New Delhi, April 13 (Ians) Japanese investment giant SoftBank is selling one of its venture capital arms, SoftBank Ventures Asia (Sbva), to Singaporean investment firm The Edgeof, as Vc funding remains scarce amid the global macroeconomic conditions.
The acquisition comes after SoftBank and its Vision Fund registered huge financial losses amid the overall slump in the world of technology.
The Edgeof, a newly-established entity, will be led by Founder Taizo Son (SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son’s younger brother), and Co-founder and Chairman Atsushi Taira from the founding team of Mistletoe.
The Edgeof will leverage Mistletoe’s know-how and establish a pan-Asian ecosystem for ‘aStartups’ by discovering, investing and supporting the growth of game-changing startups, the companies said in a statement.
The company defines “aStartups” as startups that have a mission to address fundamental problems in the world with advanced technology.
SoftBank Group will collaborate closely with The Edgeof, offering valuable expertise,...
The acquisition comes after SoftBank and its Vision Fund registered huge financial losses amid the overall slump in the world of technology.
The Edgeof, a newly-established entity, will be led by Founder Taizo Son (SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son’s younger brother), and Co-founder and Chairman Atsushi Taira from the founding team of Mistletoe.
The Edgeof will leverage Mistletoe’s know-how and establish a pan-Asian ecosystem for ‘aStartups’ by discovering, investing and supporting the growth of game-changing startups, the companies said in a statement.
The company defines “aStartups” as startups that have a mission to address fundamental problems in the world with advanced technology.
SoftBank Group will collaborate closely with The Edgeof, offering valuable expertise,...
- 4/13/2023
- by Agency News Desk
- GlamSham
Toronto International Film Festival
TORONTO -- Like his new A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Wayne Wang's The Princess of Nebraska centers on a Chinese character recently arrived on American soil. This time, it's a very young woman carrying a baby she isn't ready for.
Princess doesn't dovetail with Prayers the way Wang's pair of 1995 releases, Smoke and Blue in the Face, did, even though they share some general cultural ingredients. If each of these new titles appeals to a limited audience, the number of viewers who will appreciate both is smaller still. In the case of Princess, the tight narrative focus it shares with Prayers is colored by a bleaker outlook and edgier visual style, placing it squarely in the art house arena.
Sasha, a fairly unsympathetic girl, is from Beijing by way of Omaha. She has flown to San Francisco to meet a Westerner, Boshen, who isn't her child's father but is involved in some way we don't initially understand. We're not even certain what it is he's about to help her do -- Arrange an abortion? Make plans to sell the child or find adoptive parents? -- but we know they aren't especially fond of each other.
Boshen is more solicitous, though, than she is of him. He invites her to a dinner party, where Sasha alienates a bunch of upper-class Chinese-Americans and rifles through their purses when nobody's looking. (Later, she'll casually steal a family's shopping bag in a mall food court.) Bored, she sets out on her own to Chinatown, where an ugly night awaits.
Shot in a much more seat-of-the-pants style than Prayers, the film is as casual about framing as Sasha is about manners. Its colors tend toward the lurid or fluorescent, and its perspective sometimes shifts so that we see action through the viewfinder of Sasha's cell-phone camera. The style suits her night-time adventure, as she meets the tough-girl "X," who may be a prostitute and is definitely unsavory, and proceeds to get drunk in places she has no business being.
The source of Sasha's problems is revealed much as the troubles are in Prayers -- at the end of some fruitless wandering, to be followed by an ambiguous resolution. Here, the outlook is bleaker, stranding the expectant mother in the center of a very empty frame. Moving on, we're told in the film, is a very American idea -- viewers are left to guess whether Sasha can put anything behind her or will be carrying her mistakes for a very long time.
THE PRINCESS OF NEBRASKA
No Distributor
California Asian American Media
Credits:
Director: Wayne Wang
Co-director: Richard Wong
Writer: Michael Ray
Based on the short story by Yiyun Li
Producers: Yukie Kito, Donald Young
Executive producers: Yasushi Kotani, Taizo Son, Stephen Gong
Director of photography: Richard Wong
Production designer: Amy Chan
Music: Kent Sparling
Editor: Deirdre Slevin
Cast:
Sasha: Ling Li
Boshen: Brian Danforth
X: Pamelyn Chee
Running time -- 77 minutes
No MPAA rating...
