Posts Tagged ‘china’
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010
Fan Lixin, director of Last Train Home (Photo by Nan Chalat Noaker/Park Record)
One of the most acclaimed films at this year’s Sundance Film Festival is Last Train Home by Lixin Fan. Already the Best Feature Film winner at last November’s International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, Last Train Home chronicles a migrant-worker couple in Guangzhou trying to get on a train back to Sichuan to see their kids during the Chinese New Year, the busiest and most impossible travel period in China. Ella Taylor of NPR calls it her “favorite film of the festival, bar none… Watching this devastating portrait of a family trying to glue itself back together, you wonder how China, on its way to becoming the world’s richest nation, will avoid civil war if it doesn’t also attend to the needs of the millions of poverty-stricken families like this one.”
More info (including backlash from China) and video trailer after the break.
(more…)
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Tags: china, fan lixin, last train home, migrant labor, sundance
Posted in Chinese Cinema Today | 2 Comments »
Monday, January 18th, 2010
What do this:
and this:
have in common? Apparently, they are both images of urban gentrification in China.
The top image is from James Cameron’s Avatar, which recently set the opening-day box office record in China with 33 million yuan ($4.85 million US). The film is on track to take over the record for total gross of 460 million yuan ($67 million US) set just months ago by Roland Emmerich’s 2012, which itself had just beaten the 450 million yuan earned by Transformers 2: The Revenge of the Fallen. 2009 was indeed a record year at the Chinese box office, whose 6.2 billion yuan toppled the 2008 take by a staggering 43%. Chinese films got in on the action, with five domestic features placing among the 2008 top ten earning films. (Full list after the break).
It’s somewhat reassuring that some Chinese have taken some political activist inspiration from their mainstream entertainment. British news source The Independent reports that Avatar has been embraced by potential evictees of urban neighborhoods slated for redevelopment (such as new shopping centers that feature state-of-the art cineplexes showing, um, Avatar):
Residents of China’s “nail houses” – so named because they are the last hold-outs in areas flattened for development – have likened their plight to those of the alien Nai’vi race in the blockbuster, as too have villagers in Hong Kong who face eviction to make way for a high-speed railway line.
“I’m touched by how they protect their homeland,” 81-year-old Wong Kam-fook told the South China Morning Post, referring to the war the Na’vi wage in the film against the human invaders.
For a more realistic depiction of this plight, one might look at the source of the second image, Ou Ning’s documentary Meishi Street, which shows ordinary citizens taking a stand against the planned destruction of their homes for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. In order to widen traffic routes for the Olympic Games, the Beijing Municipal Government orders the demolition of entire neighborhoods. Given video cameras by the filmmakers, evictees shoot exclusive footage of the eviction process, adding vivid intimacy to their story.
Click here for more information on Meishi Street. Trailer of Meishi Street and the list of top 10 grossing films in China in 2009 after the break.
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Tags: avatar, box office, china, james cameron, meishi street, ou ning
Posted in Chinese Cinema Today, dGenerate Titles | No Comments »
Friday, October 9th, 2009
The Sixth China Independent Film Festival (CIFF) will be held in Nanjing from October 12-16th, 2009. Here’s a listing of their screening programs. Screenings are held in the Nanjing Visual Art College and Nanjing Art University.
In addition there will be other discussions and presentations on Chinese independent cinema (including one by yours truly on behalf of dGenerate); there’s even a “Young Movie Critics” training course on tap.
Yang Jin‘s Er Dong, a dGenerate Films catalog title, is among the titles participating in the Feature Film Competition. Other dGenerate directors who have films in the festival are Ying Liang (Good Cats) and Zhao Dayong (Rough Poetry).
Shelly Kraicer profiled the CIFF on his virtual tour of the Chinese independent film circuit. He wrote, “the festival cultivates a real sense of intellectual energy and ferment.”
Main program of films follows after the break.
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Tags: china, china independent film festival, chinese independent cinema, independent film, nanjing, zhang xianmin
Posted in Chinese Cinema Events, dGenerate Titles | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 9th, 2009
By Shelly Kraicer
San Yuan Li (dir. Ou Ning, 2003)
What is a Chinese film? Ever since I’ve started living and working in Beijing over six years ago, most serious discussions about Chinese cinema ultimately come down to this elemental question, either in its descriptive mode (what defines a Chinese film?) or in its more urgently prescriptive version (what should a Chinese film be?). Often, it’s filmmakers themselves who seem most anxious about the issue. Behind it lie several subsidiary anxieties: “What do Westerners want from Chinese films?”, “What’s my role in Chinese society?”, “Are films art, or commerce, or politics?”
