FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
CINEMA ON THE EDGE: THE BEST OF BEIJING INDEPENDENT FILM 20122014 showcases the best of recent Chinese independent cinema at multiple venues
Cinema on the Edge: The Best of Beijing Independent Film 20122014 August 7 to September 13, 2015 Anthology Film Archives, The Asia Society, Maysles Cinema at the Maysles Documentary Center, The Weatherhead East Asian Insitute at Columbia University, Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA), Made in NY Media Center by IFP, and UnionDocs
JULY 7, 2015 – A film series unlike any other, "Cinema on the Edge: Best of Beijing Independent Film 20122014" celebrates the daring spirit and creative innovation of independent filmmakers and festival organizers in mainland China. Several of these films will now be brought to the United States for the first time, to be screened in some of the best museums and cinemas in New York City.
This film series features 18 programs of outstanding recent Chinese independent cinema, showcasing the work of such acclaimed filmmakers as Ai Weiwei, Li Luo, Hu Jie, Zou Xueping and Yang Mingming. The series is organized and curated by three of Chinese independent cinema’s most committed supporters: producer and distributor Karin Chien, critic and curator Shelly Kraicer, and filmmaker and anthropologist J.P. Sniadecki. Six of NYC’s most revered film and cultural institutions will present these works: Anthology Film Archives, Asia Society, Maysles Cinematheque, The Weatherhead East Asian Insitute at Columbia University Museum of Chinese in America, Made in NY Media Center by IFP, and UnionDocs.
Background: China is one of the most exciting places for independent cinema in the world. Its breakneck pace of change has driven its independent filmmakers to invent radical new film languages.
“The independent films coming out of China continue to be at the forefront of aesthetic cinematic innovation,” says Shelly Kraicer, a veteran critic and curator of Chinese cinema. “Responding to the crazy, unpredictable changes in Chinese society and politics, these fearless directors are challenged to create sounds and images that stretch and enrich our imaginations.”
But independent films are not allowed to be shown in China. These films are made without approval of the censors and cannot be seen in regular movie theaters. Independent film festivals offer a singular space in China for unauthorized filmmakers to meet with their audiences, and to sustain a concrete, vibrant, alternative Chinese filmmaking community.
Awardwinning filmmaker J.P. Sniadecki (The Iron Ministry; People’s Park) recalls, “At the independent film festivals in China, I felt I had found my tribe: filmmakers, cinephiles, artists, scholars, and students gathering together for screenings, discussions, dinners, parties, music performances and, inevitably, various encounters with the authorities. What is most striking about the independent film community in China is it's passionate yet unpretentious vibe. These films really matter, and viewers watch with something vital at stake. But it remains a grassroots affair: everyone pitches in and interactions flow easily, creating an informal atmosphere that retains the intensity of major festivals but does away with all the hierarchy and selfimportance. Everyone is welcome... everyone except the censors.”
Films in the series include:
● Artist Ai Wei Wei’s bold investigative documentary Ping’an Yueqing ● The lushly photographed awardwinning feature Emperor Visits the Hell by Li Luo ● The unique musical documentary People’s Park by J.P. Sniadecki and Libbie Cohn ● Bold works by a new generation of Chinese women filmmakers, including Yang Mingming (Female Directors) and Wen Hui (Listening to Third Grandmother’s Stories) ● Eyeopening documentaries revealing China’s hidden past and present: Spark, Stratum I: The Visitors, Satiated Village and I Want To Be a People's Representative ● Programs showcasing contemporary China’s most outstanding works of experimental and animated filmmaking
“These films have a lot to show us, not only about China, but about storytelling freed from marketplace demands,” says Karin Chien, president and founder of dGenerate Films, a leading distributor of Chinese independent film. “These groundbreaking films deserve an audience, so we are honored to bring these films and filmmakers to New York City. Many kudos go to the bold programmers of Anthology Film Archives, Asia Society, Maysles Cinematheque, Museum of Chinese in America, and UnionDocs for embracing these films.”
