Original Ghost in the Shell (攻殻機動隊) at Row House Cinema, closing night of Pittsburgh Japanese Film Festival, April 13.

The 1995 Japanese animated movie Ghost in the Shell (攻殻機動隊) will play at the Row House Cinema on April 13, the last film of the second annual Pittsburgh Japanese Film Festival. The distributor provides a summary:

In the year 2029, cybernetic government agent, Major Motoko Kusanagi and the Internal Bureau of Investigations are hot on the trail of “The Puppet Master”—a mysterious and threatening computer virus is capable of infiltrating human hosts. Working closely with her fellow agents from Section 9, the Major embarks on a high-tech race against time to capture the omnipresent entity.

Don’t miss the movie the Examiner called “…one of the pioneering films of anime history.”

Tickets are $10 and are available online. Tickets for six other films showing through the week are available as well. The single-screen theater is located at 4115 Butler Street in Lawrenceville (map).

Jennifer Lin and "From Missionary Cook to Counterrevolutionary: The Saga of a Chinese Christian Family" at Pitt, April 11.

The University of Pittsburgh's Asian Studies Center will host journalist and author Jennifer Lin and her talk "From Missionary Cook to Counterrevolutionary: The Saga of a Chinese Christian Family" on April 11.

Journalist Jennifer Lin examines the tumultuous past and present of Christianity in China through five generations of her family.  A former Beijing correspondent for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Lin chronicles 150 years of family history in the recently-published "Shanghai Faithful: Betrayal and Forgiveness in a Chinese Christian Family" (Rowman & Littlefield).  The book includes a compelling cast: a doctor who treated opium addicts; a Penn-educated Chinese pastor; and the influential independent religious leader Watchman Nee, imprisoned after 1949 as a "counterrevolutionary".  Author Orville Schell called Lin's book "a beautifully written elegy to that generation of foreign educated, humanist and often Christian Chinese who had begun to form a cosmopolitan class in China that was comfortable on both sides of the East/West divide and might have successfully led China rom its cultural traditionalism into modernity."

See also the April 3 book review and profile in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Lin will also speak at Duquesne University on the 10th and will give a reading at St. Vincent's College the evening of Tuesday the 11th.

The talk begins at 12:00 pm in 4130 Posvar Hall (map) and is free and open to the public.

2016 Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen part of 2017-18 Ten Evenings lecture series.

Via Nguyen's Facebook page.

Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures just announced its lineup for the 2017-18 Ten Evenings series and Vietnamese-American Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen is among the season's ten speakers.

Bold, elegant, and fiercely honest, Nguyen’s debut novel, The Sympathizer, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016. His collection of stories, The Refugees, gives voice to lives led between two worlds, the adopted homeland and the country of birth.

The Refugees is a collection of perfectly formed stories exploring questions of immigration, identity, love, and family. From a young Vietnamese refugee who suffers profound culture shock when he comes to live with two gay men in San Francisco, to a woman whose husband is suffering from dementia and starts to confuse her for a former lover, to a girl living in Ho Chi Minh City whose older half-sister comes back from America, the stories are a captivating testament to the dreams and hardships of immigration. The Refugees is a beautifully written and sharply observed book about the aspirations of those who leave one country for another.

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America, His novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War is a nonfiction exploration of the conflict Americans call the Vietnam War and Vietnamese call the American War.

Nguyen will speak on April 9, 2018, and tickets go on sale July 5. The lectures are held at the Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland.

Seventh annual Matsuri at CMU, April 11.

The Japanese Student Association at Carnegie Mellon University will present its 7th annual Matsuri on Tuesday, April 11. The spring matsuri (meaning festival in Japanese) benefits Minato Middle School in Ishinomaki city, which was destroyed by the March 11, 2011 tsunami. More information, from the festival's official site:

Originally a sacred ceremony of the Shinto belief, now a night full of street food, arcade games, and joyful performances, Matsuris are of great importance to the Japanese people, its culture and its traditions.

We wanted to share a snippet of this eventful festival here in Pittsburgh, right on the CMU campus. Come by to try a taste of Japanese street food, play some traditional Japanese games, and enjoy a range of performances from Japanese Taiko Drumming to Pop + Rock Fusions of Contemporary Japanese Music.

We have put in a lot of effort into authenticity; we purchase things online and ship them from Japan. We hand craft our booths to make it look like what you see on the streets in Japan. Enjoy the event to its fullest by paying attention to the small details!

We are also proud to annouce that 100% of the profits we make at this event will be donated to Minato Middle school in Ishinomaki, Japan. This school lost their whole campus due to the East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of March 11, 2011. Please read more about our cause here.

Admission is free and the event is open to the public at the rear of the Cohon University Center (map). Additional information is available at the Japanese Student Association's website.

El Futuro Perfecto, 2016 film about young Chinese immigrant to Argentina, in Pittsburgh April 9 and 10.

