1428 (dir. Du Haibin)
Following its highly successful premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival, Du Haibin’s acclaimed documentary 1428 will be screening in October at select US engagements. Director Du Haibin will appear at several of these events.
Information on the screenings and can be found on the 1428 tour schedule page. Check back on this page regularly for updated information.
Contact us to book a screening of this film at your festival, museum, or school.
Following its highly successful premiere at the NY MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight series, Du Haibin’s acclaimed documentary 1428 will be screening in October at select US engagements. Contact us to book a screening of this film at your festival, museum, or school.
1428 (dir. Du Haibin)
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 5th
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Spurlock Museum
600 S. Gregory St.
Urbana, IL
(217) 333-9597
http://www.spurlock.uiuc.edu/education/calendar/2010_10.html#event5
With presentation on Chinese independent cinema by dGenerate’s Kevin Lee
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 12th
Stanford University, California
Pigott Hall
Main Quad, Building 260, Room 113
Director Du Haibin to attend
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 13th
SF Asia Society
Chinatown YMCA
855 Sacramento St.
San Francisco CA 94108
(415) 576-9622
http://www.ymcasf.org/chinatown/
FRIDAY-SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15-16th
Reel China
Cinema Studies Screening Room
721 Broadway, 6th floor
New York University, New York
http://crm.as.nyu.edu/object/crm.events.screenings
Director Du Haibin to attend
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 16th
Maysles Cinema
343 Lenox Ave
Ground Fl., New York, NY 10027
(212) 582-6050
http://www.mayslesinstitute.org/cinema/calendar.html
Director Du Haibin to attend; Small reception to follow
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 17th
Union Docs
322 Union Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11206
(718) 395-7902
http://www.uniondocs.org/
Master Class/Workshop led by Kevin Lee to follow
Director Du Haibin to attend
MONDAY-TUESDAY, OCTOBER 18-19th
Emergent Visions
Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies
Harvard University
CGIS South Building
1730 Cambridge Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Phone: (617) 495-4046
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~fairbank/events/events.html
Director Du Haibin to attend
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 20th
Yale University
Location TBD
Director Du Haibin to attend
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 21st
University of Chicago
Art and Politics of East Asia
Location TBD
http://lucian.uchicago.edu/workshops/artpoliticseastasia
Director Du Haibin to attend
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 22nd
Cal Arts
Location TBD
Director Du Haibin to attend
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 23rd
University of California, Santa Barbara
University of California, Santa Barbara
UCSB Multicultural Center
University Center room 1504
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-6050
(805) 893-8411
http://mcc.sa.ucsb.edu/ContactUs.aspx
Director Du Haibin to attend
1428 (dir. Du Haibin)
In his coverage of the 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival for Mubi Notebook, Doug Cummings offers his take on Du Haibin’s 1428:
Du Haibin’s 1428 visits the aftermath of the devastating 2008 Sichuan earthquake, and charts the reactions and interpretations of the survivors, who wrestle with severe personal loss and confusion. Sorting through debris and often gushing at the camera—in a variety of angry, philosophical, and grief-stricken ways—the people of the region express their sentiments about the Chinese government, cosmology, the media, and anything else of immediate importance to them. Lush green mountains provide serene visual contrast to the individual lives scrambling amid the rubble, but… the film never falls into postcard pictorialism.
Read the full article at Mubi Notebook.
By Isabella Tianzi Cai and Kevin B. Lee
Aftershock (dir. Feng Xiaogang)
The 1976 Tangshan Earthquake was one of the worst natural disasters in China’s history and believed to be the deadliest earthquake of the twentieth century. It had a magnitude of 7.8 and an estimated number of casualties between 212,419 to 719,000. Aftershock, director Feng Xiaogang’s dramatic feature about the Tangshan Earthquake, is set to be released July 22. Budgeted at 138 million RMB (over $20 million US), it is primed to be the film event of the summer for Chinese cinemas. To behold such a big-budget spectacular about a historical tragedy raises several questions about the film, chiefly: how it will recount the details of a historical tragedy while satisfying audiences as big-budget mass entertainment?
1428 (dir. Du Haibin)
By Isabella Tianzi Cai
Last month, Libertas Film Magazine (LFM), an online film magazine devoted to the voice of freedom in movies and popular culture, published a review of Du Haibin’s 1428, which screened at the Los Angeles Film Festival. The article is penned by Joe Bendel, who is a professor at NYU and also works in the book publishing industry. He originally published this article in his blog, and it was picked by LFM’s editor-in-chief among a series of reviews for provocative films at the LA Film Festival this year.
In the article, Bendel notes the unconventional yet pronounced cinematic style of Du Haibin as representative of a new generation of Chinese filmmakers.
“Stylistically compatible with China’s so-called D-Generation (D for Digital) filmmaking, Du eschews conventional documentary techniques, like formal interviews and voiceover narration. Instead, he lets the camera roll, capturing the unfiltered reality of the quake’s aftermath at intervals of ten and two hundred ten days after the disaster. It is not pretty.”
More after the break.
