Film

posts related to Chinese-language film

When True Love Came to China

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When True Love Came To China: A Toolkit E-book

This toolkit e-book, published via Screen Worlds, contains a slightly modified version of the syllabus of a course of the same title, a reflective essay and relevant resources. The course title was borrowed from the subtitle of Eileen Chang’s short story “Stale Mate: A Short Story Set in the Time When Love Came to China,” originally published in English in 1956. The course instructor Dr Panpan Yang is sharing the toolkit e-book in the hopes that it might support teachers who are equally passionate about rethinking love in all its complexity.

All Screen Worlds toolkit e-books can be downloaded here:

https://screenworlds.org/resources/#toolkits

Panpan Yang <py6@soas.ac.uk>

Pema Tseden retrospective

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For the complete retrospective of the films of Pema Tseden that I’ve curated for TIFF Cinematheque in Toronto, I’ve written a brief introductory essay on his work, and capsule descriptions of the 8 features and two shorts that we are showing in Toronto. This retrospective, if all goes well, will travel to several other venues in 2025: the Harvard Film Archive, the National Museum of Asian Art at the Smithsonian Institution, and at the VIFF Centre in Vancouver. I’m open to other suggestions – Shelly Kraicer <shellyk@mac.com> (Toronto, Canada)

Source: TIFF.net
Compassionate Light: Stories of Tibet by Pema Tseden
By Shelly Kraicer

Tibetan director Pema Tseden (1969–2023) became, during his all-too-short life, one of the most remarkable filmmakers of this century. He revolutionized the representation of Tibet and Tibetans and shared his visions of authentic Tibetan life with the entire film-going world by reimagining how narrative cinematic fiction could operate within so-called “Chinese minority cinema”. His alterative formal strategies and narrative framings were inspired by the contemporary lived experience of Tibetans, centering in his works their culture, language, religion, and ways of inhabiting and interpreting their world.

Pema Tseden died mid-career, at the age of 53. Born to farmer-herder parents in the Tibetan highlands of Qinghai Province, China, he went to rural schools and trained as a teacher. After studying Tibetan literature at Northwest Minorities University, he discovered a passion for making films. A scholarship enabled him to enrol in the prestigious Beijing Film Academy (BFA), where he studied screenwriting and film directing. He was the first Tibetan to graduate from the BFA in 2004. Since 1991, he has published short stories in both Chinese and Tibetan that use humour and a seemingly simple yet eloquent style to depict aspects of contemporary Tibetan life. Continue reading Pema Tseden retrospective →

Cutting micro-dramas down to size

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Source: China Media Project (1/9/25)
Cutting Micro-Dramas Down to Size
China’s government has signaled stricter rules this year for micro-dramas, a bite-size entertainment format with mega market potential.
By Alex Colville

Micro-dramas — TV series cut into short snippets of one to 15 minutes — are becoming a huge business worldwide. The global market for this new, bite-size format is said to be worth two billion dollars a year, with forecasts that this could double by the end of 2025. And that’s excluding China, which has emerged as a global leader in the production and consumption of weiduanju (微短剧).

Chinese micro-dramas: heavy on history and romance, light on Xi.

With the PRC’s micro-drama market growing at a blistering 250 percent annually, bringing in some RMB 37.4 billion (5.2 billion dollars) in 2023 according to state media reports, the authorities are also acting quickly to figure out how they can control this new entertainment format and ensure it serves their interests. On January 4, the National Radio and TV Administration (国家广播电视总局), or NRTA, publicized its plan to create hundreds of short videos on Xi Jinping’s political thought — for example, by promoting his vision of uniting classical Chinese culture with the latest technology and teaching netizens about the benefits of Xi’s version of the rule of law. Continue reading Cutting micro-dramas down to size →

Filmmaker sentenced for doc on White Paper protests

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Source: China Digital Times (1/8/25)
Filmmaker Sentenced to More Than Three Years in Prison for Documentary on White-Paper Protests
By 

In a closed-door trial on Monday, a judge sentenced 33-year-old Chen Pinlin to prison for three years and six months for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” Chen had produced a documentary film about the White Paper protests on their one-year anniversary in November 2023. The film’s Chinese title is “Urumqi Middle Road,” a reference to the street in Shanghai where protesters gathered to express their anger over the government’s restrictive zero-COVID policies and censorship. As Nectar Gan reported at CNN, Chen’s documentary was in part a critique of the government’s attempts to smear protesters as “foreign forces”:

In English it was called “Not the Foreign Force.” Chen previously said that he wanted to use the documentary to counter the government’s attempt to discredit the protests and blame “foreign forces” for orchestrating dissent – a tactic often deployed by China’s ruling Communist Party to explain away moments of genuine public anger.