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Tags: china, chinese cinema, chinese film, cui zi'en, documentary, enter the clowns, film bureau, film festival, ghost town, independent film, liu jiayin, meishi street, ou ning, oxhide, san yuan li, shelly kraicer, what is a chinese film, zhao dayong
Posted in Academic Resources, Chinese Cinema Today, Shelly Kraicer on Chinese Film | No Comments »
Monday, August 10th, 2009
The Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, Home of the Chinese Independent Film Archive (Photo courtesy of Iberia Center of Contemporary Art)
By Shelly Kraicer
Whenever I am interviewed about Chinese independent cinema, the question that comes up more often than anything else is “Can these kind of films be shown in China?”
The situation is changing, rapidly, and in substantial ways. The answer used to be “Yes, sort of”. Now, it’s “Yes, most definitely”.
Independent films, i.e. films made outside the government censorship system, can’t be shown in regular commercial movie theatres. When I arrived in Beijing back in 2003, one had to do a bit of investigative work to find screenings; at art galleries, a few bars and cafes, and occasionally on university campuses: all low- to zero-profile events. Now, though, there is, if not exactly a profusion, then something like a blossoming of screening opportunities for “unauthorized” Chinese indie films.
One such event, which I attended in early April, provides a handy opportunity to sketch out a provisional, though hopefully not too superficial overview of the Chinese independent film scene.
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Tags: beijing indie workshop, caochangdi, china, cifa, dgenerate, fanhall, film festival, independent film, li xianting, shelly kraicer, yunfest, zhang xianmin, zhu rikun
Posted in Academic Resources, Chinese Cinema Today, Shelly Kraicer on Chinese Film | 4 Comments »
Monday, July 27th, 2009
dGenerate Films head honcho Karin Chien reminisces on the how this company came to be. Read parts 1 and 2 of this three part series.
My first trip to Beijing was a startling revelation. The city seemed to me a mix of Las Vegas and Eastern European Communist aesthetics. The smog, traffic, and sprawl of Beijing were mind-boggling (and I’m an LA native). The underground, independent film community, though, was small and, as I soon found out, very inviting. A few introductions from colleagues in the States got me meetings with key influencers, including professor/producer/actor Zhang Xianmin, critic/curator/filmmaker Zhang Yaxuan, and programmer/critic Shelly Kraicer. I knew I found the beating heart of the community when I walked into an Communist Bloc-era apartment, in the middle of a Friday night, saw leading filmmaker Wang Bing chain-smoking in the corner, and sat down for a serious discussion about the politics of world cinema.
That first trip solidified for me the importance of distributing these films to an American audience. Not only could we return revenue to filmmakers, so they could keep making films, but we had an opportunity to open a window onto contemporary China. There is no easy access in the States to contemporary media made about China, from within China, by Chinese filmmakers. The opportunity and need were, and still is, clearly present.
When I returned to the States, we quickly got to work on watching films and pulling the company together, which took a good year of hard work, including a second visit to China in Fall 2008 (see Digital Underground in the People’s Republic). But to this day, I remain eternally grateful to the filmmakers, professors, programmers and critics who welcomed me with open arms on that first trip to Beijing. Without their faith in our work, and the trust of the filmmakers, we wouldn’t be granted the access that truly sets dGenerate apart.
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Tags: beijing, china, dgenerate films, karin chien, shelly kraicer, wang bing, zhang xianmin, zhang yaxuan
Posted in dGenerate News | No Comments »
Friday, July 24th, 2009
As a follow-up to yesterday’s news of three Chinese films pulling out of the Melbourne International Film Festival in protest to a documentary on Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer, we are posting a translation of a statement made by Jia Zhangke concerning his decision to withdraw his short film as well as Emily Tang’s A Perfect Life, produced by Jia’s company XStream Pictures. The original statement in Chinese, found here, was translated by Yuqian Yan. In this statement Jia refers to another protest, by British director Ken Loach, who withdrew from the festival after objecting to the festival’s sponsorship by the state of Israel.
1. We have no intention to interfere with the film festival’s freedom to facilitate artistic communication. It is our way of self-discipline to withdraw from the Melbourne Film Festival. I’m not an expert at Xinjiang history, but since it is only two weeks after the Urumqi riots, I think we should at least be cautious not to offend the victims.
