NEW FILMS FROM CHINA

LACUNA   2012
醉后一夜  

Director: Derek Tsang, Jimmy Wan. Producer: Pang Ho-cheung, Subi Liang. Screenwriter: Derek Tsang, Jimmy Wan, Zhang Youyou, Kuk Yuk. Cinematographer: Charlie Lam. Production Designer: Jeffrey Kong. Editor: Wenders Li. Composer: Alan Wong, Subyub Lee, Tom Lee. Cast: Zhang Jingchu, Shawn Yue, Chu Yue-sun, Yoga Lin, Lawrence Chou.

One morning a Hong Kong boy and a Mainland girl wake up in each other’s arms in the “Bed and Bath” section of a deserted high-end Beijing department store – without any idea of how they got there.
They had drunk a lot the night before and now will spend the rest of the movie desperately trying to figure out what happened – retracing their steps, chasing down where the car was parked and where the bag of money was stowed, forced to bring a very unusual “pet” to the Nativity set of a Chinese film called O MARY JANE, while having flashbacks at inopportune moments. This charmingly madcap rom-com maps a Beijing according to its young and texting generation. – Bérénice Reynaud                           HDCAM, color, Mandarin with English subtitles, 96 min.

SHANGHAI STRANGERS   
非典情人  

Director/Screenwriter: Joan Chen. Producer: Alexi Tan. Cinematographer: Florian J.E. Zinke. Production Designer: Pan Lei. Editor: Ruby Yang. Sound: Zhao Ying, Yin Jie. Composer: Daniel Belardinelli. Cast: Jiang Yiyan, Teo Yoo, Wang Yong, Arran Hawkins, Zhang Haoxing.

Christmas eve. A woman meets a foreigner. Memories spark of a romance born of another brief encounter – between a recent Shanghai riven by SARS and the city’s forgotten Jewish past. With this internet “micro-movie,” Joan Chen returns to directing for the first time in 12 years, weaving a delicate tale of love, loss and remembrance in her beloved hometown of Shanghai. – Cheng-Sim Lim             HDCAM, color, Mandarin and English with English subtitles, 24 min.

ALL APOLOGIES   2012
爱的替身   

Director: Emily Tang. Producer: Yang Jian, Chow Keung. Screenwriter: Han Jie, Emily Tang, Dong Fang. Cinematographer: Lai Yiu-fai. Production Designer: William Kwok. Editor: Chow Keung, Baek Seung-hoon. Sound: Dong Xu. Composer: Roger Lin. Cast: Cheng Taishen, Yang Shuting, Liang Jing, Gao Jin.

ALL APOLOGIES is a subtle study of the way two couples are tragically connected through the death of a child: Yonggui, a construction foreman and his wife, Yun Zhen; Yonggui’s former driver Heman who runs a tiny grocery with his wife, Qiaoyu. Convinced that a life is “owed” to him, Yonggui feels entitled to take what he wants. Qiaoyu believes it is her duty to “pay” for her husband’s mistake. Eschewing melodrama, Emily Tang paints an impressionistic portrait of the changing relationships between men and women in contemporary China, calling forth a wealth of details, gestures, off-screen gazes and small, intimate moments. – Bérénice Reynaud   HDCAM, color, Mandarin with English subtitles, 90 min.

QUEER CHINA ONSCREEN

银幕中国双年展: 中国同性恋影片

LAST DAYS   2012
最后的日子 


Director/Screenwriter:  Cui Zi’en. Cinematographer: Li Jian. Editor: Yang Jin. Composer: Chen Lele.

Boys, girls, queer desires and fantastic topographies: the Chinese queer film pioneer Cui Zi’en returns to his narrative and lyrical roots in LAST DAYS. Cui weaves a surreal tale from the materiality of low-budget filmmaking, never forgetting film’s ability to visualize desire in ways both alluring and provocative. Desire here is a meandering movement between person, body and gender, and it also coalesces into bonding and community. – Jonathan Hall
     Digital video, Mandarin, 90 min.

