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.

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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.

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The High Life (dir. Zhao Dayong)

by Isabella Tianzi Cai

RealTime Arts, Australia’s critical guide to contemporary international arts, recently reviewed several films from the 34th Hong Kong International Film Festival – several by directors with films distributed by dGenerate.

In the Asian Digital Competition section of HKIFF, the awards went to Zhao Dayong’s The High Life and Yang Heng’s Sun Spots. RealTime’s Mike Walsh comments on the former, “Characters enter and then leave the narrative, frustrating our attempt to approach contemporary China in exclusively personal terms. It is worth comparing this to the structure of Zhao’s previous documentary Ghost Town which is divided into three parts, each focusing on a different character.” dGenerate Films distributes Ghost Town as well as Zhao’s debut feature Street Life (coming soon), and Yang Heng’s Betelnut.

In the same article, Walsh also highly commends Liu Jiayin’s mesmerizing documentary Oxhide II, the sequel to Oxhide (distributed by dGenerate). He writes,

In some ways this is the ultimate work of everyday realism—until you realise that the action is carefully composed and staged. As with her previous film, Liu’s performers are her parents and herself, and the film shows them talking, squabbling and cooking together in real time and in their own home. As with any good work of minimalism, you pare down the elements so that small things assume larger impact.

The Best Documentary award went to Zhao Liang’s Petition, which was also a special selection at Cannes last year. In his HKIFF review, also at RealTime Arts, Dan Edwards compares Petition to another Chinese documentary, Once Upon a Time a Proletarian by Guo Xiaolu. Edwards comments that both these films exhibit “the Chinese independent documentary tradition of probing what lies behind the glittering facades of China’s economic success” and HKIFF may be “the only place in the People’s Republic where such critical works can play at such high profile events.”

At dGenerate Films, we are glad to make contemporary Chinese documentaries as well as feature films available to audiences outside China. Currently we hold another of Zhao’s films, Crime and Punishment, which documents the less-known daily lives of people living in a small village near the Chinese-Korean border, under the constant surveillance and harassment of a local police station.

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The feature is not available online, but we’ve secured permission to make it available as a downloadable .pdf on the dGenerate website. You can download the feature here. Thanks to Nicola Davison at Time Out Shanghai.

dGenerate Films is the proud distributor of films from five of the “Magnificent Seven.” Learn more about their films by clicking on the following titles:

Liu Jiayin: Oxhide

Ying Liang: Taking Father Home; The Other Half

Yang Heng: Betelnut

Zhao Liang: Crime and Punishment

Zhao Dayong: Ghost Town

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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

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Awards ceremony at Hong Kong International Film Festival (photo courtesy Lantern Films)

The Hong Kong International Film Festival gave out its awards Tuesday night, and to our delight, four of the nine awards were given to filmmakers repped by dGenerate. Yang Heng (director of Betelnut) took home the Golden Digital Award in the Asian Digital Competition for his new film Sun Spots, while Zhao Liang (Crime and Punishment) won the Humanitarian Award for his stunning documentary Petition. But the night belonged to Zhao Dayong (Ghost Town, Street Life), whose new film The High Life nabbed two awards – the FIRPRESCI Critics’ Jury Prize and the Silver Award in the Asian Digital Competition.

Full coverage of the awards can be found at The Hollywood Reporter.

See if you can catch Zhao Dayong’s previous feature Ghost Town, which is touring the US through April at these venues. Read some reviews of this film.

Yang Heng’s previous feature Betelnut is available at dGenerate Films. Find out more about his prizewinning debut.

Zhao Liang’s eye-opening documentary Crime and Punishment is currently available for non-theatrical exhibition, and will be available on DVD in the summer.

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Ghost Town (dir. Zhao Dayong)

SATURDAY, APRIL 3rd and SUNDAY APRIL 4th
Union Theatre, University of Wisconsin
800 Langdon Street
Milwaukee, WI 53706
http://uniontheater.wisc.edu/

THURSDAY, APRIL 8th
Southwest Film Center
3601 University Boulevard, SE
Albuquerque, NM 87106
http://www.unm.edu/~swfc/

SUNDAY, APRIL 9th
Facets Cinematheque
1517 Fullerton Avenue
Chicago, IL 60614
http://www.facets.org/pages/cinematheque/cinematheque_april2010.php

SATURDAY, APRIL 17th
University of Colorado, Humanities 150
Boulder, CO 80309-0234
http://www.colorado.edu/cas/events.htm

TUESDAY, APRIL 27th
Melnitz Movies
James Bridges Theater, Melnitz 1409
Los Angeles, CA 90095
http://gsa.asucla.ucla.edu/melnitz/

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The Mao Zedong statue of Zhiziluo salutes the New York film critics for their reviews of Ghost Town

We couldn’t be more pleased with this trifecta of fresh reviews from New York critics on the eve of Zhao Dayong’s Ghost Town’s weeklong run at the MoMA.

A.O. Scott writes in the New York Times:

Zhao has an exquisite ability to balance words with images… The life stories and household interactions that fill out the film’s three chapters take place against a natural background that is shot beautifully… A miniature epic of the everyday.

Time Out New York’s David Fear gives the film four stars:

Zhao Dayong’s extraordinary documentary on life in the rural village of Zhiziluo, nestled at the foot of the mountains in China’s southwestern Yunnan province. Never mind the nation’s great economic leap forward; the longer you watch Zhao’s chronicle of the financially destitute and the bureaucratically forgotten, the more you feel that you’re witnessing a country fraying at its edges.

Nick Pinkterton in the Village Voice:

I do not expect to soon find scenes to match Ghost Town’s mountaintop funeral, the running along after a rowdy exorcism, or the scanning of faces at the town Christmas chorale. His back to prosperity, Dayong finds hallowed ground.

If you haven’t seen what the critics are raving about, make a beeline for MoMA this week. Schedule and ticketing info here.

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Ghost Town (dir. Zhao Dayong)

Following its triumphant US Premiere at the 2009 New York Film Festival, Zhao Dayong’s Ghost Town will enjoy a weeklong run at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The MoMA will screen Ghost Town at the following dates:

• Monday, March 15, 2010, 3 p.m.
• Wednesday, March 17, 2010, 4 p.m.
• Thursday, March 18, 2010, 7 p.m.
• Friday, March 19, 2010, 3:30 p.m.
• Saturday, March 20, 2010, 4 p.m.
• Sunday, March 21, 2010, 12:30 p.m.

Tickets can be purchased at the MoMA Film Box Office adjacent to the The Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, New York, NY. Details at the MoMA site.

Further details and trailer after the break.

Zhao’s tremendously rewarding film illuminates the alienation and marginalization of the denizens of one of China’s countless remote villages. Divided into three parts, this epic documentary takes an intimate look at its varied cast of characters, bringing audiences face to face with people who were unceremoniously left behind by China’s new economy. Zhao displays great compassion and respect for the squatters and other inhabitants of the village, and he patiently teases out the special places and attachments to which they cling. Cleverly structured and beautifully shot, the film is a gratifying, if ultimately heartbreaking, testimonial to the talent and commitment of China’s vanguard independent documentary movement.

• Description from the MoMA program
• Ghost Town page at dGenerate Films
• Reviews of Ghost Town from the New York Film Festival
• Interview with director Zhao Dayong
• Interview with producer David Bandurski

Trailer:

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