Oxhide II (dir. Liu Jiayin)

This will be the largest series of Chinese cinema in Chicago this year. The series is listed online at: http://docfilms.uchicago.edu/dev/calendar/2011/fall/monday.shtml (note that the opening night screening is not listed).

A Selection of Chinese Independent Cinema

Mondays, September 26 – November 28, 2011
Doc Films, University of Chicago
Max Palevsky Cinema in Ida Noyes Hall
The University of Chicago
1212 East 59th Street, Chicago, IL

Tickets $5, free with DocFilms season pass ($30)

Few national cinemas are as vibrant as that of contemporary China. Similarly, there are few places in the world today where art and media practice share such an important role in addressing national memory and societal issues. For these and other reasons, some of the most important work being made in China today is made by independent artists, with techniques that challenge the conventions and boundaries of both documentary and fiction film.

dGenerate Films (http://dgeneratefilms.com) stands as an important cultural pipeline, distributing independent cinema from mainland China within North America and Europe. This program intends to offer a sampling of the dGenerate catalogue, which contains many of the most important films produced in China within the last decade. These films reflect Chinese independent cinema in its broad diversity, social urgency, and creative innovation.

Full schedule after the break.

September 26 • 7:00 • 58m & 70m
Disorder & Dong
Huang Weikai & Jia Zhangke, 2008 & 2009 • Huang Weikai’s gritty digital city symphony of Guanzhou has aptly been described as “Vertov on acid”. Drawing on hours of footage from a network of amateur videographers, Huang summons a critique of whitewashed contemporary media and all-pervasive voyeurism. Dong, a documentary by China’s greatest living filmmaker, depicts the painter Liu Xiaodong.

October 3 • 7:00 • 110m
Oxhide I
Liu Jiayin, 2005 • One of the most important Chinese films in the past decade and a monument of world cinema, Oxhide is a brilliant paean to the powers of formalism. Liu Jiayin cast her parents and herself as fictionalized versions of themselves. Through the thousand daily travails of city life, a genuine and deeply moving picture of Chinese familial solidarity emerges from the screen. DVD

October 10 • 7:00 • 113m
Transition Period
Zhou Hau, 2009 • If you think Chicago politics smells of cronyism, wait till you see its Chinese counterpart, vividly captured by journalist-turned-filmmaker Zhou Hao. A prizewinner at this year’s Hong Kong Documentary Festival, The Transition Period is a startlingly candid portrait of Guo Yongchang, a Chinese Communist Party county secretary who eventually was convicted on corruption charges. We see Guo discuss how to split tax revenue with lower-level officials, smear cake on the face of an American businessman seeking favors, and threaten local workers protesting over unpaid wages. DVD

October 17 • 7:00 • 115m
Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul
Hu Jie, 2004 • Lin Zhao was a young woman who attended Peking University in the 1950s. Of all the students at the university, she was the only one who refused to write a political confession during Mao’s Anti-Rightist Campaign, and as a result was sentenced to prison. Lin composed endless articles and poems from her cell. Forbidden to use pens, she wrote with a hairpin dipped in her own blood. Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul stands as a landmark in the Chinese independent documentary movement. The result is a lasting testament to a young woman’s legacy of courage and conviction.DVD

October 24 • 7:00 • 132m
Oxhide II (director Liu Jiayin)
Liu Jiayin, 2009 • Breaking new ground in cinematic art, Liu Jiayin’s follow-up to her masterful debut Oxhide turns a simple dinner into a profoundly intimate study of family relationships. Building on the stunning vision of Oxhide, writer-director Liu Jiayin once again casts herself and her parents in scripted versions of their life in a tiny Beijing apartment. At the same time, “Liu’s shots are carefully, rigorously, exquisitely composed” (Berenice Reynaud, Senses of Cinema), showcasing one of the most gifted visual artists working in China today. DVD

October 31 • 7:00 • 90m
Timber Gang
Yu Guangyi, 2006 • Yu’s documentary confronts the viewer with a China not-yet eclipsed by massive development, depicting the grueling, Herzogian conditions of rural subsistence labor. Lumberjacks in a mountainous area of China use a method that has not changed for centuries. The men stay in humble cabins, where they eat, drink wine and sleep together. This is the last year for the lumberjacks. In the spring they will start looking for other work in the city. DVD

