CINEMA ON THE EDGE: THE BEST OF THE BEIJING INDEPENDENT FILM FESTIVAL 2012-2014 showcases the best recent Chinese independent cinema at multiple venues in New York City
Kickstarter campaign launches today in support of Cinema on the Edge
Cinema on the Edge: The Best of the Beijing Independent Film Festival 2012-2014
August 7 to September 13, 2015
Anthology Film Archives, The Asia Society, Maysles Cinema at the Maysles Documentary Center, Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA), and UnionDocs
JULY 7, 2015 – A film series unlike any other, “Cinema on the Edge: Best of the Beijing Independent Film Festival” celebrates the daring spirit and creative innovation of independent filmmakers and festival organizers in mainland China. The Beijing Independent Film Festival (BIFF) has been at the forefront of presenting these groundbreaking films in China, but for the last three years the festival has met substantial official resistance. Several of these films will now be brought to the United States for the first time, to be screened in some of the best museums and cinemas in New York City.
This film series features 18 programs of outstanding recent Chinese independent cinema, showcasing the work of such acclaimed filmmakers as Ai Weiwei, Li Luo, Hu Jie, Zou Xueping and Yang Mingming. The series is organized and curated by three of Chinese independent cinema’s most committed supporters: producer and distributor Karin Chien, critic and curator Shelly Kraicer, and filmmaker and anthropologist J.P. Sniadecki. Five of NYC’s most revered film and cultural institutions will present these works: Anthology Film Archives, Asia Society, Maysles Cinematheque, Museum of Chinese in America, and UnionDocs.
Today the program team launches a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for guest travel and program printing, enabling the series to foster important dialogue and discussion around these films. [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/504829220/cinema-on-the-edge-best-of-the-beijing-indie-film]
A video introducing the campaign can be viewed here: https://vimeo.com/131274599
Background:
China is one of the most exciting places for independent cinema in the world. Its break-neck pace of change has driven its independent filmmakers to invent radical new film languages. “The independent films coming out of China continue to be at the forefront of aesthetic cinematic innovation,” says Shelly Kraicer, a veteran critic and programmer of Chinese cinema. “Responding to the crazy, unpredictable changes in Chinese society and politics, these fearless directors are challenged to create sounds and images that stretch and enrich our imaginations.”
But independent films are not allowed to be shown in China. These films are made without approval of the censors and cannot be seen in regular movie theaters. Independent film festivals offer a singular space in China for unauthorized filmmakers to meet with their audiences, and to sustain a concrete, vibrant, alternative Chinese filmmaking community.
Since 2012, independent film festivals have faced government opposition and interference. All but one or two have ceased to exist. All this may be hard to imagine in North America, where you can find film festivals every day of the year showcasing thousands of independent films.
Since 2004, the Beijing Independent Film Festival (BIFF) has been the most important venue for unauthorized films in China. Set in the artist village of Songzhuang, BIFF was a rare space where freedom of expression flourished. But in 2014, BIFF was forced to cancel its festival following aggressive police action and physical intimidation.
Award-winning filmmaker J.P. Sniadecki (The Iron Ministry; People’s Park) considers BIFF “the nexus for the most exciting filmmaking in China.” He recalls, “My first time there, I felt I had found my tribe: filmmakers, cinephiles, artists, scholars, and students gathering together to dive into a week of screenings, discussions, dinners, parties, music performances and, inevitably, various encounters with the authorities. Yet BIFF remains a grassroots affair: everyone pitches in and interactions flow easily. Our series is trying to keep that ethos alive.”
The films in BIFF 2014 were never shown. But they must be seen. With the full cooperation of BIFF, Cinema on the Edge: the Best of the Beijing Independent Film Festival 2012-2015 presents a version of the BIFF festival in North America, screening some of its best and most representative films at five top venues in New York City from August 7 to September 13, 2015.
