Posts Tagged ‘oxhide’

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Spreading Far and Wide

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

It’s always amazing to discover the global reach of some of our films. Some way or another, they find their way out of China and into theaters, festivals, and screens everywhere. Daily we hear from indie Chinese film enthusiasts from around the world and read reviews from publications we’ve never heard of.  Woke up this morning to see that the Irish Left Review has named Oxhide one of the top 100 films of the decade.  Here’s what the ILR says about Oxhide:

I don’t expect that many people will rush out to watch this, a two-hour docudrama shot on low-resolution DV, entirely in a tanner’s workshop in Beijing, in long static takes, using the director’s family (including herself) as cast. It looks gloopy green and the camera never moves once but it is completely entrancing. The director Liu was only 25 at the time and she did practically everything on this film in an astounding piece of DIY filmmaking; as ever with prodigies of the sort, it has an incredible maturity and the performances she draws out of her cranky family’s quotidian life are marvellous. Despite the best efforts of the Chinese government to marshall cinematic output there is still good stuff being made and the freshness of the work never lets up.

Hopefully they are wrong about the first sentence, but the rest we can fully get behind.

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dGenerate Directors Applauded by David Bordwell

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

“Observations on Film Art” is a blog run by prominent film scholars David Bordwell (author of numerous books including Poetics of Cinema, The Way Hollywood Tells It, and Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema) and Kristin Thompson. In Bordwell’s recent review of the Vancouver International Film Festival (October 1-16), humorously entitled “Wantons and Wontons,” dGenerate director Liu Jiayin’s new film Oxhide II won his high compliment.

Naming the film “the most exciting Asian film I saw at VIFF,” Bordwell considers the 132-minute film about a family making dumplings as “a demonstration of how a simple form, patiently pursued, can yield unpredictable rewards.” This sequel to Oxhide further explores the themes of family dynamics and economic hardship, and Liu displays her mastery in handling the tension between a quasi-documentary aspect and self-conscious artistry even better. As Bordwell notes: “[A]lthough everything looks spontaneous, it was all completely staged—written out in detail, rehearsed over months, reworked in test footage, and eventually played out in ‘real time.’”

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Shelly on Film: Pushing Beyond Indie Conventions

Monday, October 12th, 2009
by Shelly Kraicer
Betelnut (dir. Yang Heng)

Betelnut (dir. Yang Heng)

Perhaps I’ve been spending just a bit too much time watching movies in China? I have this recurring daydream, most often when I’m watching a new Chinese film that some enterprising young director has sent me. I always watch every independent film that I receive. You never know what gems might appear unsolicited in the mail. And, even if the film isn’t so terrific, it will still be a useful index of all sorts of interesting trends: it might reveal what young filmmakers in China are filming, how they are looking at the world around them, or, at least, what they think people like me want to see.

The daydream, or perhaps it’s a fantasy, is this. There exists, down some dusty grey hutong alleyway of Beijing, a Chinese Indie Director’s Discount Emporium. You want to make a film? Step right in and assemble your movie at bargain prices. The shelving on the left is stocked with cast members: long-haired village boys, out of school, drifting aimlessly. At the back is a set of grainy, dusty, brown-grey village-scapes, ready to be populated by said drifters. To the right, useful equipment. Some tripods, but with a restriction: they must be set up at least 50 metres from the subjects being filmed. Right beside is a very long long shelf, holding 3 minute, 10 minute, even 20 minute-long takes, offered for a steal at family-sized package prices. Alternatively, you could go for deep discount on little DV cams, with the proviso that, held close to the subjects, they be shaken as vigorously as possible. The dialogue shelves in the centre are threadbare: screenplays for rent are all dialogue-light. And, off in a corner, is a shelf labelled “Prostitutes”. It’s over-loaded, with a three-for-the-price-of-one sale.

This may seem a bit mean. But the people I’m making fun of here, in fact, are international film programmers like me (I select Chinese language films for the Vancouver International Film Festival), not the filmmakers themselves. It seems that many of us (my colleagues from other film festivals, and wouldn’t exclude myself) sometimes seem to select films armed with a checklist of “East Asian art film attributes”, the things that populate the shelves of our hutong indie shop. Who can blame a young director from China, who, with little or no chance of gaining any return on his or her investment within his own country, tries to design a film to suit those foreigners who pay the bills, fund post production, and just might offer an overseas distribution deal?