TORONTO -- Like his new A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Wayne Wang's The Princess of Nebraska centers on a Chinese character recently arrived on American soil. This time, it's a very young woman carrying a baby she isn't ready for.
Princess doesn't dovetail with Prayers the way Wang's pair of 1995 releases, Smoke and Blue in the Face, did, even though they share some general cultural ingredients. If each of these new titles appeals to a limited audience, the number of viewers who will appreciate both is smaller still. In the case of Princess, the tight narrative focus it shares with Prayers is colored by a bleaker outlook and edgier visual style, placing it squarely in the art house arena.
Sasha, a fairly unsympathetic girl, is from Beijing by way of Omaha. She has flown to San Francisco to meet a Westerner, Boshen, who isn't her child's father but is involved in some way we don't initially understand. We're not even certain what it is he's about to help her do -- Arrange an abortion? Make plans to sell the child or find adoptive parents? -- but we know they aren't especially fond of each other.
Boshen is more solicitous, though, than she is of him. He invites her to a dinner party, where Sasha alienates a bunch of upper-class Chinese-Americans and rifles through their purses when nobody's looking. (Later, she'll casually steal a family's shopping bag in a mall food court.) Bored, she sets out on her own to Chinatown, where an ugly night awaits.
Shot in a much more seat-of-the-pants style than Prayers, the film is as casual about framing as Sasha is about manners. Its colors tend toward the lurid or fluorescent, and its perspective sometimes shifts so that we see action through the viewfinder of Sasha's cell-phone camera. The style suits her night-time adventure, as she meets the tough-girl "X," who may be a prostitute and is definitely unsavory, and proceeds to get drunk in places she has no business being.
The source of Sasha's problems is revealed much as the troubles are in Prayers -- at the end of some fruitless wandering, to be followed by an ambiguous resolution. Here, the outlook is bleaker, stranding the expectant mother in the center of a very empty frame. Moving on, we're told in the film, is a very American idea -- viewers are left to guess whether Sasha can put anything behind her or will be carrying her mistakes for a very long time.
THE PRINCESS OF NEBRASKA
No Distributor
California Asian American Media
Credits:
Director: Wayne Wang
Co-director: Richard Wong
Writer: Michael Ray
Based on the short story by Yiyun Li
Producers: Yukie Kito, Donald Young
Executive producers: Yasushi Kotani, Taizo Son, Stephen Gong
Director of photography: Richard Wong
Production designer: Amy Chan
Music: Kent Sparling
Editor: Deirdre Slevin
Cast:
Sasha: Ling Li
Boshen: Brian Danforth
X: Pamelyn Chee
Running time -- 77 minutes
No MPAA rating...
- 9/17/2007
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Toronto International Film Festival
TORONTO -- One of two new small-scale films from Wayne Wang (both based on stories by Yiyun Li), A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is modest but moving, a finely observed portrait of a father/daughter relationship that will resonate deeply for many viewers. The scale may limit its pull in the art house arena somewhat, but Chinese-Americans and viewers from other immigrant communities will appreciate its themes.
The story of a man who doesn't know his daughter at all, Prayers showcases an affecting performance by Henry O as Mr. Shi, who has just arrived in Spokane from China to see daughter Yilan for the first time in 12 years. The two greet each other stiffly when he emerges from the airport gates, and Yilan clearly has little idea what to do with him; heading out to work on his first day in town, she suggests that he should "take it easy" and might want to walk to the park.
Shi has higher hopes than that, taking constant notes in order to improve his English and shopping for what he needs to cook in Yilan's underequipped kitchen. For the next few nights, they will see each other only at dinner, where he makes much more food than the two can eat.
Though Shi is eager to make up for lost time (he innocently snoops around her apartment during the day, looking for insight), his daughter spends less and less time at home. Shi (whose wife died of cancer) makes friends at the park with an Iranian woman, and we come to get the point that, if rejecting one's parents is common in many cultures, it's doubly so for immigrants hoping to assimilate in a new environment. Shi and Madam, as he calls her, have amusingly piecemeal conversations in which three languages are spoken but only one understood.