************************* Press contacts: Kevin B. Lee: email: [email protected] Karin Chien: email: [email protected]; phone: 9172099602 ************************* List of Films and Screening Venues in Cinema on the Edge: The Best of Beijing Independent Film 20122014
ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES (August 713) 32 Second Avenue (at 2nd St.), New York NY 10003, (212) 5055181, anthologyfilmarchives.org. Admission: $10 general; $8 students, seniors and children (12 & under); $6 AFA members.
EMPEROR VISITS THE HELL 唐皇游地府/ Tang huang you difu Directed by Li Luo 2012, 67 min, digital. In Mandarin with English subtitles. Winner of the 2012 Vancouver International Film Festival’s Dragons & Tigers Prize, this is a quietly astonishing tour de force that hinges on a lovely conceit: relocating to the present day the famous story of the Tang dynasty Emperor Taizong’s visit to the underworld. Shot in elegant, blackandwhite long takes, the film spins a tale of a local river god, the Dragon King, who, feuding with a fortune teller, alters the weather without authorization and is condemned to death. When the Emperor fails to commute the god’s sentence, otherworldly retribution is swift: he is summoned to Hell. Li’s audacious use of multiple levels of storytelling and filmmaking craftily and joyously subverts every authority around. –Fri, Aug 7 at 6:45 and Mon, Aug 10 at 9:00 (intro and Q&A with director Li Luo at both screenings)
AROUND THAT WINTER 田园将芜 / Tianyuan jiang wu Directed by Wang Xiaozhen 2013, 96 min, digital. In Shandong dialect with English subtitles. This curiously beautiful Daoist comedy, the opening film of BIFF2013, is a first film full of promise. Wang, painting with scrupulously composed, eloquent blackandwhite images, tells of a young urbanite who brings his girlfriend to meet his farmer parents in the countryside of Shandong province. Although nothing precisely happens, the farm and surrounding woods are a stage for almost nonstop cursing, kissing, pissing, and fucking. It’s both earthy and somehow unworldly at the same time, featuring perfectly ribald kids, a voyeuristic brother with a urination fetish, and a deadpan comic couple. Wang has a terrific eye, and an utterly unique, lowkey comic voice. –Fri, Aug 7 at 8:45 (introduced by critic and Cinema on the Edge programmer Shelly Kraicer) and Tues, Aug 11 at 7:00.
YUMEN 玉门 Directed by Huang Xiang, Xu Ruotao, and JP Sniadecki 2013, 65 min, 16mmtodigital. In Gansu dialect with English subtitles. Two Chinese avantgarde artists and an American experimental filmmaker have collaborated on a stunningly beautiful Chinese experimentalfictiondocumentary that dazzlingly combines ghost stories and “ruin porn” to form a celluloid psychocollage. Shot on 16mm film, it’s set in the largely abandoned oil drilling town of Yumen – a place with an ancient, poetic history in China’s western Gansu province – and takes us through trashed, desolate urban spaces abandoned by Chinese socialism. But the filmmakers bring these places alive with their cast of ghosts, artists, vagabond dancers, and singers. It’s a film chock full of fascinating things: massive oil pumps and sunblasted vistas; nude performance art and impromptu flamenco; fuzzy bunny rabbits and snarling canines; groovy 70s Taiwan pop and contemporary Korean girl bands; socialist nostalgia and postmodern pastiche. –Sat, Aug 8 at 6:45 and Tues, Aug 11 at 9:00.
FOUR WAYS TO DIE IN MY HOMETOWN 我故乡的四种死亡方式 / Wo guxiangde si zhong siwang fangshi Directed by Chai Chunya 2012, 90 min, digital. In Gansu dialect with English subtitles. A fourpart fiction film that’s as much poetry as it is narrative, firsttime filmmaker Chai Chunya’s gorgeous work evokes four characters – a poet, a searcher, a puppet master, and a shaman – each with intense, mystical, deeplyrooted spiritual links to the land (the film was shot in and around Gansu province) mediated by the four elemental symbols: earth, water, fire, and wind. The film’s logic is associative, dreamlike; Chai builds up a series of striking tableaux, hypnotically suggestive and pictorially spectacular. Two young women lose a camel, then a father. A retired shadow puppeteer meets a guntoting tree thief. Storytellers and shamans evoke a lost spiritual world that Chai films back to life in spectacular visual motifs whose meanings are intuited, like deeply felt communal memories. –Sat, Aug 8 at 8:45 and Wed, Aug 12 at 7:00.