The 2016 film El Futuro Perfecto will play in Pittsburgh on April 9 and 10, as part of the Carnegie Mellon University International Film Festival and at Carlow University, respectively. The film festival's website describes:

El Futuro Perfecto tells the story of a young Chinese woman named Xiaobin who emigrates to Argentina. Sharing her sense of displacement, we follow Xiaobin as she attends Spanish classes, works her day job at a butcher shop, and struggles to pass through the language barrier in a new culture. A subtle love story permeates the surface of this quiet drama as Xiaobin’s journey of self-identification leads her to a crossroads where she must find the courage to determine her own future, rather than the future her family intends for her.

The April 9 screening at CMU is the festival's closing film and features a Q&A session with director Nele Wohlatz. It starts at 4:00 pm in the Jared L. Cohon University Center McConomy Auditorium (map). Tickets for the April 9 show are available online; tickets for April 10 are not yet available.

Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Dark Side Of Dimensions (遊☆戯☆王 THE DARK SIDE OF DIMENSIONS) in Pittsburgh, April 14.

The Hollywood Theater in Dormont will show the 2016 movie Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Dark Side Of Dimensions (遊☆戯☆王 THE DARK SIDE OF DIMENSIONS) on April 14 at 4:00 pm. The movie opened at select Pittsburgh theaters in January.

The theater is located at 1449 Potomac Ave. in Dormont (map), and is accessible by Pittsburgh's subway/LRT at a block south of Potomac Station.

Second annual Pittsburgh Japanese Film Festival at Row House Cinema, April 7 - 13.

The second annual Pittsburgh Japanese Film Festival will run at the Row House Cinema in Lawrenceville from April 7 through 13. Seven movies comprise the 2017 iteration, and, as the Facebook event page describes it, the "key themes this year include felines, friendship, and the samurai code for 2017": 1977's House (ハウス), 1962's Harakiri (切腹), 1993's Sailor Moon R: The Movie (劇場版 美少女戦士セーラームーンＲ) , 2014's Samurai Cat (猫侍), 2002's short film Ghiblies Episode 2 (ギブリーズ episode2), and 2013's Why Don't You Play in Hell? (地獄でなぜ悪い). Special events include Pittsburgh Taiko on April 10, a tea ceremony on April 12, and the remastered 1995 Ghost in the Shell (攻殻機動隊) as the closing film.

Tickets and showtime information is available is available online. The single-screen theater is located at 4115 Butler Street in Lawrenceville (map).

Nicky's Thai Kitchen North Hills location to open in mid-April.

The Nicky's Thai Kitchen coming to Mt. Nebo Road in the North Hills is planning on a mid-April opening. I photographed early signage back in January; earlier anticipated openings in February and March were delayed. The new restaurant will open at 1026 Mt. Nebo Rd. (map) in what was Recipes Remembered and, most recently, a Chinese restaurant.

Rashomon (羅生門) at Tull Family Theater, April 18.

The 1950 Akira Kurosawa film Rashomon (羅生門) will play at the Tull Family Theater in Sewickley on April 18 as part of it's Classic Tuesdays series. A synopsis of the film, from a 2002 Roger Ebert review:

The film opens in torrential rain, and five shots move from long shot to closeup to reveal two men sitting in the shelter of Kyoto's Rashomon Gate. The rain will be a useful device, unmistakably setting apart the present from the past. The two men are a priest and a woodcutter, and when a commoner runs in out of the rain and engages them in conversation, he learns that a samurai has been murdered and his wife raped and a local bandit is suspected. In the course of telling the commoner what they know, the woodcutter and the priest will introduce flashbacks in which the bandit, the wife and the woodcutter say what they saw, or think they saw--and then a medium turns up to channel the ghost of the dead samurai. Although the stories are in radical disagreement, it is unlike any of the original participants are lying for their own advantage, since each claims to be the murderer.

The movie starts at 7:00 pm and tickets are available online. he Tull Family Theater is located at 418 Walnut St. in Sewickley (map), about 15 miles northwest of Pittsburgh.

Caissa Touristic to start charter flights from Pittsburgh to China starting in June, first steps toward non-stop service.

Caissa Touristic will start offering charter flights from Pittsburgh International Airport to China starting in June, according to a press release and the local papers. Pittsburgh will be the first city in North America serviced by Caissa Touristic. From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

The flights are a product of an agreement with the airport authority, which operates Pittsburgh International; the VisitPittsburgh tourism group; and Idea Foundry, a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit that works with Chinese families and students to encourage educational ties and investment.

In addition to bringing tourists from China, Caissa will sell tickets in the Pittsburgh region for travelers interested in flying to the country on the return trip.

“This is huge step forward for the future, particularly for nonstop air service to China. The charter-to-scheduled service model has been successfully adopted in other parts of the world,” said Christina Cassotis, airport authority CEO. “We are the first U.S. market to tap into China’s fast-growing tourism market with this type of business model, and it shows Pittsburgh to be an industry leader.”