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Lourdes Fisherman
A swordsman wants to fight an evil man; but the swordsman throws his sword into the sea after fighting because he wants to live in peace. The film is set in the ancient city of the Song dynasty. It was filmed in a provincial town in Shandong province, China.
The restoration and preservation project, funded by a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation and done in partnership with the George Eastman Museum and Japanese American National Museum, is the culmination of years of work for Khor. It started as her dissertation, a deep dive into the origins of the film industry and the role Japanese Americans played in it.
Even though the museum had created a safety print of the film in 1980, it was still incredibly fragile, which meant Khor could only view it once without rewinding. Playing it frame by frame, Khor took an hour to watch the 30-minute film.
At the center of the movie-going experience for Japanese Americans was the benshi. A performer, the benshi would narrate the film for audiences, but they also served as an exhibitioner, bringing the film projector and putting together the programing for audiences.
Restoration work is still ongoing, and Khor says work will be done in October and that a screening of the film will follow. But she hopes that the project can go beyond one film and help kickstart awareness about this broader cinematic history and the Japanese Americans who helped build it.
As of this writing, nothing else is known about the newly-revealed film outside its brief 20-second trailer, but that hasn't stopped SAO fans worldwide from expressing much excitement and speculation on what it will entail. That said, here's why a film with an entirely new story could be the perfect next move for Reki Kawahara's long-running franchise.
This as-yet-unnamed film will be Sword Art Online's second to feature an anime-original story, with the first being 2017's Ordinal Scale. While multiple factors have understandably made the anime as a whole rather divisive, Ordinal Scale was quite well-received by viewers and professional critics alike. With its focus on an augmented reality device rather than the usual VR, and a more compelling storyline than the "ALfheim Online" and "Gun Gale Online" arcs, the film delivered its own original story while also cementing its canonicity within the anime's timeline.
The proof is already in the pudding that an original on-screen adaptation for Sword Art Online can be done successfully. Here's hoping this mysterious next film can be a similarly refreshing entry for longtime fans who may be a bit starved for some truly brand-new content starring Kirito, Asuna and the rest of the gang in their next-gen adventures.
"He was truly one of our greatest fencing masters and a world-class film fight director and choreographer, and both the fencing community and film world will miss him," said the fencing academy's president Philip Bruce.
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