November 7 • 7:00 • 169m
Ghost Town
Zhao Dayong, 2009 • A remote village in southwest China is haunted by traces of its cultural past; Zhiziluo is a town barely clinging to life. Divided into three parts, this documentary takes an intimate look at its varied cast of characters, bringing audiences face to face with people left behind by China’s new economy. A father-son duo of elderly preachers argue over the future of their village church. A twelve year-old boy scavenges the hillside to feed himself. Zhao’s novelistic yet urgent film attests to the filmmaker’s deep commitment to his subjects as well as the painful lives of those forgotten by the onslaught of development. DVD

November 14 • 7:00 • 91m
Winter Vacation
Li Hongqi, 2010 • Winter Vacation is a film of quiet anger. Throughout its still mastershots, a many peopled cast passes in and out of this wintery town within Inner Mongolia. Terse and deadpan, Winter Vacation evinces a style recalling such filmmakers as Jim Jarmusch, Tsai Ming-Liang and Corneliu Porumboiu. DVD

November 21 • 7:00 • 85m
No. 89 Shimen Road
Shu Haolun, 2010 • A poignant reflection of memory in the years leading up to Tianemen Square, No. 89 Shimen Road tells the story of one boy’s coming of age and the community that supported him on one street in Shanghai. Creating an eerie relay of stand-ins for the coming tensions within China throughout the 1980s the film finds urgency and a personal voice within the register of nostalgia. Conceived of as a richly textured fictional account of the time, the film weaves many elaborate devices including still photography and controlled film footage meant to evoke a document of the time, an elaborately recreated milieu. DVD

November 28 • 7:00 • 168m
Tape
Li Ning, 2010 • Shooting for five years, Li Ning documents his struggle to achieve success as an avant-garde artist despite the pressures of modern life in China. He is caught between two families: his wife, son and mother, whom he can barely support and his enthusiastic but disorganized guerilla dance troupe. One of the finest portraits of an artist in recent memory, Li’s film makes a case for the inseparability of the personal and political and an edifying testament to the struggle to create. Tape shatters documentary conventions, utilizing a variety of approaches, including guerilla documentary, experimental street video, even CGI. DVD

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Ghost Town (Fei Cheng)
directed by Zhao Dayong
Tucked away in a rugged corner of Southwest China, a village is haunted by traces of China’s cultural past while its residents piece together a day-by-day existence.

Relevant Classroom Use

By Isabella Tianzi Cai

Earlier this month, the story of a dead Chinese college student circulated the Internet under close monitoring by Chinese press authorities.  The 23-year-old man, Zhao Wei, was a college student making his way home by train. He traded his seat with a passenger in another car so as to stay close with his friend. Somewhere during this exchange, he got on the bad side of his train conductor. He was led away by railway police and mysteriously died.

An initial autopsy report ruled that Zhao’s death was due to his jumping off the train. His body suffered many injuries, with signs also showing that he had been handcuffed. Unconvinced by the findings, Zhao’s bereft parents have been trying to petition the authorities to investigate further. As stated by official Chinese news channels, the case will be properly handled by the railway police, which, ironically, may have also caused the death.

Zhao’s tragic death and its murky aftermath echo the December 8, 1994 fire incident in Urumqi, which is explored in a powerful documentary, Karamay, by Xu Xin. In both these incidents, ordinary young people were victims. The Karamay fire raged in a theater where roughly 1,000 students and teachers gathered to perform for a visiting delegation of government officials. Because of inadequate fire escape routes and instructions, 323 people, including 284 children, were killed, while nearly all the officials, who were the first to be evacuated, left unscathed.

As the details of Zhao’s horrifying death have leaked into China’s public sphere, they have triggered concern over public safety issues. Upon learning of Zhao’s death, people have reason to think that if such police brutality can happen on a train, it can happen elsewhere as well. The Karamay fire also had this effect on those who learned the facts of the matter. The victims’ parents had all intuitively treated the theater as a safe public venue for their children, but were tragically let down.

As distressing as Zhao’s death is the apparently futile quest for justice by his parents, whose efforts have proven powerless against a giant state apparatus. The parents of the Karamay incident suffered a similar fate. As described in Xu Xin’s epic investigation, their years of tireless efforts to demand an official apology have resulted in nothing. They have had to put up with not only the the trauma of their personal loss, but the apathy and indifference of the authorities.