OUR STORY: 10 YEARS OF GUERRILLA WARFARE OF THE BEIJING QUEER FILM FESTIVAL   2012
 我们的故事

Director: Yang Yang. Producer: Beijing Queer Film Festival Organizing Committee. Cinematographer: Deng Jianping, Ma Ke, Yang Jin, Diao Dingcheng, Xiaomin, Zhou Shuxuan. Editor: Deng Jiangping, Feng Zhe.

Female documentarian and festival organizer Yang Yang’s film follows the peregrination of the Beijing Queer Film Festival across a decade to find a regular home. An atlas of Beijing alternative screening venues, OUR STORY is a document of homophobia and of queer maneuvering against normative power. – Jonathan Hall      Digital video, Mandarin with English subtitles, 42 min.

THE MONKEY KING: UPROAR IN HEAVEN 3D   2012 / 1961-1964
大闹天宫

Director: Su Da, Chen Zhihong. Producer: Ren Zhonglun, Frederic Rose, Wang Tianyun, Qian Jianping. Musical Arrangement: Shi Jiayang. Sound: Liang Yingjun.  Restoration: Tom Burton. 3D Conversion Director: Pierre Routhier. Cast: Li Yang, Chen Daoming, Chen Kaige, Feng Xiaogang, Zhang Guoli.

1961-1964 Two-Part Original    Director: Wan Laiming, Tang Cheng. Screenwriter: Li Kerou, Wan Laiming. Based on Journey to the West by Wu Cheng’en. Cinematographer: Wang Shirong, Duan Xiaoxuan. Production Designer: Zhang Guangyu,  Zhang Zhengyu. Editor: Xu Zhenzu. Composer: Wu Yingju. Animation Design: Yang Dingxian, Duan Jun, Pu Jiaxiang, Lu Qing, Lin Wenxiao, Ge Guiyun.  Backgrounds: Fang Pengnian, Gao Yang, Qin Yizhen, Liang Like.

One of the most famous characters in Chinese mythology, the Monkey King is the hero of Wan Laiming and Tang Cheng’s two-part animated feature from the 1960s. A beloved landmark of Chinese animation, Wan and Tang’s masterpiece returns to theaters after a painstaking and dazzling 3D makeover led by experts at Los Angeles-based Technicolor.

A playful, trickster figure, the Monkey King leaves chaos in his wake wherever he goes, from the Dragon King’s palace in the Eastern Sea to the heavenly halls of the Celestial Emperor himself. These ethereal worlds come to life through vibrant animation set to a soundtrack inspired by Beijing Opera and a new cast of voice actors that includes China’s top live-action directors. The respectfully rendered 3D heightens the film’s enchanting spell. – Paul Malcolm3D DCP, color,     Mandarin, 92 min.

THE RED DETACHMENT OF WOMEN  1970 
红色娘子军

Director: Fu Jie, Pan Wenzhan. Producer: Beijing Film Studio. Adaptation: China Dance Drama Troupe. Cinematographer: Li Wen. Cast: Liu Qingtang, Xue Jinghua, Song Chen, Li Xinying, Li Chengxiang.

The tumultuous Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), remembered now as a dark period of political violence in China, also saw the creation of spectacular works of art known as yangbanxi (revolutionary model dramas). Drawing upon Chinese opera, novels, and films, Western symphonic music, and even ballet, yangbanxi defined the culture of the Cultural Revolution. In this iconic 1970 ballet film, the heroine Wu Qinghua escapes from an evil landlord and becomes the leader of a women’s militia – guided all the while by a dashing Communist Party cadre. Courtesy of the China Film Archive, this is the first officially approved screening of the film in the US. The presentation also marks the 40th anniversary of President Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. – Robert Chi      35mm, color, 105 min.