FEMALE DIRECTORS 女导演 / Nü daoyan Directed by Yang Mingming 2012, 43 min, digital. In Mandarin with English subtitles. Two brilliant young women, art school graduates with deliciously profane vocabularies and supreme confidence, talk sex, cinema, and power, as they wield their shared video camera like a scalpel. Yang Mingming’s superb debut is hilarious, moving, and subversive: is it documentary or fiction, or something new that violates both modes with gleeful abandon? & LISTENING TO THIRD GRANDMOTHER’S STORIES 听三奶奶讲过去的事情 / Ting sannainai jiang guoqu de shiqing Directed by Wen Hui 2012, 75 min, digital, b&w/color. In Mandarin with English subtitles. A language written by women confronts official ideology in dancer/choreographer/filmmaker Wen Hui’s film. She starts from stories her 83yearold greataunt tells her of being tortured as a “class enemy” during Mao’s China: the result is poetry, an experimental documentary that combines testimony and dancelike gesture, in blackandwhite and color. –Sun, Aug 9 at 5:30 and Wed, Aug 12 at 9:00.
PING’AN YUEQING 平安乐清 Directed by Ai Weiwei 2011, 142 min, digital. In Mandarin with English subtitles. The documentaries produced by Ai Weiwei’s studio are closer to investigative journalism than to conceptual art. This film in particular starts from a specific case, the mysterious death by “road accident” of a village leader, Qian Yunhui from Zhejiang province, an activist who stood up for his fellow villagers when their land was confiscated without compensation by the local government. Qian’s death in 2010 quickly became a cause célèbre online in China. Ai and his team take up the challenge of determining what really happened, and dig deep into the land dispute lying behind what looks like the convenient murder of a rights advocate. The story unfolds like a thriller, but an ultrarealist one, with terrified villagers, government media spectacles, conflicting stories, and a mysteriously disappearing surveillance video. –Sun, Aug 9 at 8:00 and Thurs, Aug 13 at 6:30.
EXPERIMENTAL SHORT FILM PROGRAM:
THE POET AND THE SINGER 金刚经 / Jingangjing Directed by Bi Gan 2012, 26 min, digital A visually splendid poem that provocatively but elegantly juxtaposes a poet, a singer, a river, a pair of murderers, and the Diamond Sutra.
DISMANTLING CLEMATIS #16 拆铁丝16＃/ Chai tiesi #16 Directed by Zhi Jun 2014, 30 min, digital After a fire, scarred bonsai trees are meticulously freed of their supporting wires by medical professionals.
I’M NOT NOT NOT CHEN ZHOU Directed by Chen Zhou 2013, 34 min, digital The color yellow, as well as artist Chen Zhou and his alter ego(s), star in this droll, playfully conceptual tour de force.
Total running time: ca. 95 min. –Mon, Aug 10 at 7:00 and Thurs, Aug 13 at 9:15.