Like many young people who took part in the protests, it was Chen’s first time voicing his political demands in China when he took to the streets of Shanghai on November 26, 2022, according to a post he published when releasing the documentary.

He said he produced the documentary to convey his personal experience and reflections.

“I hope to explore why, whenever internal conflicts arise in China, foreign forces are always made the scapegoat. The answer is clear to everyone: the more the government misleads, forgets, and censors, the more we must speak up, remind others, and remember,” he wrote. “Only by remembering the ugliness can we strive toward the light. I also hope that China will one day embrace its own light and future.” [Source] Continue reading Filmmaker sentenced for doc on White Paper protests →

How a feminist comedy came to rule China’s box office

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Source: NYT (12/11/24)
How a Feminist Comedy Came to Rule China’s Box Office
阅读简体中文版 | 閱讀繁體中文版
“Her Story” touches on sensitive topics in China, like censorship and gender inequality. But its humorous, nonconfrontational approach may have helped it pass censors.
By Vivian Wang, Reporting from Beijing

Three adults and a child wearing matching black sweaters with the words “Her Story” printed in pink, stand with a promotional placard at an event.

Shao Yihui, right, the director of “Her Story,” a feminist-themed comedy that has become a box office hit in China, along with members of the cast at a premiere in Beijing. Credit…Visual China Group, via Getty Images

The movie calls out stigmas against female sexuality and stereotypes about single mothers. It name-drops feminist scholars, features a woman recalling domestic violence and laments Chinese censorship.

This is not some indie film, streamed secretly by viewers circumventing China’s internet firewall. It is China’s biggest movie right now — and has even garnered praise from the ruling Communist Party’s mouthpiece.

The success of “Her Story” [好东西], a comedy that topped China’s box office for the last three weeks, is in some ways unexpected, at a time when the government has cracked down on feminist activism, encouraged women to embrace marriage and childbearing and severely limited independent speech.

The film’s reception reflects the unpredictable nature of censorship in the country, as well as the growing appetite for female-centered stories. Discussion of women’s issues is generally allowed so long as it does not morph into calls for rights. “Her Story,” which some have called China’s answer to “Barbie,” cushions many of its social critiques with jokes.

The director of “Her Story,” Shao Yihui, has emphasized at public appearances that she is not interested in provoking “gender antagonism,” an accusation that official media has sometimes lobbed against feminists. Continue reading How a feminist comedy came to rule China’s box office →

Anime’s knowledge cultures

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Source: Association for Chinese Animation Studies (11/14/24)
Anime’s Knowledge Cultures: From Astro Boy to China’s Zhai Generation
By Jinying Li

In the first two decades of the 21st century, we witnessed a widespread cultural movement of geekdom that went global and mainstream simultaneously. While American media were announcing “it’s hip to be square” and “geek is chic,” their East Asian counterparts were embracing otaku and zhai as trendy labels to identify a new generation of pop culture heroes who thrived on the transmedia arenas of the digital era. In 2008, “zhai” was chosen as the Chinese “buzz word of the year” to celebrate the cultural prominence of China’s zhai generation which, according to the Chinese news media, not only defined the cultural meanings of the “Internet pop” (网络流行) but also characterized “a state of living and being” (生存状态) in the 21st century.[1] During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, zhai as “a state of living and being” was further embraced in China as a crucial cultural strategy to survive the pandemic quarantines and lockdowns, displacing the fear of an infectious disease with the obsession with spreadable media.[2]

The worldwide rise of geek and zhai culture points to the emergence and significance of a new demographic of transnational knowledge workers in a global economy dominated by information networks. This knowledge class functions as a crucial yet often overlooked nexus in the ongoing transformations of information society that we are still trying to understand. These so-called geeks, otaku, and zhai are the active agents, as both consumers and producers, connecting techno-economic developments to socio-cultural changes. Therefore, critically examining this social group and its cultural values, I believe, is the key to understanding our current information society at large.

