Archive for the ‘Chinese Cinema Events’ Category

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Chinese Women’s Documentary Film Festival & Symposium at Brown University

Tuesday, March 13th, 2012

The Chinese Women’s Documentaries in the Market Era Film Festival will take place March 17-18, with a Symposium on March 21st in Providence, RI. The events are sponsored by the Nanjing-Brown Joint Program in Gender Studies and the Humanities.

Chinese Women’s Documentaries in the Market Era will screen and examine important documentary films by Chinese Women directors from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China. The symposium will feature directors and international scholars who will discuss the role and significance of women’s documentary films in articulating different human concerns, critical visions, and visual aesthetics in the rapidly changing Greater China area.

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Upcoming Screening in Ann Arbor and Berkeley

Thursday, March 8th, 2012

Screening of 1428 in Ann Arbor, Michigan on Saturday, March 10th, 7-9pm: 

"1428" (dir. Du Haibin)

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CinemaTalk: A Conversation with Filmmaker Ji Dan

Wednesday, February 29th, 2012
By Maya Eva Gunst Rudolph 

Ji Dan

Originally from Heilongjiang, Ji Dan is a documentary filmmaker who has worked extensively in both China and Japan. Her past works include Spirit Home (2006), Dream of the Empty City (2007), and Spiral Staircase of Harbin (2008), which was awarded prizes at both the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival and the China Documentary Film Festival.

Ji Dan’s most recent work, When The Bough Breaks, is a remarkably intimate account of a family of migrant trash scavengers living in Beijing and the bitter struggle of two young girls to send their little brother to school, against all odds and in the wake of their older sister’s disappearance. The day after When The Bough Breaks made its North America premiere at MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight, I spoke to Ji Dan in New York about the family depicted in When The Bough Breaks, her unique approach to filming and getting involved in the lives of her subjects, her mutual appreciation of theater and documentary, and what it’s like being one of Chinese documentary’s few female directors.

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Posted in China Today, Chinese Cinema Events, Chinese Cinema Today, CinemaTalk: Conversations on Chinese Cinema Studies, dGenerate Events, Film Festivals, Interviews | No Comments »

Review: When The Bough Breaks

Tuesday, February 28th, 2012

By Maya Eva Gunst Rudolph 

"When The Bough Breaks" (dir. Ji Dan)

Ji Dan’s When The Bough Breaks, which made its North American premiere last week at MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight, is a documentary of uncommon scope that drives at the heart of all epic drama: it is a story of a family. Both sweeping in its vast theatrical grasp and unnervingly intimate in scale, Ji Dan’s work unfolds for two and a half hours of deep absorption into a world that, as the director remarked in her presentation of the film at MoMA, “is very different from the one we are living in now.” (more…)

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‘Writing in Water’ To Screen at NYU

Monday, February 13th, 2012

courtesy of Angela Zito

The NYU Cinema Studies department will screen a preview of Angela Zito‘s documentary Writing in Water on Tuesday, March 6. The screening of this 42-minute documentary, described as “a film on the social life of calligraphy,” will take place from 6-8pm in the Michaelson Theater, Tisch School of the Arts, 721 Broadway, New York, NY. 

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“When The Bough Breaks” to Screen at Documentary Fortnight

Tuesday, February 7th, 2012

"When The Bough Breaks" (dir. Ji Dan)

Ji Dan‘s When the Bough Breaks will screen on Monday, February 20 and Wednesday, February 22nd as part of the Documentary Fortnight at MoMa. The American premiere of the documentary will be followed by a discussion with director Ji Dan.

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CinemaTalk: Interview with Alison Klayman, director of “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry”

Friday, February 3rd, 2012

By Maya Eva Gunst Rudolph 

Alison Klayman (alisonklayman.com)

Alison Klayman is a journalist who, while living in China from 2006-2010, produced radio and television for news sources such as  NPR’s “All Things Considered,” AP Television, Voice of America, Current TV, and CBC. She is the director of the documentary film Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, which won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Prize for Spirit of Defiance at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. I spoke with Alison at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah about the film’s trajectory, the role of social media in making bringing this story to life, and her working relationship with China’s most notorious artist and filmmaker. Thanks to Alison and her team for their cooperation.