MADE IN NY MEDIA CENTER BY IFP (August 17) 30 John St. DUMBO Brooklyn, New York NY 11201, (718) 7296677, http://nymediacenter.com
EGG AND STONE 鸡蛋和石头 / Jidan he shitou by Huang Ji 2011, 98 min, digital. In Hunan dialect with English subtitles. Winner of the 2012 International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Tiger Award, Huang Ji’s brave personal film is one of the most auspicious debuts in recent Chinese cinema. Set in her home village in rural Hunan province, Egg and Stone is a powerful autobiographical portrait of a 14yearold girl’s attempts to come to terms with her emerging sexual maturity. Since her parents moved to the city to work, she has been forced to live with her uncle and aunt for seven years. Alone with her own inchoate fears and desires, she grapples with a terrifying world of sexual awakening and danger. Huang Ji’s visual sophistication, narrative fluency, and technical polish belie her youth. Cinematographer Ryuji Otsuka (also the film’s producer and editor) contributes beautifully crafted cinematic images, fearfully intimate, softly pulsing with light, saturated with complex emotional power. Monday, August 17 at 7:00pm
MAYSLES CINEMA AT THE MAYSLES DOCUMENTARY CENTER (August 1819) 343 Lenox Avenue / Malcolm X Boulevard, New York, NY 10027 (between 127th and 128th Streets), (212) 5376843, http://maysles.org/mdc/ $10 General Admission (suggested)
CUT OUT THE EYES 挖眼睛/ Kong yanjing Directed by Xu Tong 2014, 80 min, digital. In Chinese with English subtitles. Er Housheng is a blind musician who travels Inner Mongolia with his lover/partner Liu Lanlan performing the saucy, sensationally bawdy form of musical duet comedy called er ren tai. Er’s female audiences are particularly enthralled with his combination of sensuality, Rabelaisian earthiness, and frankly socially subversive lyrics. Director Xu’s specialty is to train his piercingly observant documentary camera — intimate and complicit, rather than coldly objective — on unique Chinese characters like Er, using them to probe deep beneath the surface of China’s clash of rural traditions with its urbanizing contemporaneity. The result is, on one hand, an enthralling ethnographic showpiece; but it’s at its core a passionate and frenzied psychodrama of lust, violence, and genius. Tuesday, August 18 at 7:30pm (intro and discussion with Angela Zito, professor at NYU, filmmaker and cocurator of Reel China @NYU Film Festival)
A FILMLESS FESTIVAL 2015, approx. 85 minutes, digital. In Chinese with English subtitles. This film documents the 11th Beijing Independent Film Festival in 2014, from the preparations before the opening ceremony to the process of its forced cancellation, the event which spurred the Cinema on the Edge series. The footage used for the film was captured by audience members, local artists, invited directors and special guests, festival volunteers and workers, as well as journalists and members of the media. It is a film produced by the collective. Wednesday, August 19 at 7:30pm, Q&A with filmmaker Wang Wo and filmmaker and Cinema on the Edge coorganizer J.P. Sniadecki)
ASIA SOCIETY (August 20 and 24) 725 Park Avenue (at 70th Street), New York, NY 10021; 2122886400; https://tickets.asiasociety.org Tickets: $12 General; $10 Seniors; $7 Students; Free for members and persons under 16. Admission is free on Fridays from 6:00 to 9:00 pm.
PEOPLE’S PARK 人民公园/ Renmin gongyuan Directed by J.P. Sniadecki & Libbie Cohn 2012, 75 min, digital. In Sichuanese and Mandarin. This is an experimental, structuralist documentary shot in People’s Park, Chengdu, Sichuan, in one single, bravura take lasting 75 minutes by two young American directors. Their camera captures the fullness of Chinese urban leisure life. As the camera pans side to side and glides relentlessly forward through the park, it catches hundreds of Chinese urbanites out for fun, relaxation, socializing, and a certain kind of freedom: eating, strolling, singing, practicing calligraphy, and watching each other. Watching becomes dancing, as the film slowly gathers an ecstatic, trancelike groove, building to a rapturous climax, as people, movement, music, image, and sound mix together: this is as close to pure pleasure as cinema gets. Thursday, August 20 at 6:30pm (Q&A with J.P. Sniadecki)
