog and podcast is really well worth checking out.
If you want to listen to the podcast, then you can find it here.
askforthemoon.com.au 