Films in the series include:
- Artist Ai Wei Wei’s bold investigative documentary Ping’an Xueqing
- The lushly photographed award-winning feature Emperor Visits the Hell by Li Luo
- The unique musical documentary People’s Park by J.P. Sniadecki and Libbie Cohn
- Bold works by a new generation of Chinese women filmmakers, including Yang Mingming (Female Directors) and Wen Hui (Listening to Third Grandmother’s Stories)
- Eye-opening documentaries revealing China’s hidden past and present: Spark, Stratum I: The Visitors, Satiated Village and I Want To Be a People’s Representative
- Programs showcasing contemporary China’s most outstanding works of experimental and animated filmmaking
“These films have a lot to show us, not only about China, but about storytelling freed from marketplace demands,” says Karin Chien, president and founder of dGenerate Films, a leading distributor of Chinese independent film. “These groundbreaking films deserve an audience, so we are honored to bring these films and filmmakers to New York City. Many kudos go to the bold programmers of Anthology Film Archives, Asia Society, Maysles Cinematheque, Museum of Chinese in America, and UnionDocs for embracing these films.”
Kickstarter Campaign Launches to Support Chinese Filmmakers
To maximize the social and cultural impact of the screenings, today the series program team is launching a Kickstarter campaign to allow filmmakers from China to meet audiences, and to publish a program booklet of original essays and filmmaker contributions for the series.
None of the funding will go towards paying the organizers, who are working as volunteers simply to carry out the series and allow independent filmmakers from China to meet their audience in ways they are denied at home. By truly bringing an audience to these filmmakers, the campaign can realize the full potential of the series to celebrate the brilliance and vibrancy of these films.
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Press contacts:
Kevin B. Lee: email: alsolikelife@gmail.com
Karin Chien: email: karinc@gmail.com; phone: 917-209-9602
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List of Films and Screening Venues in Cinema on the Edge: The Best of the Beijing Independent Film Festival 2012-2014
ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES (August 7-13)
32 Second Avenue (at 2nd St.), New York NY 10003, (212) 505-5181, anthologyfilmarchives.org.
Admission: $10 general; $8 students, seniors and children (12 & under); $6 AFA members.
EMPEROR VISITS THE HELL
唐皇游地府/ Tang huang you difu
Directed by Li Luo
2012, 67 min, digital. In Mandarin with English subtitles.
Winner of the 2012 Vancouver International Film Festival’s Dragons & Tigers Prize, this is a quietly astonishing tour de force that hinges on a lovely conceit: relocating to the present day the famous story of the Tang dynasty Emperor Taizong’s visit to the underworld. Shot in elegant, black-and-white long takes, the film spins a tale of a local river god, the Dragon King, who, feuding with a fortune teller, alters the weather without authorization and is condemned to death. When the Emperor fails to commute the god’s sentence, otherworldly retribution is swift: he is summoned to Hell. Li’s audacious use of multiple levels of storytelling and filmmaking craftily and joyously subverts every authority around.
–Fri, Aug 7 at 6:45 (introduced by critic and Cinema on the Edge programmer Shelly Kraicer) and Mon, Aug 10 at 9:00
AROUND THAT WINTER
田园将芜 / Tianyuan jiang wu
Directed by Wang Xiaozhen
2013, 96 min, digital. In Shandong dialect with English subtitles.
This curiously beautiful Daoist comedy, the opening film of BIFF2013, is a first film full of promise. Wang, painting with scrupulously composed, eloquent black-and-white images, tells of a young urbanite who brings his girlfriend to meet his farmer parents in the countryside of Shandong province. Although nothing precisely happens, the farm and surrounding woods are a stage for almost non-stop cursing, kissing, pissing, and fucking. It’s both earthy and somehow unworldly at the same time, featuring perfectly ribald kids, a voyeuristic brother with a urination fetish, and a deadpan comic couple. Wang has a terrific eye, and an utterly unique, low-key comic voice.