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Independents on the Sidelines: Chris Berry on the Shanghai International Film Festival

Sunday, October 4th, 2009
Oxhide-II-300x144

Oxhide II (2009, dir. Liu Jiayin)

Held on June 13-21, 2009, the 12th Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF) was, to quote Chris Berry, “bigger than ever.” In his review of the festival on Senses of Cinema, Berry analyzed the continued growth and unusual challenges confronting this “large and ambitious A-list festival.”  The subtle and ambiguous status of Chinese independent cinema is of particular concern.

For this relative newcomer to the international festival circuit, the greatest challenge is to attract strong entries for its main competition. Berry notes that the unavoidable self-awareness of “both political sensitivities and the expectations of the public and the authorities” makes the selection of foreign films “idiosyncratic, to say the least.” In the domestic sector, the official-sponsored status of the festival prevents it showing Chinese independent films—films that have not been through the government censorship system, although the various sidebar events managed to “provide spaces where independents can appear and participate.” Berry especially noted the presence of Liu Jiayin and praised highly her new work Oxhide II, inevitably absent in the festival:

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dGenerate Directors Featured in Dragons & Tigers

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

by Lu Chen

Tony Rayns and Shelly Kraicer, programmers of the Vancouver International Film Festival‘s big Dragons & Tigers: The Cinemas of East Asia section, have announced a program that will showcase a total of thirty-five features, four mid-length films and twenty-two shorts, as of publication. Dragons & Tigers is one of the preeminent showcases of East Asian films in the world, and a stepping stone for many young Asian filmmakers. This year it will feature five World Premieres, eight International Premieres, twelve North American Premieres and two Canadian Premieres from seventy countries.

Four dGenerate Films directors are featured in the program.

  • Gay activist and radial filmmaker Cui Zi’en’s Queer China, ‘Comrade’ China uses rare testimonies from theorists, activists and artists to outline the modern origins of Chinese homosexuality through its attempted suppression to its breakthroughs in the last decade.
  • Zhao Dayong’s (whose documentary Ghost Town will have its international premiere at the New York Film Festival on September 27) Rough Poetry brings together political theater and faces in closeup by putting eight characters in a cage, playing themselves, including a cop, a prostitute, and a poet.
  • Liu Jiayin’s Oxhide II is a sequel to her dGenerate title Oxhide and uses the occasion of making dumplings with her parents to structure this formally daring, wryly amusing look at family dynamics, economic burdens and the ethics and aesthetics of cooking from scratch.
  • Yang Heng’s (Betelnut) Sun Spots tells a tale of love, betrayal and revenge set in a verdant mountain paradise in central China, and captures the anguish and passion of a youthful lost generation.

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Shelly on Film: What is a Chinese Film?

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

By Shelly Kraicer

San Yuan Li

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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Liu Jiayin’s Oxhide II wins at CinDi Seoul

Monday, August 31st, 2009

On Tuesday, August 25, the 3rd Cinema Digital Seoul (CinDi) film festival in Seoul, Korea concluded with director Liu Jiayin’s feature Oxhide II receiving the Blue Chameleon Award, chosen by a jury of international critics.  The film, which was invited to the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes, also received an audience award, the White Chameleon.

Liu Jiayin is one of the youngest and most promising independent filmmakers in the Digital Video movement in China.  She made her first feature Oxhide, a dGenerate title, when she was twenty-three, and served as writer, director, cinematographer, as well as a character in the three-character film.  Boldly transforming documentary into fiction, Liu Jiayin cast her parents and herself as fictionalized versions of themselves in an intimate portrait of a father’s leather bag business and a family’s anxiety over its decline.  Daily life in an impossibly cramped Beijing apartment takes on epic proportions in this intimate portrait, with unprecedented access of a working-class Chinese family.  In an review on Cinema Scope, Shelly Kraicer praised the film as “the most important Chinese film of the past several years–and one of the most astonishing recent films from any country.”

Oxhide II, Liu’s second feature, is the sequel to Oxhide and continues to follow the fate of the same business and the same family.  Using real time in the shoot, the film takes place when the family gathers to make and eat dumplings, a quintessential family ritual in China.  In an interview with Fanhall Films, Liu Jiayin mentioned that in Oxhide II, she reduces the dramatic quality of Oxhide in order to present a “diluted” (xishi) life.

Launched in July 2007, CinDi aims at discovering, presenting and supporting a new generation of digital films and filmmakers in Asia.  Chinese-language films covered half of this year’s program.  Xu Tong’s documentary Wheat Harvest won the top Red Chamelon Award, for which the Chinese independent director Lou Ye (director of Suzhou River and Summer Palace) served in the jury.  Lou’s film Spring Fever was the opening night film of the festival.

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