BEIJING FLICKERS POP-UP EXHIBITION
《有种》流动展览

In 2010, a photography commission from one of China’s foremost contemporary art venues, the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA), prompted Zhang Yuan to issue a casting call on Chinese Twitter to Beijingers born after 1980. Almost two decades after BEIJING BASTARDS (1993), his landmark Sixth Generation film about the artistic underground in 1990s China, Zhang was curious about the new generation of dreamers and strivers in Beijing. Of the 200-odd people who tweeted him back – among them “rock-and-roll musicians, artists, actors, stock scalpers, bodyguards, social workers, university students, the unemployed” (Zhang Yuan) – the filmmaker chose 11. The still and video portraits of the chosen 11, a chiaroscuro of faces and bodies surrounded by inky darkness or the muted browns and greys of the Beijing winter when the photography took place, debuted in an exhibition at UCCA later that year. The stories the young people told of living in the margins of China’s mega-capital subsequently became the basis for Zhang Yuan’s new film, with some of the storytellers now cast in it.

SAUNA ON MOON   2011 
嫦娥

Director/Screenwriter/Production Designer: Zou Peng. Producer: Chen Zhiheng. Cinematographer: Yu Lik-wai. Editor: Wenders Li. Sound: Zhang Yang. Composer: Wang Lei. Cast: Wu Yuchi, Yang Xiaomin.

Zou Peng’s dazzling second feature witnesses life at a boisterous sauna/brothel in the Southern Chinese industrial heartland of Guangdong. The sauna workers, older and younger women alike, observe a brisk regimen of rehearsing the art of providing pleasure, in the interest of creating the region’s leading pleasure palace for high-rolling “special guests.” Zou eschews easy moralistic conclusions about the politics of power, preferring instead to portray a social ecology built around the unabashed pursuit and uses of money. The fantastical factory that is the sauna becomes a vortex of ironies, prompting both scopophilic pleasure and an uncanny catalog of the effects of China’s economic divides. – Shannon Kelley      35mm, color, Putonghua with English subtitles, 93 min.

THE PEOPLE’S SECRETARY   2010

Director/Producer/Editor: Zhang Qing. Cast: Wang Zhixin, Lu Yuzhen, Lu Tinghai, Zhang Weicheng.

Installation artist Zhang Qing employs the ubiquity of closed-circuit television cameras to amplify a cheeky satire, with multiple video feeds bearing witness to the super-human good works of a community leader, recounted in a style that echoes Chinese television of the 1980s.– Paul Malcolm                 DVD, color, Mandarin with English subtitles, 18 min.

ARE WE REALLY SO FAR FROM THE MADHOUSE?   2010
 我们离疯人院有多远

Director/Cinematographer/Editor: Li Hongqi. Producer: Alex Chung. Composer: P.K. 14, Dear Eloise.

Li Hongqi followed his critically acclaimed fiction feature WINTER VACATION (2010) with this, his first documentary, a film as mesmerizing and unsettling as his fiction work – even as it’s harder to pin down. Joining China’s art rockers P.K. 14 (short for “Public Kingdom for Teens”) on their first national tour, Li’s camera surrenders to the flow of life on the road. What might be standard concert film footage, Li renders utterly absorbing through rigorous formal experimentation, including an asynchronous soundtrack that shifts between the band’s own sonic swirls and a discordant mashup of animal growls. To quote one of the P.K. 14 songs, it’s a “mysterious chaos” that captures the restlessness of contemporary China. – Paul Malcolm      HDCAM, color, Putonghua with English subtitles, 87 min.