Another similarity between the two incidents is the  media blackout that surrounded both of them. Since the Karamay fire, only upbeat news reports about the fire circulated in the public, paying lip service to the victims while assuring that new safety measures will prevent such a tragedy from happening again. Seventeen years have now passed. One may judge how much China’s media landscape has evolved from the excerpt of an article by David Bandurski below:

The fact that the Zhao Wei story is still being actively scrubbed from the Internet, combined with the fact that no other mainstream media have touched the story, strongly suggests there has been some sort of directive from press authorities on this story that either defines it as off-limits or sends the signal that coverage is risky.

Many thanks to David Bandurski for bringing the story of Zhao Wei to greater attention. David is editor of the Chinese Media Project, and also the producer of films directed by Zhao Dayong, including Ghost Town and Street Life, both distributed by dGenerate.

Karamay will screen on Sunday April 3 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, as part of the series Fearless: Chinese Independent Documentaries.

Relevant Classroom Use

Disorder (dir. Huang Weikai)

DGENERATE FILMS EVENTS FOR THE WEEK OF 3/21/11-3/27/11

Disorder at the Freer Gallery

Friday, March 25 at 7 PM

Screening at the Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital: Focus on China

Address:
Freer Gallery of Art
Jefferson Drive at 12th St SW
Washington D.C.

Description:
“Disorder is simply a gripping, stirring, occasionally shocking experience.” – Hua Hsu of The Atlantic

Huang Weikai’s one-of-a-kind news documentary captures, with remarkable freedom, the anarchy, violence, and seething anxiety animating China’s major cities today. As urbanization in China advances at a breakneck pace, Chinese cities teeter on the brink of mayhem.

Admission is free. Seating for films is available on a first-come, first-served basis. Auditorium doors will open approximately 30 minutes before each show.

Disorder at the Ann Arbor Film Festival

Saturday, March 26 at 2 PM

Preceded by the  world premiere of Robert Fenz’s most recent film, “The Sole of the Foot”.

Address:
603 East Liberty Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48104

Description:
Tickets are $9 and can be purchased by calling 734-604-4627 or emailing boxoffice@aafilmfest.org.

Ghost Town at the Freer Gallery

Sunday, March 27 at 2 PM

Screening at the Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital: Focus on China

Address:
Freer Gallery of Art
Jefferson Drive at 12th St SW
Washington D.C.

Description:
“A miniature epic of the everyday” – A.O. Scott, The New York Times

Tucked away in a rugged corner of Yunnan Province, Lisu and Nu minority villagers squat in the abandoned halls of this remote former Community county seat. Divided into three parts, this epic documentary takes an intimate look at its varied cast of characters, bringing audiences face to face with people left behind by China’s new economy.

Admission is free. Seating for films is available on a first-come, first-served basis. Auditorium doors will open approximately 30 minutes before each show.

For a full list of upcoming events, visit our Events Page.

Relevant Classroom Use

Betelnut (dir. Yang Heng)

DGENERATE FILMS EVENTS FOR THE WEEK OF 3/07/11-3/13/11

Betelnut at the Centre for Contemporary Arts

Tuesday, March 8 at 7:00 PM

Address:
350 Sauchiehall Street
Glasgow, United Kingdom

Description:
“Pure cinema” – Susanna Harutyunyan, FIPRESCI – The International Federation of Film Critics

“Exquisite!” – Tony Rayns, Film Comment

Along a sleepy Hunan riverside, two delinquent boys experience a summer of love and violence in Yang Heng’s visually stunning debut.

Tickets are free, they will be awarded on a first-come, first-serve basis.  Call the CCA Box Office on 0141 352 4900 to reserve your ticket.

Queer China at Pomona College

Thursday, March 10

Address:
Pomona College
333 North College Way
Claremont, CA

Description:

Best Documentary at the Lisbon Gay and Lesbian Film Festival

Directed by Cui Zi’en, China’s leading queer theorist, activist and scholar, the documentary includes rarely seen footage of the first ever appearance of gays and lesbians on  State television, including Cui Zi’en himself.