My work is about the cultural values of geeks, otaku and zhai: how they emerged, why they matter, and what they mean. Through the lens of anime and its transnational fandom, I explore the meanings and logics of “geekdom” as one of the most significant sociocultural groups of our time.  The key questions are why anime appeals to this rapidly expanding social group, and how anime constitutes a mediation environment that effectively translates between knowledge work and what Tiziana Terranova calls “knowledgeable consumption of culture.”[3] I study geek and zhai as informational knowledge culture in postindustrial society and investigates how anime constitutes a powerful media environment that cultivate and sustain this knolwge culture. Studying anime as the media environment of global geekdom, I want to shift the center of knowledge culture from the computer boys in Silicon Valley to the anime fandom in East Asia, problematizing the supposed American whiteness in the popular imagination of the knowledge class. This shift from the techno-culture of computing to the transmedia system of anime also calls for a theoretical rethinking of how knowledge culture is mediated. I argue that the culturalization of informational knowledge work needs a media form, which is animation rather than computation. Continue reading Anime’s knowledge cultures →

Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to annnounce publication of Chuanhui Meng’s review of Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture: Envisioning the Nation, by Sheldon H. Lu. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/chuanhui-meng/. My thanks to Shaoling Ma, our film/media studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication. This is Prof. Ma’s first review since she replaced Jason McGrath in that position.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Contemporary Chinese Cinema and
Visual Culture: Envisioning the Nation

By Sheldon H. Lu

Reviewed by Chuanhui Meng

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright December, 2024)

Sheldon H. Lu, Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture: Envisioning the Nation London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Xi + 256 pp. ISBN 978-1350234185 (hardcover)

Zhang Yimou’s 张艺谋 2016 blockbuster production The Great Wall (长城) presents a fantastical narrative where foreign mercenaries join forces with Chinese defenders to protect the Great Wall, and by extension the Chinese nation, from monstrous and foreign invasions. The film’s story and production embody two seemingly contradictory aspects. On the one hand, the diegetic narrative aims to consolidate the “border” of the Chinese nation by fortifying the Great Wall against external threats. On the other hand, the diegetic incorporation of friendly foreign forces and the extra-diegetic, transnational collaborations between U.S.-China-and-Japanese film production companies in the making of the film cross the proverbial “Great Wall” in today’s global film industry. These ongoing tensions—among nationalism, transnationalism, and globalization; among the “walling” and “de-walling” of culture and national borders—capture a central concern of Sheldon H. Lu’s most recent book Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture. In theorizing nation-building in contemporary China within the context of transnationalism and globalization, Lu examines this distinguished phenomenon of “walling,” defining it not primarily as “setting up physical barriers,” but more as “the selective, restrictive flow of information, ideas, and ideology” in both physical and virtual spaces (12). Continue reading Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture review →

Golden Horse Film Fest

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Source: China Digital Times (11/28/24)
Online Censorship About Lou Ye, Geng Jun Films Winning Awards at 61st Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival
By 

A banner year for Chinese films and filmmakers at the 61st Taipei Golden Horse Awards has attracted much attention on Chinese social media, despite strict ongoing censorship of any topic connected to the awards. This year’s Golden Horse Award winners, announced on November 23, include Best Narrative Feature and Best Director for Lou Ye’s “An Unfinished Film,” a work of docu-fiction about a film crew caught up in the COVID pandemic lockdown of Wuhan; Best Leading Actor, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, and the Audience Choice Award for “Bel Ami,” Geng Jun’s LGBTQ+-themed black comedy; and Best Adapted Screenplay for Wang Xiaoshuai’s “Above the Dust,” a coming-of-age film that casts a critical eye on events in PRC history (including 1950s land reform, the Great Leap Forward, and the massive famine that ensued).

Chinese actors and films have technically been banned from participating in the Golden Horse Awards since 2019, after a 2018 award-ceremony speech in which Taiwanese director Fu Yue expressed her wish for Taiwan to be treated as “an independent entity.” Despite this restriction, films from China (including some co-produced films) made up over 200 of this year’s record-high 718 Golden Horse Film Festival submissions from Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, and Malaysia.

