Short Film News (SFN) - International Short Film Festival Oberhausen continues its tradition of mounting curated programs in its 55th edition with Unreal Asia, a ten-part film program of works from South East Asia.

The program questions the foundations of global exchanges of goods and information between Asia and the West with screening of 70 films and videos from countries like Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia and Vietnam.

Oberhausen 2009 also offers a look at the works of Japanese filmmaker Matsumoto Toshio, whose 1969 long feature A Funeral Parade of Roses had a direct influence on Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange.

He is a key figure in Japanese cinema in the roles of both theorist and director, and the festival dedicates a long overdue retrospective to this filmmaker.

Additional Profiles are dedicated to Mexican filmmaker Nicolas Echevarria, Russian artists' duo "Factory of Found Clothes", who will create a performance for the Oberhausen program, and actor Herbert Fritsch.

More information about festival's special programs is available at: www.kurzfilmtage.de.