2. The political inclination of the Melbourne Film Festival this year is getting stronger. First, it was the British director Ken Loach who questioned the funding of the festival, accusing them of using blood money. Then Ten Conditions of Love, a documentary about Rebiya Kadeer, appeared on the program list. They even organized a series of activities for her.
3. We think attending the same event with Rebiya Kadeer contains political meanings. It is emotionally intolerable and practically inappropriate. So the staff of Xstream Pictures agreed to withdraw from the festival to show our attitude and stance.
4. On July 19, our company representative Zhou Qiang (Chow Keung) wrote to the president of Melbourne Film Festival, announcing that two films from XStream Pictures: “Cry Me a River” and A Perfect Life will withdraw from the festival. Director Emily Tang Xiaobai and producer Zhou Qiang (Chow Keung) also canceled their plans to attend the festival.
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Tags: china, chinese cinema, independent film, jia zhang-ke, jia zhangke, ken loach, melbourne, melbourne international film festival, muslim, perfect life, politics, rebiya kadeer, uighur
Posted in Chinese Cinema Today | 2 Comments »
Thursday, July 9th, 2009
By Shelly Kraicer
Photo courtesy of TreeHugger.com
It’s always an interesting time to be in China, a place seemingly without uninteresting times. To be here now, though, lets you see a singular moment in society floating, unpinned, somewhere in between two bankrupt ruling ideologies. The collapse of official Communism/Maoism/Socialism with Chinese characteristics, as the ruling thinking evolved from pre-Liberation through the Cultural Revolution to post-Mao Dengism, is the keynote for lots of standard accounts of China today.
Traditional Chinese culture was, for a time, obliterated by various more or less radical and institutional versions of leftist ideology. These slowly disappeared in fact, though the rote sloganeering formulas persist, especially around the “liang hui” or annual meeting of the Chinese government’s legislative bodies, that took place in the spring. Following Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, and the unbridled embrace of wealth-concentration and manifest corruption in the Jiang Zemin era, the new god became capitalism, in its rawest, unregulated forms. Free market ideology imported from its Western exponents has washed over China, pushing some groups and regions ahead, leaving millions in the interior and the countryside, behind. Now that financial market capitalism is having its own profound existential crisis in the West, does China have to think about tossing out its brand new ruling ideology, right on top of the refuse of the old one? It’s enough to cause a case of ideological whiplash.
What happens when an unstable society starts to face the possibility that its hot new set of ideological nostrums might be just as insubstantial as those it has just recently thrown over? It must be a dizzying sort of disorientation for those Chinese who have invested their new identities in the new ways of thinking.
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Tags: capitalism, china, communism, er dong, feng xiaogang, free market, jian yi, shelly kraicer, super girls, yang jin
Posted in Chinese Cinema Today, Shelly Kraicer on Chinese Film, dGenerate Titles | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
Read Part 1 here
So after a fateful NYU booking and Sundance shuttle ride, I now had the beginnings of a foundation to make the idea of distributing independent Chinese films a reality. For six months, I worked on the idea from afar, that is from my office in Chinatown. I tried email, Skype, and phone calls, but the time and cultural differences between U.S. and China were too great to surmount through digital communication alone. I had hit a roadblock.
At the same time, friends and colleagues began to express interest in collaborating on this venture. By the Fall, Philip Lam, now on our board of directors, and Brent Hall, our COO, expressed their faith in the venture, and made a commitment to building a company together. Their support was what I needed to push the idea into reality.
Having realized that nothing beats face-to-face contact, I booked a three week trip to Beijing to see the underground film community for myself. With nothing more than a handful of contacts and a Powerpoint presentation, I arrived in Beijing for my first time in January’s below-freezing temperatures.
I was ready to start meeting China’s underground directors … now I just had to find them.
Come back soon for Part 3 of “The Birth of dGenerate Films” by dGenerate President Karin Chien…
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Tags: beijing, china, dgenerate films, film distribution
Posted in dGenerate News | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 14th, 2009
Photo courtesy World Socialist Website
dGenerate films is proud to welcome director Ying Liang to the New York City and SF Bay Area at the end of April and beginning of May. Ying will attend screenings of his most recent two features, The Other Half and Good Cats. (more…)
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Tags: berkeley, china, china institute, chinese cinema, film, good cats, indie cinema, lincoln center, other half, screening, sfiff, ying liang
Posted in Chinese Cinema Events, dGenerate Events, dGenerate News | 1 Comment »