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dGenerate Films: Can you talk a little about the origins of your working relationship with Ai Weiwei and how the project got started?

Alison Klayman: I had been living in Beijing for about two years when my roommate, Stephanie Tung, who was working at Three Shadows [Photography Center, a gallery and cultural center in Caochangdi, Beijing] got me involved in an exhibition they were doing of Ai Weiwei’s photos from New York. The photos are kind of a“greatest hits” series of contemporary cultural figures in China and provided an interesting window into this cross-cultural understanding of New York that I was really drawn to. I was kind of underemployed at the time and Stephanie suggested I make a video to accompany the exhibition. Rong Rong [photographer and Three Shadows director] gave me the okay and I went from Three Shadows to Weiwei’s house with the camera already rolling. It was really natural and organic. I didn’t just show up at Weiwei’s door and say “I’m fascinated by you, I want to film you.” We finished the video and Weiwei liked. I think it showed who he really is—very charismatic and engaging, fun-loving, doesn’t take himself too seriously. And then projects just kept coming up, so I feel compelled to keep filming. That’s kind of the beauty of Beijing—it’s very open and you can easily fall into these kinds of projects unexpectedly.

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Pema Tseden discusses “Tibetan Cinema Today” on February 2nd

Monday, January 30th, 2012

New Yorkers, please join Pema Tseden, director of Old Dog, Francois Robin, and Robbie Barnett in a discussion of contemporary Tibetan film and literature this Thursday, February 2. The event, organized by the Trace Foundation, will run from 6-8pm and take place at Trace Foundation’s Latse Library, 132 Perry Street, 2B, New York, NY.

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Review: Pema Tseden’s Old Dog

Monday, January 30th, 2012

"Old Dog" (dir. Pema Tseden)

By Maya Eva Gunst Rudolph

At the Slamdance Film Festival, where Pema Tseden’s elegiac 2010 feature Old Dog made its US premiere last week, filmmakers are asked to share their “war stories”—the trials and tribulations of producing Slamdance’s class of often low-budget, off-the-grid films. While battling budget woes and zany locations mishaps is common among Slamdance filmmakers, Old Dog arrived in Park City with a self-evident “war story,” a sense of the political and poetic enmeshed in each highly emblematic frame of this story of an aging Tibetan herder and his eponymous mastiff.

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Memory and Witness in Chinese Language Cinema at University of Glasgow

Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012

MEMORY AND THE WITNESS IN CHINESE LANGUAGE CINEMA
GILMOREHILL CENTRE, UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW
SATURDAY 28TH JANUARY 2012 (9.30am – 6.15pm)

"Though I Am Gone" (dir. Hu Jie)

With the release of films such as Hu Jie’s Though I Am Gone (2006), Wang Bing’s Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (2007) and Jia Zhangke’s 24 City (2008), there seems to have been a growth of interest in recent years in the relationship between film, memory and the notion of witnessing in Chinese Language Cinema. The aim of this symposium is to explore this trend in relation to work produced in the People’s Republic, Hong Kong, Taiwan and diasporic China through documentary filmmaking, fiction film and video art.

This symposium has been jointly organised by the Department of Theatre, Film and Television at the University of Glasgow and Ricefield Chinese Arts and Cultural Centre as part of Takeaway China, a festival of film and photography from China held annually in Glasgow.

Among the dGenerate titles screening will be Xu Tong‘s Fortune Teller, Hu Jie‘s Though I Am Gone, and Robin Weng Shuoming‘s Fujian Blue.

For more information about the symposium and Takeaway China festival, including abstracts, speakers’ biographies and details of film screenings, please go to www.takeawaychina.com

This symposium is free of charge, but as places are limited all delegates much register by Friday, 20th January. For further information and to reserve a place please contact Dr Philippa Lovatt at p.lovatt.1@research.gla.ac.uk

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