THE DOSSIER 档案 / Dang’an Directed by Zhu Rikun 2014, 129 min. In Chinese with English subtitles. Tsering Woeser, the subject of Chinese filmmaker Zhu Rikun’s extraordinary documentary, is a Tibetan writer now based in Beijing. Through her writing and online voice, she has become one of the most eloquent voices on Tibet. Zhu Rikun’s sharply designed, formally innovative documentary is completely in Woeser’s own voice: Zhu alternates formally photographed scenes of Woeser reading excerpts from her secret government “dossier” (which she has somehow gained access to) with scenes of her speaking in her own soft but powerful, eloquent, passionate voice. Woeser’s moving account of her political awakening and current activism makes for a powerful document of a Tibetan woman finding her voice and insisting on her freedom to use it. Monday, August 24 at 6:30pm (Q&A with Zhu Rikun)
WEATHERHEAD EAST ASIAN INSTITUTE AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY (September 9) 420 W 118th St #9, New York, NY 10027 (212) 8542592 http://www.columbia.edu/cu/weai/
THE LAST MOOSE OF AOLUGUYA 犴达罕 / An da han Directed by Gu Tao 2013, 100 min, digital. In Chinese with English subtitles. Award winning filmmaker Gu Tao’s weirderthan fiction documentary is a portrait of Weijia, a hunterpoet with a tumultuous life. Weijian is a member of the Ewenki minority, whose homeland is near Siberia in far northeastern China. Forbidden to continue hunting, the Ewenki have been forced to move from their forests into dreary Chinese governmentdesigned permanent villages. Like many, deprived of livelihood, Weijia spends his time drinking and being a poet … when all of a sudden, as in a fairytale, a young teacher from Hainan, the tropical paradise island in China’s far south, comes to marry him and sweep him away. Weijia, clad in tropical print shirts, doesn’t quite fit into paradise, and his story turns dark, with intimations of madness and violence. Wednesday, September 9, 6pm
MUSEUM OF CHINESE IN AMERICA (MoCA) (September 10) 215 Centre Street, New York, NY 10013, (212) 6194785, www.mocanyc.org. Admission: $10 General; $5 Seniors (65+ w/ID) and Students (w/school ID); free for MOCA Members and Children under 12 in groups less than 10.
ANIMATION SERIES (108 min total running time)
Perfect Conjugal Bliss / 花好月圆 Zhong Su, 6’ 2014 A gorgeous 3D animation unscrolling through Chinese history, from grey urban collapse to ultracoloured consumer dystopia.
How / 在哪儿 Zhang Yipin, 5’ 2013 Traditional penandink drawings, animating a fuzzyhaired ruddycheeked girl’s imaginative world of terror and freedom.
The Hunter and the Skeleton / 猎人与骷髅怪 Bai Bin 26’ (prize) 2012 A spectacular animated version, flash plus thangka, of an Eastern Tibetan folk tale: when a hunter meets a fearsome skeleton monster, are they friends, or enemies?
An Apple Tree / 苹果树 Bai Bin, 11’ 2013 A Tibetan fable, in vivid colours, of an indomitable tree, assailed yet triumphant.
Double Act / 双簧 Ding Shiwei, 5’ 2013 Blackandwhite industrial surreal: bodies float between familiar bureaucratic monuments above, and sunflowers beneath the earth.
Mirror Room / 镜室 Zhou Xiaohu 8’ 2012 Master clay animator Zhou fashions a bathroom of hallucinatory reflections, where Lacan meets fascism
The New Book of Mountains and Seas Part 2 / 新山海经2 Qiu Anxiong 29’ (2007) 2012 Animating classicstyled ink and pen drawings, and filling them with quasinightmarish animalmachine forms, Qiu suggests a world under ecological collapse, where genetically tampered animal forms expire on earth and colonize the stars.
Family Reunion / 馬拉自在 Chen Lihua 18’ 2012 Amei, a Taiwanese aboriginal woman working in a factory, is called home for the Harvest Festival, but her boss refuses. In Chen’s imaginative tale, illustrated with cut out and line drawn animation, a daughter’s powerful dreaming saves all.