Ghost Town at Cornell Cinema

Friday, March 11 at 7:00 PM

Screening as part of the “China Now” Film Series

Address:
Cornell Cinema
104 Willard Straight Hall
Ithaca, Illinois

Description:

“A quiet marvel” – Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune

Tucked away in a rugged corner of Yunnan Province, Lisu and Nu minority villagers squat in the abandoned halls of this remote former Community county seat. Divided into three parts,  Ghost Town takes an intimate look at its varied cast of characters, bringing audiences face to face with people left behind by China’s new economy.

Tickets are $7 for the general public, $5.50 for seniors, and $4 for students and kids 12 and under.  Advance Sale Tickets can be purchased at the Willard Straight Hall Ticket Desk, or at the box office, which opens 20 minutes before the scheduled showtime.

For a full list of upcoming events, visit our Events Page.

Relevant Classroom Use

Zhao Dayong, director of Street Life and Ghost Town

By Isabella Tianzi Cai

This entry is part of a weeklong spotlight of newly available titles in the dGenerate Films catalog.

In the Global Times, Chris Hawke (Hao Ying) highlights director Zhao Dayong’s filmmaking career and three of his documentaries.  The article is occasioned by the screening of Zhao’s Street Life (2006) and Ghost Town (2008) at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing.

Street Life and Ghost Town, both available through the dGenerate catalog, have received international recognition in the festival circuit, and continue to garner praise from film critics from around the world. With regard to Street Life,  Hawke writes,

Zhao explores how the poorest of the poor prey on each other, and draws parallels and allusions to the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West.

This point is reaffirmed by Zhao: “As you can see through the plot and the ending, Street Life does indeed work as a parable, more or less.” In terms of shooting technique, Hawke points out Zhao’s unintrusive approach. In order to capture the last scene in Street Life, Zhao said that he followed his subject for hours despite feeling the power to intervene. Because he is willing to take chances and let the stories unfold on their own, he has successfully

[captured] some shockingly intimate scenes [in Ghost Town], such as an impoverished father suggesting to his daughter and her boyfriend that they break up so the father can sell her as a wife to a rich out-of-towner.

Not many details are given about Zhao’s latest documentary, My Father’s House. But we know it is “the story of an underground Nigerian church.” Zhao expressed that he loves changes and enjoyed working with new subjects; given that he is concerned with contemporary social realities in China, it is not surprising that he has found a new inspiration in “Guangzhou’s swelling African population.”

As for Zhao’s formalistic choices, Hao thinks that

Zhao’s documentaries, like those of many other Chinese directors, are slow moving, capturing the epic nature of daily life and transporting the viewer completely into a new, foreign environment.

However, Zhao prefers not to think of the pace of his films as either fast or slow. He wants to leave audience room for interpretation and also protect his creative space. He considers the freedom and authority that he has over his work extremely valuable. Therefore, he does not believe in film schools, which he thinks of as “a crushing environment for the independent spirit.”

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Ghost Town (dir. Zhao Dayong)

In  a stroke of inspired Halloween programming, The Cleveland Museum of Art will screen the acclaimed (and fittingly titled) documentary Ghost Town this Sunday at 1:30PM.

Special admission: $10; museum members, seniors age 65 and older, and students, $8; no passes or vouchers.

The Cleveland Museum of Art
11150 East Boulevard
Cleveland, OH 44106

For more information about Ghost Town at the Cleveland Museum of Art website!

Keep track of upcoming screenings of dGenerate films by visiting our Events page.

Relevant Classroom Use

Directors Jia Zhangke, Wang Xiaoshuai and Lou Ye at the Beijing premiere of Wang's Chongqing Blues (photo courtesy of Screening China)

We’ve been following Dan Edwards‘ blog Screening China for the past several weeks, and it’s quickly shaping up to be an important source for reviews on the latest in Chinese film, especially from the indie/arthouse side. Dan, who is based in Beijing, writes for The Beijinger and Real Time Arts, among other publications. We’ve been linking all year to his coverage of our films and filmmakers: a review of Ghost Town;  an interview with Liu Jiayin; a profile on documentary filmmakers; and a recap of the Hong Kong International Film Festival. He’s contributed a lot in a relatively short time, and it’s good to be able to access his content on his blog (which, ironically, is blocked in China).

Here are some recent highlights from his blog:

From his review of Yang Rui’s Crossing the Mountain:

It’s a brave first feature (Yang has apparently previously made documentaries) and at it’s best Crossing the Mountain allows us to sink into the sense of time and space of a pre-modern society existing on the hazy edges of a rapidly modernising nation. As such, it’s a reminder of cinema’s ability to not only tell a story, but transport us into a whole other way of being in the world.