Until the film's end, when some causes of family tension are finally brought to the surface, this is about all that happens. Wang's empathy for Mr. Shi, and O's dignified persistence in what appears to be a doomed effort to connect, draw us in and keep us from becoming bored. (An 83-minute running time helps in that respect.)
At one point, Yilan repeats a friend's idea that people would be better at raising children if they could somehow be grandparents before becoming parents. She doesn't seem to see the obvious corollary, that we are often far more forgiving of our grandparents' perceived faults than of our parents'. "A Thousand Years of Good Prayers" waits patiently for her to piece it together.
A THOUSAND YEARS OF GOOD PRAYERS
No Distributor
North by Northwest
Credits:
Director: Wayne Wang
Writer: Yiyun Li
Based on the short story by Yiyun Li
Producers: Yukie Kito, Rich Cowan, Wayne Wang
Executive producers: Yasushi Kotani, Taizo Son, Jooick Lee
Director of photography: Patrick Lindenmaier
Production designer: Vincent De Felice
Music: Lesley Barber
Co-producer:
Costume designer: Lisa Caryl
Editor: Deirdre Slevin
Cast:
Yilan: Faye Yu
Mr. Shi: Henry O
Madam: Vida Ghahremani
Boris: Pasha Lychnikoff
Running time -- 83 minutes
No MPAA rating...
TORONTO -- One of two new small-scale films from Wayne Wang (both based on stories by Yiyun Li), A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is modest but moving, a finely observed portrait of a father/daughter relationship that will resonate deeply for many viewers. The scale may limit its pull in the art house arena somewhat, but Chinese-Americans and viewers from other immigrant communities will appreciate its themes.
The story of a man who doesn't know his daughter at all, Prayers showcases an affecting performance by Henry O as Mr. Shi, who has just arrived in Spokane from China to see daughter Yilan for the first time in 12 years. The two greet each other stiffly when he emerges from the airport gates, and Yilan clearly has little idea what to do with him; heading out to work on his first day in town, she suggests that he should "take it easy" and might want to walk to the park.
Shi has higher hopes than that, taking constant notes in order to improve his English and shopping for what he needs to cook in Yilan's underequipped kitchen. For the next few nights, they will see each other only at dinner, where he makes much more food than the two can eat.
Though Shi is eager to make up for lost time (he innocently snoops around her apartment during the day, looking for insight), his daughter spends less and less time at home. Shi (whose wife died of cancer) makes friends at the park with an Iranian woman, and we come to get the point that, if rejecting one's parents is common in many cultures, it's doubly so for immigrants hoping to assimilate in a new environment. Shi and Madam, as he calls her, have amusingly piecemeal conversations in which three languages are spoken but only one understood.
Until the film's end, when some causes of family tension are finally brought to the surface, this is about all that happens. Wang's empathy for Mr. Shi, and O's dignified persistence in what appears to be a doomed effort to connect, draw us in and keep us from becoming bored. (An 83-minute running time helps in that respect.)
At one point, Yilan repeats a friend's idea that people would be better at raising children if they could somehow be grandparents before becoming parents. She doesn't seem to see the obvious corollary, that we are often far more forgiving of our grandparents' perceived faults than of our parents'. "A Thousand Years of Good Prayers" waits patiently for her to piece it together.
A THOUSAND YEARS OF GOOD PRAYERS
No Distributor
North by Northwest
Credits:
Director: Wayne Wang
Writer: Yiyun Li
Based on the short story by Yiyun Li
Producers: Yukie Kito, Rich Cowan, Wayne Wang
Executive producers: Yasushi Kotani, Taizo Son, Jooick Lee
Director of photography: Patrick Lindenmaier
Production designer: Vincent De Felice
Music: Lesley Barber
Co-producer:
Costume designer: Lisa Caryl
Editor: Deirdre Slevin
Cast:
Yilan: Faye Yu
Mr. Shi: Henry O
Madam: Vida Ghahremani
Boris: Pasha Lychnikoff
Running time -- 83 minutes
No MPAA rating...