–Fri, Aug 7 at 8:45 (introduced by critic and Cinema on the Edge programmer Shelly Kraicer) and Tues, Aug 11 at 7:00.
YUMEN
玉门
Directed by Huang Xiang, Xu Ruotao, and JP Sniadecki
2013, 65 min, 16mm-to-digital. In Gansu dialect with English subtitles.
Two Chinese avant-garde artists and an American experimental filmmaker have collaborated on a stunningly beautiful Chinese experimental-fiction-documentary that dazzlingly combines ghost stories and “ruin porn” to form a celluloid psycho-collage. Shot on 16mm film, it’s set in the largely abandoned oil drilling town of Yumen – a place with an ancient, poetic history in China’s western Gansu province – and takes us through trashed, desolate urban spaces abandoned by Chinese socialism. But the filmmakers bring these places alive with their cast of ghosts, artists, vagabond dancers, and singers. It’s a film chock full of fascinating things: massive oil pumps and sun-blasted vistas; nude performance art and impromptu flamenco; fuzzy bunny rabbits and snarling canines; groovy 70s Taiwan pop and contemporary Korean girl bands; socialist nostalgia and postmodern pastiche.
–Sat, Aug 8 at 6:45 and Tues, Aug 11 at 9:00.
FOUR WAYS TO DIE IN MY HOMETOWN
我故乡的四种死亡方式 / Wo guxiangde si zhong siwang fangshi
Directed by Chai Chunya
2012, 90 min, digital. In Gansu dialect with English subtitles.
A four-part fiction film that’s as much poetry as it is narrative, first-time filmmaker Chai Chunya’s gorgeous work evokes four characters – a poet, a searcher, a puppet master, and a shaman – each with intense, mystical, deeply-rooted spiritual links to the land (the film was shot in and around Gansu province) mediated by the four elemental symbols: earth, water, fire, and wind. The film’s logic is associative, dreamlike; Chai builds up a series of striking tableaux, hypnotically suggestive and pictorially spectacular. Two young women lose a camel, then a father. A retired shadow puppeteer meets a gun-toting tree thief. Storytellers and shamans evoke a lost spiritual world that Chai films back to life in spectacular visual motifs whose meanings are intuited, like deeply felt communal memories.
–Sat, Aug 8 at 8:45 and Wed, Aug 12 at 7:00.
FEMALE DIRECTORS
女导演 / Nü daoyan
Directed by Yang Mingming
2012, 43 min, digital. In Mandarin with English subtitles.
Two brilliant young women, art school graduates with deliciously profane vocabularies and supreme confidence, talk sex, cinema, and power, as they wield their shared video camera like a scalpel. Yang Mingming’s superb debut is hilarious, moving, and subversive: is it documentary or fiction, or something new that violates both modes with gleeful abandon?
LISTENING TO THIRD GRANDMOTHER’S STORIES
听三奶奶讲过去的事情 / Ting sannainai jiang guoqu de shiqing
Directed by Wen Hui
2012, 75 min, digital, b&w/color. In Mandarin with English subtitles.
A language written by women confronts official ideology in dancer/choreographer/filmmaker Wen Hui’s film. She starts from stories her 83-year-old great-aunt tells her of being tortured as a “class enemy” during Mao’s China: the result is poetry, an experimental documentary that combines testimony and dance-like gesture, in black-and-white and color.
–Sun, Aug 9 at 5:30 and Wed, Aug 12 at 9:00.
PING’AN YUEQING
平安乐清
Directed by Ai Weiwei
2011, 142 min, digital. In Mandarin with English subtitles.