From his review of Ghost Town director Zhao Dayong’s The High Life, which won two awards at HKIFF:

The High Life is a surprising, unsettling film, rich in cynical humour about the nature of power, economics and relationships in contemporary China. Following the unveiling of his acclaimed three-hour documentary Ghost Town last year at the New York Film Festival (see my article on the film for RealTime here), Zhao Dayong is rapidly establishing himself as a major rising talent in Chinese cinema.

Most recently, Dan has front-row coverage of the Beijing premiere of Wang Xiaoshuai’s new film Chongqing Blues, and reports how Jia Zhangke unintentionally upstaged the proceedings.

We look forward to ongoing reports and reviews from Dan’s blog.

Relevant Classroom Use

Street Life (dir. Zhao Dayong)

The Flaherty Film Seminar, a private, weeklong series of screenings and talks with filmmakers, scholars and enthusiasts, concluded another annual edition last month. This year’s Seminar was curated by film critic Dennis Lim with the guiding theme of “Work”. Chinese filmmaker Zhao Dayong attended the seminar, presenting his first two feature films: Street Life and Ghost Town, both distributed by dGenerate.

In ArtForum, Nicholas Rapold points out several highlights of the Seminar, including Zhao Dayong’s films:

Zhao Dayong’s lauded Ghost Town (2009) conjures a marginal community in the provinces—a former Communist workers’ village perched in the mountains. Its unification of artistry (Zhao trained as an oil painter) with social portraiture made the centrally placed film a capstone to the week’s percolating dialogue on how work forges identity. Accordingly, Zhao’s embedded look at the Shanghai homeless, Street Life (2006), offered a fascinating vision of unmade man: a prolonged finale showing one of the subjects (recently beaten by police) engaged in demented Situationist crumping in a public square under a Jumbotron.

The full article can be accessed at ArtForum.

Relevant Classroom Use

Ghost Town (dir. Zhao Dayong)

As part of its national tour, Zhao Dayong’s acclaimed documentary Ghost Town is screening for a week in Chicago, from April 9-15 at Facets Cinematheque. Chicago critics are already showering unanimous praise upon the film. Some excerpts:

“Fine, go ahead and film!” hollers a resident of Zhiziluo. “But there’s nothing worth filming here.”
Zhao Dayong offers a differing view in “Ghost Town…” This skilled filmmaker finds much to contemplate in the long abandoned, largely depopulated Chinese town.

- Bill Stamets, The Chicago Sun-Times

A quiet marvel, Zhao Dayong’s second feature-length picture is no less an indelible portrait of a place, and its people, as Terence Davies’ “Of Time and the City” and Jia Zhangke’s “Still Life” or “24 City.”

- Michael Phillips, The Chicago Tribune

Directed by Zhao Dayong, this 2008 documentary presents Zhizilou, a small town in Yunan province, as evidence that the Chinese economic miracle has eroded once-thriving rural cultures by drawing villagers to large cities… The lush mountain scenery contrasts vividly with the crumbling town, but the biggest impact comes from the astonishing candor of the residents.

- Andrea Gronvall, The Chicago Reader

Shot without government permission in a remote part of China, Ghost Town is about as handmade as filmmaking comes… Zhao finds unlikely poetry in his story, seemingly one of utter hopelessness, and uses it to bring this epic portrait full circle.

- Ben Kenigsberg, Time Out Chicago

Director-editor-cinematographer Zhao Dayong’s astonishingly gorgeous, achingly sorrowful three-part independent documentary, “Ghost Town” (2008), captures the life and survival of Zhiziluo, a village in remote Southwest China. His work resembles that of his countryman Zhangke Jia and other filmmakers of the current generation working on high-definition video (a format less restricted by the Chinese government than 35mm features intended for theatrical exhibition), all demonstrating by witness, “What is now? What is China? What is the future?” All find the lyric in the mundane: So many stories, so many vistas of physical beauty and dusty ruin… “Ghost Town” is profound in portraying the particulars of generations of villagers and profoundly sad as well.

- Ray Pride, New City Film

Tickets can be purchased at:

Facets Cinematheque
1517 Fullerton Avenue
Chicago, IL 60614

Relevant Classroom Use