UNIONDOCS (September 1113) 322 Union Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY 11211, www.uniondocs.org
THE RIVER OF LIFE 生命的河流 / Shengming de heliu Directed by Yang Pingdao 2014, 101 min, digital. in Mandarin and Cantonese with English subtitles. Yang Pingdao is one of China’s most exciting emerging filmmakers. His astonishingly creative camera eye brings unexpected beauty to his new feature length film. Using an innovative structure, based on the distinctive texture of family memory through space and time, Yang invents something poised delicately between fiction and documentary to capture crystallized moments in his family history, to recreate in cinematic form its emotional weight and variety, woven around the life and death of his grandmother, and the birth of his child. In order to combine extended family chronicle, implicit national history, and intimate soulbearing autobiography, Yang employs gentle formal experimentation to invent new cinematic pathways. Opening film and prize winner of BIFF 2014. September 11
SPARK Xinghuo / 星火 Directed by Hu Jie 2014, 101 min, digital. In Mandarin with English subtitles. Probably China’s most important unofficial historianfilmmaker, Hu Jie documents with his camera episodes that Chinese official history, for now, ignores. Spark was an underground magazine published in 1960 by four young intellectuals who wanted to expose the devastating famine caused by Mao’s Great Leap Forward, a horrendous period of national suffering that is still unmentioned in China’s history textbooks today. This is filmmaking as urgent historical investigation: with a shoestring budget Hu combines years of research, and a knack for getting people to talk without fear about the most taboo subjects in China’s recent past. His alternative oral history approach knits together courageous and frequently moving interviews with the magazine’s surviving editor, supporters, and readers, who were ready to sacrifice themselves to alert their countrymen to unprecedented disaster. September 12
STRATUM 1: THE VISITORS Diceng 1: laike 底层1:来客 Directed by Cong Feng 2013, 71 min, digital. In Mandarin with English subtitles. Poet and filmmaker Cong Feng started to film a documentary about wholescale urban demolition in the Beijing suburb of Tongzhou, but discovered that the extraordinary rapidity of change and the furious power of China’s history of destruction required something more experimental, more essaylike. From hallucinatory (are they perhaps utopian? despairing?) images of a bulldozer seeming to conjure up a building from its rubble, we follow two characters wandering through debris, telling stories of childhood trauma (featuring canine, not human loyalty during a horrific episode from the Cultural Revolution). Cong, like a visual paleogeologist, unearths surreal, chilling images of otherworldly beauty emanating from the buried strata of this collapsing world, whose history threatens to be suffocated by layers of experience, of loss, of unremembered suffering. September 12
I WANT TO BE A PEOPLE’S REPRESENTATIVE 我要当人民代表/ Wo yao dang renmin daibiao Directed by Jia Zhitan 2014, 78 min, digital. In Hunanese with English subtitles. Can a documentary camera be a tool for democracy in China? Jia Zhitan certainly thinks so, and wields his camera like an antibureaucratic weapon. Jia, a member of Caochangdi’s influential Villagers Documentary Project (organizer Wu Wenguang has been training local villagers to use digital video cameras to record their participation in ultralocal politics), wants to run to be a delegate to the National People’s Congress. He wins the first round, but is deemed unqualified by officials for reasons they keep to themselves. As the irrepressibly scrappy and stubborn Jia seeks explanations and redress from ever higher levels of authority, he records their interactions scenes that would play as entertaining satiric comedy if they weren’t so frustratingly real. September 13
SATIATED VILLAGE 吃饱的村子/ Chibao de cunzi Directed by Zou Xueping 2011, 88 min. In Shandong dialect with English subtitles. Zou Xueping’s took her first documentary The Hungry Village (part of Caochangdi Workstation’s Folk Memory Project) — made up of firstperson testimony about the effects of the Great Famine of 1960 (see Hu Jie’s Spark for another view) on her home village in Shandong — back home to show her subjects. They unanimously disapproved. Frustrated and full of doubt, Zou then made this second documentary discussing the villagers’ reactions to her first. This wonderful, searching, selfreflexive film questions the necessity and usefulness of truthtelling via cinema, when it brings pain and even shame upon neighbours and family. Zou’s 9yearold niece emerges as its star, a girl who can balance competing exigencies of truth and love with a wisdom beyond her years. September 13 (Q&A with Zou Xueping)
A reception and discussion on participatory filmmaking with Zou Xueping and filmmaker Li Xinmin will take place between the screenings on September 13.