Davide Cazzaro is Italian, lives in Seoul, and has devoted a finite publishing project — exactly ten issues, no more — to cinema across Asia. NANG, which launched in 2016, is a biannual, print-only, English-language magazine that exists somewhere between a film journal and an art object. The name derives from a traditional form of shadow puppetry, and the designers — Seoul-based twins Shin Haeok and Shin Donghyeok — turned this into the magazine's visual DNA, cutting the masthead itself into a play of light and shadow.
Each issue is built around a single theme and handed to a different guest editor: Ben Slater tackled screenwriting for the debut, Amir Muhammad curated the fiction issue, Yoo Un-Seong and John Torres explored cinema's spectral scars. The result is a publication that refuses the usual festival-circuit coverage in favor of something deeper and more idiosyncratic. Since its first issue, NANG has been indexed by the International Federation of Film Archives, placing it alongside the most serious periodicals in the field.
The magazine is also an act of memory. It is dedicated to Alexis Tioseco and Nika Bohinc, two young film critics who were murdered in Manila in 2009 — a tragedy that shook the global cinephile community. For the tenth anniversary of their deaths, NANG published a special online edition inviting emerging writers under thirty to describe the Asian films they had loved over the preceding decade. Cazzaro, who previously worked as a researcher for the Busan International Film Festival, brings an archivist's precision and a cinephile's passion to every page.
With its finite run nearing completion, NANG is not trying to become an institution — it is trying to become a collection, ten volumes of beauty and scholarship that will outlast any algorithm.
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