When Night Falls (dir. Ying Liang)
In the New Yorker, Richard Brody reviews Ying Liang’s award-winning new feature When Night Falls, which has yet to be screened in the US:
“It’s a fictionalized account of a true story, concerning a young man, Yang Jia, who was convicted, in 2008, of stabbing and slashing six police officers to death. Later in the year, he was executed… (more…)
Twin Cities area film programmer Kathie Smith reviews Zhao Liang’s documentary Crime and Punishment, which screened earlier this year at the Trylon Microcinema, as part of a series of Chinese independent films programmed by Smith:
Crime and Punishment, Zhao Liang first feature length documentary, is an observational powerhouse. Bringing direct cinema back from the ashes, Zhao adds another dimension to China’s dichotomies by focusing on a small forgotten corner of this rising superpower. Situated on his home turf, Zhao is given unprecedented access to a local police station along the North Korean border. Mean streets these are not. Instead we have life on the margins where ambitions of any kind have left this town behind. The police are candid, the situations are often defy logic, and the arrests add up to little more than harassment masquerading as control. Even moments of idleness seem to be cloaked in an aura of base tedium: cleaning a gun, fiddling with a pair of handcuffs or a bout of wrestling in the snow.
Indiewire lends a double dose of coverage to Pema Tseden’s Old Dog on its New York festival premiere at the Brooklyn Film Festival. The film screens in New York City again next Monday June 18 at the Northside Festival in Brooklyn.
In his review of the film, Indiewire critic Christopher Bell gives the film an “A” rating, declaring it “a true gem and the mark of an especially skilled director.”
Singing karaoke with Taiwanese investors, smearing birthday cake on the cheeks of an American factory owner, knocking back baijiu, a Chinese spirit, with property developers: Guo Yongchang would do anything to attract investment to Gushi, a county of 1.6m people in Henan province, where he served as party secretary. His antics are recorded in “The Transition Period”, a remarkable fly-on-the-wall documentary about his last months in office, filmed by Zhou Hao.
The Economist reviews Zhou Hao’s The Transition Period and places the film in the context of how local-level government operates, and the effect of its policies on shaping China’s economy and society:
When the government urged the banks to support its 2008 stimulus effort, local governments scrambled to claim an outsized share of the lending. The result is a local-government debt burden worth over a fifth of China’s 2011 GDP.
The worst abuses, however, involve land. Local officials can convert collectively owned rural plots into land for private development. Since farmers cannot sell their land directly to developers, they have to accept what the government is willing to pay. Often that is not very much.
The Transition Period is available as part of the dGenerate catalog.
To celebrate its 50th issue, Cinema Scope has compiled a list of fifty directors under 50 who represent “the future of cinema.” Much to the pride and delight of all those who champion Chinese voices in contemporary cinema, Cinema Scope has chosen to honor several significant Chinese filmmakers: Liu Jiayin, director of Oxhide and Oxhide II, Zhao Liang, director of Petition and Crime and Punishment, Pema Tseden the Tibetan director of Old Dog, Jia Zhangke, director of such films as Unknown Pleasures and The World, as well as the 2008 documentary Dong, and Wang Bing, director of Coal Money and Man With No Name.
Director Liu Jiayin and her parents in "Oxhide"
Profiling Liu Jiayin, Andréa Picard praises Liu and the Oxhide series, musing “Who was this filmmaker who so maturely delineated the space of her imagination, carving a humanist monument from next to nothing?”
On these remarkable films that measuredly unfold an intimate world of family minutiae, Picard discusses Liu’s “carefully calibrated yet warmly sensual sound and image construction, a droll humanism, and, ultimately, a feisty hopefulness.”
Zhao Liang
Zhao Liang, called a “poet of justice” by reviewer Albert Serra, is described as an artist who “cannot simply describe social injustices, lies, abuses of power…because as an author he’s realized that “reality” itself is unjust and abusive. And it’s absurd to find a way to fight against it because reality has as much power as the “system” does in China.” Of the careful examination of power and artistry at play in Zhao’s Crime and Punishment and Petition, as well as his dedication to pulling back the layers of the grueling injustices of Chinese beaurocracy, Serra writes: “With any other topic he could have been involuntarily serving the propaganda of what he’s criticizing, but the issue of the absence of justice turns our hearts with so much power that this is impossible.”
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…)
By Maya Eva Gunst Rudolph
"Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry" (dir. Alison Klayman)
The documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, which was directed by Alison Klayman and won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Prize for Spirit of Defiance at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, is a story about an artist and filmmaker, about a tug-of-war between an activist and his government, and a portrait of modern China – but it’s also a story about cats. In the film’s opening sequence, Ai, whose propensity to speak in metaphor is evident throughout the film, discusses the many cats he keeps milling around his home and studio. “One cat out of forty has learned to open the door,” he reports, remarking that if that one cat hadn’t succeeded in opening the door, no one would even know that cats were even capable of opening doors. A charming moment later we see this apparently exceptional cat leap up, open the studio door, and free himself. Welcome to the world of Ai Weiwei.
"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.
"Fujian Blue" (dir. Weng Shuoming)
dGenerate Films is pleased to announce that Robin Weng Shuoming‘s Fujian Blue will be available to rent for all Comacast Cable on-demand subscribers during the month of January.
Fujian Blue is a thrilling narrative portrayal of reckless youth, corruption, and heartache in of southern China’s most telling social environments.
A full review by Mike Fu can be found here:
“Subtropical reveries of money, sex, and power dominate the golden triangle of southern China in this gritty neorealist drama from Robin Weng (Weng Shouming). Featuring idyllic natural landscapes side by side with Fujian province’s urban sprawl, Weng’s narrative follows a group of young hoodlums circulating carefree in a vapid nightlife of karaoke bars and dance halls. By day, they pursue a more malicious endeavor to extort money from local housewives, whose husbands have made their fortunes abroad and left them floundering at home. The film opens contrasting rows of decrepit houses with breathtaking mansions, reminiscent of a southern Californian suburb, glistening beneath the sun. Already the dichotomy of contemporary Chinese society becomes apparent: the rift between haves and have-nots threatens to grow ever wider, and the stakes only become higher for a younger generation willing to risk everything.”
By Maya E. Rudolph
From L to R: Dan Streible, Angela Zito, Wu Wenguang, Zhang Zhen
“Independent film has gone from underground to come above ground.” Wu Wenguang‘s most recent project in mentorship and documentary filmmaking, which made its US premiere at NYU under the title Getting The Past Out Loud: Memory Projects with Wu Wengugang, is an exploration of individual and collective memory, of personal storytelling, and of the evolving talents of China’s newest generation of filmmakers. The event was organized by Professors Angela Zito and Zhang Zhen at the Center for Religion and Media Studies at NYU, which Zito co-directs and was co-sponsored by the Department of Cinema Studies, where Zhang is Associate Professor. The event was also made possible thanks to generous support from China House.
Wu, often extolled to as the godfather of the New Documentary Movement in Chinese independent cinema, presented two of his own projects at the weekend screening series, but emphasized the significant work of those young people involved in the Memory Project. “My generation of filmmakers often started out working within the state system, but we were dissatisfied and bored,” Wu expressed in conversation with Professors Zhang, Zito and Cinema Studies Professor Dan Streible. “Filmmaking twenty years ago was about throwing tantrums. The new generation is more introspective, they don’t need to throw tantrums. They’ve adapted a more authentic independent posture.”