ANIMATED, GOLDEN RESTORED   1934-1980
 黄金时代的修复版动画片

This selection of animated shorts digitally restored by the China Film Archive offers a rare glimpse of the luminous output of the Shanghai Animation Film Studio during the 1950s-’60s and late 1970s-’80s, often considered the twin Golden Ages of Chinese animation. Featured are vibrant paper-cut animation by one of the pioneering Wan brothers; ink-wash masterpieces co-directed by ASIFA lifetime achievement honoree Te Wei, possibly the only animator ever from China to be so recognized; A Da’s playful modernism; and as a bonus, China’s earliest extant animation (showing Disney and Fleischer influences to boot). – Cheng-Sim Lim

THE MOUSE AND THE FROG   1934 
鼠与蛙

Producer: Wan Brothers    HDCAM, b&w, silent with English subtitles, 15 min.

PIGSY EATS WATERMELON   1958
 猪八戒吃西瓜

Director: Wan Guchan. Screenwriter: Bao Lei. Cinematographer: Chen Zhenghong. Production Designer: Zhang Tongxuan, Xie Yougen. Animation Design: Hu Jinqing, Qian Jiaxing, Shen Zuwei, Che Hui. Composer: Wu Yingju.      HDCAM, color, Putonghua with English subtitles, 20 min.

LITTLE TADPOLES LOOK FOR THEIR MOTHER   1960
 小蝌蚪找妈妈

Director/Screenwriter: Te Wei, Tang Cheng / Shanghai Animation Film Studio. Adapted from the story by Fang Huizhen and Sheng Lude. Cinematographer: Duan Xiaoxuan, You Yong, Wang Shirong. Production Designer: Te Wei. Animation Design: Tang Cheng, Wu Qiang, Yan Dingxian, Xu Jingda, Dai Tielang. Background Design: Zheng Shaoru, Fang Pengnian. Composer: Wu Yingju.                      HDCAM, color, Putonghua with English subtitles, 10 min.

THE COWHERD’S FLUTE   1963 
牧笛

Director: Te Wei, Qian Jiajun. Screenwriter: Te Wei. Cinematographer: Duan Xiaoxuan. Animation Design: Wu Qiang, Jiao Yesong, Lin Wenxiao, Dai Tielang. Background Design: Fang Jizhong. Painter: Fang Pengnian, Qin Yizhen. Flute Solo: Lu Chunling.      HDCAM, color, 20 min.

THREE MONKS   1980
 三个和尚

Director: A Da. Screenwriter: Bao Lei. Cinematographer: You Yong. Character Design: Han Yu. Animation Design: Ma Kexuan, Fan Madi, Zhuang Minjin, Xu Xuande, Qin Baoyi. Background Design: Chen Nianxi. Background Artist: You Xiannui. Composer: Jin Fuzai.      HDCAM, color, 20 min.

SOME ACTIONS WHICH HAVEN’T BEEN DEFINED YET IN THE REVOLUTION   2011 
一场革命中还未来得及定义的行为

Director/Producer/Screenwriter: Sun Xun. Editor: Xu Chong, Sun Xun, Tang Bohua.

Animated using woodblock prints, SOME ACTIONS uses pulsating, hallucinatory imagery to evoke a Kafkaesque atmosphere of grotesquery, anxiety and vague ideological constrictions. “I only ask questions,” says animator Sun Xun. “It’s up to the viewer to think about what he has seen. And to come up with his own answers.” – Tom Vick      HDCAM, color, 13 min.

DOUBLE XPOSURE   2012 
 二次曝光

Director: Li Yu. Producer: Fang Li. Screenwriter: Li Yu, Fang Li. Cinematographer: Florian J.E. Zinke. Production Designer: Liu Weixin. Editor: Li Yu, Yuan Ze. Sound: Du Duu-chih. Composer: Howie B. Cast: Fan Bingbing, Feng Shaofeng, Huo Siyan, Joan Chen, Yao Anlian.

Since debuting with her first feature FISH AND ELEPHANT in 2001, director Li Yu has gone from rough-and-ready documentary realism with non-professional actors to working with some of the biggest Chinese stars. This stylish and briskly paced psychological thriller, her fifth and visually most ambitious feature yet, plumbs thriller staples of dualities and doubling in dizzying permutations – past indistinguishable from present, reality entangled with illusion, guilt and terror shadowing feelings of love – to a clincher of an ending. Joan Chen in a supporting role impresses, as does Chinese superstar Fan Bingbing, playing a young urbanite whose façade of certainties and comforts – boyfriend, apartment and car – violently splinters in a moment of jealousy. – Cheng-Sim Lim                                                35mm, color, Mandarin with English subtitles, 105 min.