The documentaries produced by Ai Weiwei’s studio are closer to investigative journalism than to conceptual art. This film in particular starts from a specific case, the mysterious death by “road accident” of a village leader, Qian Yunhui from Zhejiang province, an activist who stood up for his fellow villagers when their land was confiscated without compensation by the local government. Qian’s death in 2010 quickly became a cause célèbre online in China. Ai and his team take up the challenge of determining what really happened, and dig deep into the land dispute lying behind what looks like the convenient murder of a rights advocate. The story unfolds like a thriller, but an ultra-realist one, with terrified villagers, government media spectacles, conflicting stories, and a mysteriously disappearing surveillance video.
–Sun, Aug 9 at 8:00 and Thurs, Aug 13 at 6:30.
EXPERIMENTAL SHORT FILM PROGRAM:
THE POET AND THE SINGER
金刚经 / Jingangjing
Directed by Bi Gan
2012, 26 min, digital
A visually splendid poem that provocatively but elegantly juxtaposes a poet, a singer, a river, a pair of murderers, and the Diamond Sutra.
DISMANTLING CLEMATIS #16
拆铁丝16＃/ Chai tiesi #16
Directed by Zhi Jun
2014, 30 min, digital
After a fire, scarred bonsai trees are meticulously freed of their supporting wires by medical professionals.
I’M NOT NOT NOT CHEN ZHOU
Directed by Chen Zhou
2013, 34 min, digital
The color yellow, as well as artist Chen Zhou and his alter ego(s), star in this droll, playfully conceptual tour de force.
Total running time: ca. 95 min.
–Mon, Aug 10 at 7:00 and Thurs, Aug 13 at 9:15.
MAYSLES CINEMA AT THE MAYSLES DOCUMENTARY CENTER (August 18-19)
343 Lenox Avenue / Malcolm X Boulevard, New York, NY 10027 (between 127th and 128th Streets), (212) 537-6843, http://maysles.org/mdc/
$10 General Admission (suggested)
CUT OUT THE EYES
挖眼睛/ Kong yanjing
Directed by Xu Tong
2014, 80 min, digital. In Chinese with English subtitles.
Er Housheng is a blind musician who travels Inner Mongolia with his lover/partner Liu Lanlan performing the saucy, sensationally bawdy form of musical duet comedy called er ren tai. Er’s female audiences are particularly enthralled with his combination of sensuality, Rabelaisian earthiness, and frankly socially subversive lyrics. Director Xu’s specialty is to train his piercingly observant documentary camera — intimate and complicit, rather than coldly objective — on unique Chinese characters like Er, using them to probe deep beneath the surface of China’s clash of rural traditions with its urbanizing contemporaneity. The result is, on one hand, an enthralling ethnographic showpiece; but it’s at its core a passionate and frenzied psycho-drama of lust, violence, and genius.
Tuesday, August 18 (time TBD)
UNTITLED BEHIND THE SCENES DOCUMENTARY ON THE BEIJING INDEPENDENT FILM FESTIVAL
Directed by Wang Wo
Wednesday, August 19 (time TBD, Q&A with director Wang Wo)
ASIA SOCIETY (August 20 and 24)
725 Park Avenue (at 70th Street), New York, NY 10021; 212-288-6400; https://tickets.asiasociety.org
Tickets: $12 General; $10 Seniors; $7 Students; Free for members and persons under 16. Admission is free on Fridays from 6:00 to 9:00 pm.
PEOPLE’S PARK
人民公园/ Renmin gongyuan
Directed by J.P. Sniadecki & Libbie Cohn
2012, 75 min, digital. In Sichuanese and Mandarin Chinese.
This is an experimental, structuralist documentary shot in People’s Park, Chengdu, Sichuan, in one single, bravura take lasting 75 minutes by two young American directors. Their camera captures the fullness of Chinese urban leisure life. As the camera pans side to side and glides relentlessly forward through the park, it catches hundreds of Chinese urbanites out for fun, relaxation, socializing, and a certain kind of freedom: eating, strolling, singing, practicing calligraphy, and watching each other. Watching becomes dancing, as the film slowly gathers an ecstatic, trance-like groove, building to a rapturous climax, as people, movement, music, image, and sound mix together: this is as close to pure pleasure as cinema gets.