1428 (dir. Du Haibin)
Du Haibin’s award winning documentary 1428 has been selected as one of the must-sees playing at the Los Angeles Film Festival by the LA Weekly. LA Weekly film editor Karina Longworth ties the film’s depiction of disaster management with that the current oil spill devastating the Gulf Coast:
“We don’t know what to do at all.” That statement, spoken by a Chinese woman whose home has been demolished by the government without her permission, functions as the thesis of this episodic, verité-style documentary shot in the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Setting up a fascinating contrast between the “official” version of events captured by the state media and the rage and frustration of those struggling to rebuild far from photo ops, the theme of power brokers failing to serve people who can’t fathom self-sufficiency in the wake of unforeseen disaster hits eerily close to home.
1428 plays this Sunday and Monday at the Regal Cinemas at LA Live:
Tickets can be purchased at the Festival website.
Find out more about 1428.
1428 (dir. Du Haibin)
The 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival will screen Du Haibin’s prize-winning documentary 1428 this Sunday and Monday at the Regal Cinemas at LA Live:
Tickets can be purchased at the Festival website.
In the current issue of the online magazine includes a lengthy appraisal by film scholar and Cal Arts professor Berenice Reynaud on 1428. It’s part of a much longer review of last fall’s Vancouver Film Festival. We’ve republished the passage concerning 1428 below:
—–
The shadow of lost sons haunts Du Haibin’s 1428, an award-winning (Orizzonti Award in Venice) documentary on the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake that killed tens of thousands of people, rendered millions homeless and turned the Beichuan area into piles of rubble. Echoing Du’s previous works (such as Tielu yanxian [Along the Railway, 2001] San [Umbrella, 2007]), it is shot in hybrid cinéma-vérité style, with his subjects freely addressing and interacting with him. “Some people thought I was working for television. They would spontaneously stand in front of the camera, to tell me that the Chinese people were lucky. When Chinese people talk about the Communist party leaders, I have no way of sorting out what is true and what is false… Some also told me that is was a system of corrupt bureaucrats, but they said so because they had been wronged.” We see an old lady staunchly defending the government on her way to collect an electric blanket, then switching to angry recriminations after it is refused to her. Other addresses are more intimate. While washing clothes in a brook, a woman describes how terribly she misses her dead children. A teenager looking for his missing brother asks Du “Are you filming this?” A butcher interjects: “You and I are from the same generation. You remember how terrible it was in 1979!”
Read more after the break.
Queer China, 'Comrade China' (dir. Cui Zi'en)
The newest issue of the online film journal Senses of Cinema features lengthy reviews by film scholar and Cal Arts professor Berenice Reynaud on new films from Mainland China. Titled “Men Won’t Cry – Traces of a Repressive Past,” Reynaud covers a dozen international titles that screened at last fall’s Vancouver International Film Festival, giving special attention to four new films from the Mainland, as well as the Hong Kong feature Night and Fog by Ann Hui. Her analysis is particularly astute at discerning issues of identity, gender, power and nationhood in the formal approaches taken by each film. The following are some choice excerpts, though readers are advised to read Reynaud’s appreciations in full:
Buried (dir. Wang Libo)
Wang Libo’s film Buried was one of the prizewinners of the 2009 Beijing Documentary Film Festival. This probing documentary was made in the aftermath of the 2008 earthquake that shook Sichuan province (an event covered in detail by Du Haibin’s 1428, playing next month at the Los Angeles Film Festival). The film is now available in its entirety on YouTube; it’s embedded in its entirety on our site, following the break.
Instead of focusing directly at the Sichuan earthquake, Wang’s film looks back at controversies surrounding the 1976 Tangshan Earthquake that killed over 200,000 people. Using a range of expert testimonies, Wang builds a provocative argument that Chinese officials had significant information forewarning of an imminent earthquake, but did not take sufficient action to help prevent the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. The implications of the film’s conclusions bear heavily on the Chinese government’s handling of both the Tangshan and the Sichuan earthquake. Buried leaves disturbing questions about the power and responsibility of government in disaster management.
Director’s Statement:
The 1976 Tangshan Earthquake left a lot of open questions. Before the earthquake, seismological personnel in Tangshan and quake experts in Beijing had already warned of an imminent quake. But in the end, more than 240,000 people had to pay with their lives, causing a shocking tragedy of massive proportions. Why did this happen? In the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake about 100,000 people were killed. Faced with terrible quakes, the human race repeats tragedy time and time again. It is terrible that people can only offer money and bland tears after the disaster – when better preparation could have saved lives. A nation has to courageously face its own weakness to remain hopeful.
- Wang Libo
Click through to watch the entire film, embedded on YouTube:
1428 (dir. Du Haibin)
The 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival (June 17-27, 2010) has announced its lineup, and we’re happy to see that Du Haibin’s prize-winning documentary 1428 will be screening as part of the Festival’s International Showcase.
The festival’s program page has this to say about 1428: “Filmmaker Du Haibin artfully hones in on the aftermath of the great Sichuan earthquake of 2008, capturing the intimate reactions of the survivors and the government’s response, both ten days after the tragedy and seven months later.”
The film will screen at the following dates and venues (to be confirmed; check the Festival website closer to the dates of the Festival).
Tickets will go on sale June 1 at the Festival website.
Find out more about 1428.