THREE SISTERS   2012
  三姊妹

Director: Wang Bing. Producer: Sylvie Faguer, Mao Hui. Cinematographer: Huang Wenhai, Li Peifeng, Wang Bing. Editor: Adam Kerby, Wang Bing. Sound. Fu Kang. Cast: Sun Ying, Sun Zhen, Sun Fen, Sun Shunbao, Sun Xinliang.

Master documentarist Wang Bing turns his camera to the most invisible and disenfranchised among the Chinese population. In a remote village perched nearly 10,000 feet up in the Yunnan highlands, three sisters – Yingying (ten years old), Zhenzhen (six years old) and Fenfen (four years old) – are left to fend for themselves. Their mother is gone, their father works in a town reachable only after a long walk and a rickety bus ride. Day in and day out, the little girls collect peat to make fire, tend sheep, wash their own clothes at a water pump and perform all sorts of chores. In spite of their hard life and constant toil, the little girls are playful and very affectionate towards each other… until one day when their father comes home. – Bérénice Reynaud      Blu-ray, color, Yunnan dialect with English subtitles, 153 min.

THE DITCH   2010
 夹边沟

Director/Screenwriter: Wang Bing. Producer: K. Lihong, Mao Hui, Philippe Avril, Francisco Villa-Lobos, Sebastien Delloye, Dianba Elbaum. Cinematographer: Lu Sheng. Production Designer: Bao Lige, Xiang Honghui. Editor: Marie-Hélèene Dozo. Cast: Lu Ye, Lian Renjun, Xu Cenzi, Yang Haoyu, Cheng Zhengwu, Jing Niansong.

In his first dramatic feature, director Wang Bing, best-known for his epic documentary WEST OF THE TRACKS (2003), vividly recreates the brutal conditions at the Jiabiangou labor camp in the Gobi Desert, where some 3,000 intellectuals were sent during the Anti-Rightist Campaign beginning in the late 1950s. Digging the eponymous ditch, the prisoners labor at the very edge of human endurance. They seem resigned to death, until a woman appears, searching for her husband and inspires some of them to plot an escape. With its emphasis on sensory details like the incessant, blinding desert sun and the slurping of the thin gruel on which its characters subsist, THE DITCH is an intensely visceral experience about a period of Chinese history still rarely discussed today. – Tom Vick                           35mm, color, Mandarin with English subtitles, 109 min

THE CREMATOR   2012
 焚尸人

Director/Screenwriter/Editor: Peng Tao. Producer: Gao Hong. Cinematographer: Li Xi. Production Designer: Ai Xianhong. Sound: Zhang Yang. Cast: Cheng Zhengwu, Lang Nv.

Director Peng Tao achieves soaring humanism and lyricism in this portrait of life among the lonely. Cremator Cao makes a living incinerating the dead, while secretly selling “ghost wives” to bereaved families seeking companions for their recently deceased, single sons. Unwell, he makes similar plans for himself, but his plot is upended by an encounter with a young woman who’s searching for her missing sister. Cao’s succeeding journey with this young woman sets up the film’s second half, in which his new companion battles her own mounting hardships, and gradually becomes embroiled in his, leading to a denouement of exceeding loveliness. – Shannon Kelley                                                HDCAM, color, Putonghua with English subtitles, 90 min.

SOME ACTIONS WHICH HAVEN’T BEEN DEFINED YET IN THE REVOLUTION    2011   一场革命中还未来得及定义的行为

Director/Producer/Screenwriter: Sun Xun. Editor: Xu Chong, Sun Xun, Tang Bohua. Composer: Jin Shan.