- 9/14/2007
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
TORONTO -- The fiction of Jhumpa Lahiri conveys a sense of disorientation and loss, of melancholy guilt mingling with the embrace of freedom. She writes of the immigrant experience in America and the film adaptation of her first novel, "The Namesake", from director Mira Nair honors her themes with a meticulous, understated, empathetic telling of the story of two generations of a Bengali family in America. What no film could probably do is get across Lahiri's rich descriptions of the quotidian that so vividly dramatizes the contrast in cultural ways of thinking and the identity confusions at the heart of her story. Nair's film settles for something closer to the surface that makes its dramatic points well and brings Lahiri's characters to life but misses the emotional intensity.
"The Namesake" is a highly personal film for its three authors -- Nair, Lahiri and screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala, all women of Indian origin who have lived much of their lives in the West. It is hard to imagine a better cast or production values so the film should find audiences among sophisticated urban adults. Certainly Lahiri's books have created a large fan base around the world for what is a universal story of a family in transition.
The Gangulis from Calcutta settle in New York in the 1970s after a traditional arranged marriage. When the couple has its first child, the task of naming the son falls to the grandmother of Ashima (Tabu). Only her letter never arrives from India and the hospital insists on a name for the birth certificate. So Ashoke (Irrfan Khan) names his son Gogol. This is the name of his favorite Russian author, but reason for that name goes deeper, back to a train wreck he survived as a young man in India.
It is Gogol's story we follow but his story also is that of his family. The first generation assimilates but never quite adjusts to the New World the way Gogol (Kal Penn) and his sister Sonia (Sahira Nair) do. "I feel like I gave birth to strangers!" Ashima declares one day. Not only are accents different but the youngsters' attitudes toward dating and drinking and the American lifestyle must be checked at the front door.
Gogol hates his name. When he enters university, he goes to great bother to legally change his "good name" to Nikhil. This is how everyone he meets from this point on will know him. The name uncertainty and passion to change it, of course, serves as metaphor for greater questions of identity. For Gogol will forever lead a double life: He lives in yet feels estranged from two cultures.
Penn, a fine American Indian actor getting a crack at his first lead in a major film, brings wonderful comic sensibility to the role that makes Gogol a much more companionable and amusing companion than his literary counterpart. But when the moment arrives, where Gogol/Nikhil has to grow up immediately and take over his responsibilities, Penn shows you a man who discovers his Indian-ness. The lightness of his previous scenes gives way to a more somber and perplexed individual. It's a smart performance.
The older actors, Khan and Tabu, who perform mostly in Indian art-house movies, alter their characters too from the novel in subtle ways, suggesting more warmth and love in the parents' lives. Neither actor is Bengali, yet both are more than credible with the accent, language and manner of people from that state.
The movie makes one jolting leap from Gogol as a teen to his job and romance following university graduation with a degree in architecture. It's more than a little bewildering and suggests a drastic postproduction editing decision.
Consequently, Gogol's romances have been reduced to two: with a rich but really nice American named Maxine (Jacinda Barrett), a woman who best expresses the social freedoms of the West, and Moushimi (Zuleikha Robinson), a fellow Bengali who demonstrates what can happen when someone living a dual life takes freedoms too far.
Cinematographer Frederick Elmes and production designer Stephanie Carroll don't push the contrasts between New York and Calcutta; letting those locations speak eloquently for themselves. Nitin Sawhney's Indian-spiced music is just right.
THE NAMESAKE
20th Century Fox
Fox Searchlight Pictures/Entertainment Farm/UTV Motion Pictures presents a Mirabai Films & Cine Mosaic production
Credits:
Director: Mira Nair
Screenwriter: Sooni Taraporevala
Based on the novel by: Jhumpa Lahiri
Producers: Lydia Dean Pilcher, Mira Nair
Executive producers: Yasushi Kotani, Taizo Son, Ronnie Screwvalal Director of photography: Frederick Elmes
Production designer: Stephanie Carroll
Costume designer: Arjun Bhasin
Co-producers: Lori Keith Douglas, Yukie Kito, Zarina Screwvala
Music: Nitin Sawhney
Editor: Allyson C. Johnson
Cast:
Gogol: Kal Penn
Ashima: Tabu
Ashoke: Irrfan Khan
Maxine: Jacinda Barrett
Moushimi: Zuleikha Robinson
Sonia: Sahira Nair
Running time -- 122 minutes
MPAA rating: PG-13...
