Chien-Ming Wang (Image taken from Youtube)
Los Angeles, April 15 (CNA) A documentary following the later years of Taiwanese pitcher Chien-Ming Wang's (王建民) professional baseball career will be featured in the international documentary competition lineup for the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival (LAAPFF) and will receive its global premiere at LAAPFF on May 9.
LAAPFF, now in its 34th year, will be held May 3-12, according to event organizers.
The documentary featuring the former New York Yankees pitcher will hit theaters in San Francisco after its May 9 LAAPFF premiere.
LAAPFF presents a Grand Jury Award for Outstanding Asian Pacific international documentary and narrative features and one of the films in the competition of international documentaries is Late Life: The Chien-Ming Wang Story, which was directed by Taiwanese-Canadian filmmaker Frank W. Chen (陳惟揚), according to a statement released by event organizers.
The film could be best described as a baseball version of the documentary Linsanity about Jeremy Lin (林書豪). It chronicles Wang's last-ditch effort to be recruited by a professional baseball team after a series of injuries disrupted his trailblazing career in the major leagues, according to the statement.
In the first official trailer for the movie posted on its Facebook fan page, Wang said he just wanted to prove "I can pitch in the Major League again."
"Of course, I didn't want to give up; I was not going to concede." "I wanted to be back on the mound," Wang said.
The 34th edition of LAAPFF features an international array of documentaries including Ankar, about the pain of the Cambodian genocide under the Khmer Rouge regime from 1975-1979; Becoming Who I was, which follows a young Indian boy believed to be the reincarnation of a Tibetan Buddhist monk; and China's Forgotten Daughters, a portrait of the human cost of China's former one-child policy.
Others works in the international documentary competition include The Cleaners, which explores the unseen world of content moderators, who work on behalf of giant social media companies such as Facebook deciding what can and cannot stay online; People's Republic of Desire, a documentary on China's evolving cultural traits, examines the entertainers and fans devoted to online live-streaming; and Singing with Angry Bird, which depicts a popular Korean choir master who started a children's choir in Pune, India and struggles to organize a concert of the choir and the children's parents.
Meanwhile, Taiwan director Jay Chern's (陳鈺杰) third feature film Omotenashi is included in the international narrative competition category.
The 2018 LAAPFF awards ceremony is set to be held on May 10.
(By Edward Tsao and Evelyn Kao)
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