Animated using woodblock prints, SOME ACTIONS uses pulsating, hallucinatory imagery to evoke a Kafkaesque atmosphere of grotesquery, anxiety and vague ideological constrictions. “I only ask questions,” says animator Sun Xun. “It’s up to the viewer to think about what he has seen. And to come up with his own answers.” – Tom Vick      HDCAM, color, 13 min.

FENG SHUI   2012
 万箭穿心

Director: Wang Jing. Screenwriter: Wu Nan. Based on a novel by Fang Fang. Cinematographer: Liu Younian. Production Designer: Bai Hao. Editor: Feng Wen. Sound: Wang Changrui. Composer: Yang Sili. Cast: Yan Bingyan, Jiao Gang, Chen Gang.

With a studious, young son and a husband with a steady job, Li Baoli seems poised for upward mobility and a happy family life. And yet the Wuhan shopkeeper’s helper seems incapable of inner peace. Viewed with grave concern by family and friends, she harasses and belittles her husband until he is driven to extremes, whereupon life takes a drastic turn. Director Wang Jing renders this family story with shrewdness and compassion, locating the seeds of trouble in powerful crosscurrents of class and gender. Award-winning actor Yan Bingyan delivers a knockout performance as Li Baoli, a woman perpetually clouded with confusion as to why her life is in such disarray. – Shannon Kelley                HDCAM, color, Putonghua with English subtitles, 120 min.

PAINTED SKIN: THE RESURRECTION   2012
 画皮II

Director: Wuershan. Producer: Chen Kuo-fu, Pang Hong, Wang Zhonglei. Screenwriter: Ran Ping, Ran Jia’nan. Cinematographer: Arthur Wong. Production Designer: Hao Yi. Editor: Xiao Yang. Sound: Zhao Nan, Yang Jiang. Composer: Katsunori Ishida. Cast: Zhou Xun, Vicki Zhao, Chen Kun, Mini Yang, William Feng.

PAINTED SKIN smashed box-office records this summer to become the highest-grossing Mainland Chinese film of all time. This visually sumptuous take on one of the Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio by Qing Dynasty writer Pu Songling pairs humans and demons equally obsessed by something they cannot have… or cannot be. After she’s freed by the bird spirit Qu’er from 500 years of imprisonment under a frozen lake, fox spirit Xiaowei still needs to devour men’s hearts. She chances upon Princess Jing, who, disfigured by a bear, hides behind a mask and dares not confront her true love. If the two women exchange identities, however, Jing would be beautiful again, and Xiaowei would finally become a woman. – Bérénice Reynaud

Blu-ray, color, Putonghua with English subtitles, 131 min.

DOUBLE XPOSURE  2012 
 二次曝光

Director: Li Yu. Producer: Fang Li. Screenwriter: Li Yu, Fang Li. Cinematographer: Florian J.E. Zinke. Production Designer: Liu Weixin. Editor: Li Yu, Yuan Ze. Sound: Du Duu-chih. Composer: Howie B. Cast: Fan Bingbing, Feng Shaofeng, Huo Siyan, Joan Chen, Yao Anlian.

Since debuting with her first feature FISH AND ELEPHANT in 2001, director Li Yu has gone from rough-and-ready documentary realism with non-professional actors to working with some of the biggest Chinese stars. This stylish and briskly paced psychological thriller, her fifth and visually most ambitious feature yet, plumbs thriller staples of dualities and doubling in dizzying permutations – past indistinguishable from present, reality entangled with illusion, guilt and terror shadowing feelings of love – to a clincher of an ending. Joan Chen in a supporting role impresses, as does Chinese superstar Fan Bingbing, playing a young urbanite whose façade of certainties and comforts – boyfriend, apartment and car – violently splinters in a moment of jealousy. – Cheng-Sim Lim                                              35mm, color, Mandarin with English subtitles, 105 min.