[NY Programmer Choice]

Death Promise makes New York more than a setting: it makes the city the source of its rage. Filmed on New York locations, it brings together a circle of local martial-arts friends: Charles Bonet, an early Hispanic tournament competitor known as “the Latin Panther”; Richard Brinsley “Speedy” Leacock, operator of New York’s Black Magic Dojo; and Brooklyn-born Bill Louie, founder of the Chinese-American Goju-Ryu Karate system. Together, they turn a decaying tenement into the arena of a martial-arts revenge picture.

Full Program Notes

Goran Topalovic
Programmer, Subway Cinema
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Subway Cinema is a New York–based, volunteer-run nonprofit organization dedicated to Asian popular cinema and the preservation of America’s Asian film exhibition heritage. Founded in 1999, it presented the inaugural New York Korean Film Festival, When Korean Cinema Attacks!, in 2001, and founded the New York Asian Film Festival the following year. Since 2019, it has focused on retrospectives and classic-film screenings, placing Asian cinema’s history in conversation with New York’s rich culture of repertory and genre exhibition. Its recent collaborations with Film at Lincoln Center and