Thursday, August 20 at 6:30pm (Q&A with J.P. Sniadecki)
THE DOSSIER
档案 / Dang’an
Directed by Zhu Rikun
2014, 129 min. In Chinese with English subtitles.
Tsering Woeser, the subject of Chinese filmmaker Zhu Rikun’s extraordinary documentary, is a Tibetan writer now based in Beijing. Through her writing and online voice, she has become one of the most eloquent voices on Tibet. Zhu Rikun’s sharply designed, formally innovative documentary is completely in Woeser’s own voice: Zhu alternates formally photographed scenes of Woeser reading excerpts from her secret government “dossier” (which she has somehow gained access to) with scenes of her speaking in her own soft but powerful, eloquent, passionate voice. Woeser’s moving account of her political awakening and current activism makes for a powerful document of a Tibetan woman finding her voice and insisting on her freedom to use it.
Monday, August 24 at 6:30pm (Q&A with Zhu Rikun)
MUSEUM OF CHINESE IN AMERICA (MoCA) (September 10)
215 Centre Street, New York, NY 10013, (212) 619-4785, www.mocanyc.org.
Admission: $10 General; $5 Seniors (65+ w/ID) and Students (w/school ID); free for MOCA Members and Children under 12 in groups less than 10.
ANIMATION SERIES
(108 min total running time)
PERFECT CONJUGAL BLISS
花好月圆
Zhong Su, 6’ 2014
A gorgeous 3D animation unscrolling through Chinese history, from grey urban collapse to ultra-coloured consumer dystopia.
HOW
在哪儿
Zhang Yipin, 5’ 2013
Traditional pen-and-ink drawings, animating a fuzzy-haired ruddy-cheeked girl’s imaginative world of terror and freedom.
THE HUNTER AND THE SKELETON
猎人与骷髅怪
Bai Bin 26’ (prize) 2012
A spectacular animated version, flash plus thangka, of an Eastern Tibetan folk tale: when a hunter meets a fearsome skeleton monster, are they friends, or enemies?
AN APPLE TREE
苹果树
Bai Bin, 11’ 2013
A Tibetan fable, in vivid colours, of an indomitable tree, assailed yet triumphant.
DOUBLE ACT
双簧
Ding Shiwei, 5’ 2013
Black-and-white industrial surreal: bodies float between familiar bureaucratic monuments above, and sunflowers beneath the earth.
MIRROR ROOM
镜室
Zhou Xiaohu 8’ 2012
Master clay animator Zhou fashions a bathroom of hallucinatory reflections, where Lacan meets fascism
THE NEW BOOK OF MOUNTAINS AND SEAS PART 2
新山海经
Qiu Anxiong 29’ (2007) 2012
Animating classic-styled ink and pen drawings, and filling them with quasi-nightmarish animal-machine forms, Qiu suggests a world under ecological collapse, where genetically tampered animal forms expire on earth and colonize the stars.
FAMILY REUNION
馬拉自在
Chen Li-hua 18’ 2012
A-mei, a Taiwanese aboriginal woman working in a factory, is called home for the Harvest Festival, but her boss refuses. In Chen’s imaginative tale, illustrated with cut out and line drawn animation, a daughter’s powerful dreaming saves all.
UNIONDOCS (September 11-13)
322 Union Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY 11211, www.uniondocs.org
THE RIVER OF LIFE
生命的河流 / Shengming de heliu
Directed by Yang Pingdao
2014, 101 min, digital. in Mandarin and Cantonese with English subtitles.
Yang Pingdao is one of China’s most exciting emerging filmmakers. His astonishingly creative camera eye brings unexpected beauty to his new feature length film. Using an innovative structure, based on the distinctive texture of family memory through space and time, Yang invents something poised delicately between fiction and documentary to capture crystallized moments in his family history, to recreate in cinematic form its emotional weight and variety, woven around the life and death of his grandmother, and the birth of his child. In order to combine extended family chronicle, implicit national history, and intimate soul-bearing autobiography, Yang employs gentle formal experimentation to invent new cinematic pathways. Opening film and prize winner of BIFF 2014.
