Fortune Teller (dir. Xu Tong)
Over at the MUBI Notebook, one of the leading sites for writing on cinema, editor Daniel Kasman offers his report on the 2010 Vancouver International Film Festival, in which he names Xu Tong’s independent documentary Fortune Teller “the best film I saw this year at VIFF.” Fortune Teller was a prize-winner at the 2010 Beijing Independent Documentary Festival, but has yet to premiere in the United States, a fact that we are working to rectify within the near future. Read critic and VIFF programmer Shelly Kraicer’s description of the film, expanded from the VIFF Dragons and Tigers program notes.
Kasman’s report opens into an extended meditation on the historical significance of the current Chinese independent cinema, comparing it to the classic Hollywood productions of the 1930s. Most of his reflections on the topic are reproduced below:
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“The similarity I see between, say, an American film from the 1930s and a independent Chinese film from 2010, like Fortune Teller, a documentary that was the best film I saw this year at VIFF, is the understanding of filmmakers-producers that one’s country has a significant population, a population whose stories should be told and to whom stories about that population should be told.