"The Namesake" is a highly personal film for its three authors -- Nair, Lahiri and screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala, all women of Indian origin who have lived much of their lives in the West. It is hard to imagine a better cast or production values so the film should find audiences among sophisticated urban adults. Certainly Lahiri's books have created a large fan base around the world for what is a universal story of a family in transition.
The Gangulis from Calcutta settle in New York in the 1970s after a traditional arranged marriage. When the couple has its first child, the task of naming the son falls to the grandmother of Ashima (Tabu). Only her letter never arrives from India and the hospital insists on a name for the birth certificate. So Ashoke (Irrfan Khan) names his son Gogol. This is the name of his favorite Russian author, but reason for that name goes deeper, back to a train wreck he survived as a young man in India.
It is Gogol's story we follow but his story also is that of his family. The first generation assimilates but never quite adjusts to the New World the way Gogol (Kal Penn) and his sister Sonia (Sahira Nair) do. "I feel like I gave birth to strangers!" Ashima declares one day. Not only are accents different but the youngsters' attitudes toward dating and drinking and the American lifestyle must be checked at the front door.
Gogol hates his name. When he enters university, he goes to great bother to legally change his "good name" to Nikhil. This is how everyone he meets from this point on will know him. The name uncertainty and passion to change it, of course, serves as metaphor for greater questions of identity. For Gogol will forever lead a double life: He lives in yet feels estranged from two cultures.
Penn, a fine American Indian actor getting a crack at his first lead in a major film, brings wonderful comic sensibility to the role that makes Gogol a much more companionable and amusing companion than his literary counterpart. But when the moment arrives, where Gogol/Nikhil has to grow up immediately and take over his responsibilities, Penn shows you a man who discovers his Indian-ness. The lightness of his previous scenes gives way to a more somber and perplexed individual. It's a smart performance.
The older actors, Khan and Tabu, who perform mostly in Indian art-house movies, alter their characters too from the novel in subtle ways, suggesting more warmth and love in the parents' lives. Neither actor is Bengali, yet both are more than credible with the accent, language and manner of people from that state.
The movie makes one jolting leap from Gogol as a teen to his job and romance following university graduation with a degree in architecture. It's more than a little bewildering and suggests a drastic postproduction editing decision.
Consequently, Gogol's romances have been reduced to two: with a rich but really nice American named Maxine (Jacinda Barrett), a woman who best expresses the social freedoms of the West, and Moushimi (Zuleikha Robinson), a fellow Bengali who demonstrates what can happen when someone living a dual life takes freedoms too far.
Cinematographer Frederick Elmes and production designer Stephanie Carroll don't push the contrasts between New York and Calcutta; letting those locations speak eloquently for themselves. Nitin Sawhney's Indian-spiced music is just right.
THE NAMESAKE
20th Century Fox
Fox Searchlight Pictures/Entertainment Farm/UTV Motion Pictures presents a Mirabai Films & Cine Mosaic production
Credits:
Director: Mira Nair
Screenwriter: Sooni Taraporevala
Based on the novel by: Jhumpa Lahiri
Producers: Lydia Dean Pilcher, Mira Nair
Executive producers: Yasushi Kotani, Taizo Son, Ronnie Screwvalal Director of photography: Frederick Elmes
Production designer: Stephanie Carroll
Costume designer: Arjun Bhasin
Co-producers: Lori Keith Douglas, Yukie Kito, Zarina Screwvala
Music: Nitin Sawhney
Editor: Allyson C. Johnson
Cast:
Gogol: Kal Penn
Ashima: Tabu
Ashoke: Irrfan Khan
Maxine: Jacinda Barrett
Moushimi: Zuleikha Robinson
Sonia: Sahira Nair
Running time -- 122 minutes
MPAA rating: PG-13...
- 9/12/2006
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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