September 11
SPARK
Xinghuo / 星火
Directed by Hu Jie
2014, 101 min, digital. In Mandarin with English subtitles.
Probably China’s most important unofficial historian-filmmaker, Hu Jie documents with his camera episodes that Chinese official history, for now, ignores. Spark was an underground magazine published in 1960 by four young intellectuals who wanted to expose the devastating famine caused by Mao’s Great Leap Forward, a horrendous period of national suffering that is still unmentioned in China’s history textbooks today. This is filmmaking as urgent historical investigation: with a shoestring budget Hu combines years of research, and a knack for getting people to talk without fear about the most taboo subjects in China’s recent past. His alternative oral history approach knits together courageous and frequently moving interviews with the magazine’s surviving editor, supporters, and readers, who were ready to sacrifice themselves to alert their countrymen to unprecedented disaster.
September 12
STRATUM 1: THE VISITORS
Diceng 1: laike
底层1:来客
Directed by Cong Feng
2013, 71 min, digital. In Mandarin with English subtitles.
Poet and filmmaker Cong Feng started to film a documentary about whole-scale urban demolition in the Beijing suburb of Tongzhou, but discovered that the extraordinary rapidity of change and the furious power of China’s history of destruction required something more experimental, more essay-like. From hallucinatory (are they perhaps utopian? despairing?) images of a bulldozer seeming to conjure up a building from its rubble, we follow two characters wandering through debris, telling stories of childhood trauma (featuring canine, not human loyalty during a horrific episode from the Cultural Revolution). Cong, like a visual paleo-geologist, unearths surreal, chilling images of otherworldly beauty emanating from the buried strata of this collapsing world, whose history threatens to be suffocated by layers of experience, of loss, of unremembered suffering.
September 12
I WANT TO BE A PEOPLE’S REPRESENTATIVE
我要当人民代表/ Wo yao dang renmin daibiao
Directed by Jia Zhitan
2014, 78 min, digital. In Hunanese with English subtitles.
Can a documentary camera be a tool for democracy in China? Jia Zhitan certainly thinks so, and wields his camera like an anti-bureaucratic weapon. Jia, a member of Caochangdi’s influential Villagers Documentary Project (organizer Wu Wenguang has been training local villagers to use digital video cameras to record their participation in ultra-local politics), wants to run to be a delegate to the National People’s Congress. He wins the first round, but is deemed unqualified by officials for reasons they keep to themselves. As the irrepressibly scrappy and stubborn Jia seeks explanations and redress from ever higher levels of authority, he records their interactions scenes that would play as entertaining satiric comedy if they weren’t so frustratingly real.
September 13
SATIATED VILLAGE
吃饱的村子/ Chibao de cunzi
Directed by Zou Xueping
2011, 88 min. In Shandong dialect with English subtitles.
Zou Xueping’s took her first documentary The Hungry Village (part of Caochangdi Workstation’s Folk Memory Project) — made up of first-person testimony about the effects of the Great Famine of 1960 (see Hu Jie’s Spark for another view) on her home village in Shandong — back home to show her subjects. They unanimously disapproved. Frustrated and full of doubt, Zou then made this second documentary discussing the villagers’ reactions to her first. This wonderful, searching, self-reflexive film questions the necessity and usefulness of truth-telling via cinema, when it brings pain and even shame upon neighbours and family. Zou’s 9-year-old niece emerges as its star, a girl who can balance competing exigencies of truth and love with a wisdom beyond her years.
September 13 (Q&A with Zou Xueping)
A reception and discussion on participatory filmmaking with Zou Xueping and filmmaker Li Xinmin will take place between the screenings on September 13.