A recent CDT Chinese post notes that the film review site Douban has scrubbed any mention of the Golden Horse Awards or award winners from the site, and Weibo search results for “Golden Horse Awards” (金马奖, Jīn Mǎ Jiǎng) are restricted to content posted by certified “blue V” accounts. Despite this, some articles about the awards that omitted or altered director names and film titles are still circulating online. For example, an article from WeChat account “Super-Sauce Movie Paradise” (超酱的电影天堂, Chāo Jiàng de Diànyǐng Tiāntáng) managed to escape censorship by employing some extensive linguistic sleight-of-hand: Continue reading Golden Horse Film Fest →

How Trump divides Chinese who aspire to democracy

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Source: NYT (11/11/24)
How Trump Divides Chinese Who Aspire to Democracy
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A new HBO documentary about opposition to autocrats says a lot about the complex politics the president-elect inspires for people fleeing countries.
By Li Yuan

Rosa María Payá and Nanfu Wang sitting side by side in a dark theater looking straight ahead, each with one hand resting on her mouth.

Rosa María Payá, left, and Nanfu Wang met at a film festival in 2016 and found they were kindred spirits. Ms. Wang’s new film, “Night Is Not Eternal,” portrays Ms. Payá, a Cuban activist who fights for democracy in her home country. Credit…HBO

The long and loud campaign of Donald J. Trump, and now his re-election as president, have prompted deep divisions among many Chinese who advocate for democracy.

Wang Lixiong, a Beijing-based author, has been imprisoned and surveilled for his critical writings about China. The day before the election, he posted on X that Mr. Trump’s political alliance with the tech entrepreneur Elon Musk was worrying: “A Trump presidency combined with Musk’s influence may become a singularity that backfires on democracy.” People responded by condemning him, leaving hateful comments, including ones that wished him death.

Luo Yufeng, an online influencer who moved to New York more than a decade ago and posts about the possibilities that freedom brings, has also received abhorrent comments on her X account. She had been posting about her support for Mr. Trump, saying she opposed President Biden’s immigration policies.

On social media and around dinner tables, businesspeople, intellectuals and scholars I know who have fought side by side for democracy in China since the 1980s have been fighting one another over Mr. Trump. I have adopted a policy for gatherings with friends at my dining table in New York: No talk of American politics when we are eating.

I have been thinking a lot about China, democracy and Mr. Trump recently because of “Night Is Not Eternal,” a documentary by Nanfu Wang, a Chinese-born filmmaker I first met over a year ago. The film, which will debut on HBO on Nov. 19, is a moving portrayal of a Cuban activist, Rosa María Payá, who fights for democracy in her home country. Continue reading How Trump divides Chinese who aspire to democracy →

Wang Bing’s Youth (Homecoming)

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Source: NYT (11/8/24)
A Chinese Homecoming Story That’s Universal
In the finale of Wang Bing’s nonfiction trilogy, garment-factory workers return to their families and wrestle with the questions all young people do.
By Alissa Wilkinson

In an outdoor scene, a joyful bride rides a groom's back amid a crowd of people bundled up against the cold.

In “Youth (Homecoming),” workers get married on their winter break. Credit…Icarus Films

What happens when young people with jobs in the big city return to the homes they left behind? It’s a question that powers a whole bevy of films, including Hallmark’s holiday offerings. But it’s perhaps less expected in a 152-minute Chinese documentary, the final installment in a trilogy stretching nearly 10 hours.

“Youth (Homecoming)” (in theaters), directed by the eminent filmmaker Wang Bing, is shorter by at least an hour than its predecessors, “Youth (Spring)” and “Youth (Hard Times).” Wang shot the films over about five years, spending time with the myriad young people, mostly in their late teens and 20s, who travel to the city of Zhili to work in garment factories. No one subject is the main protagonist in the “Youth” trilogy; instead, we see a collage of faces and personalities, all of whom toil very long hours for very little pay.

“Spring” is the most cheerful of the films, showing the laborers as they arrive and get busy at their machines, often singing to pop music and talking about love. “Hard Times,” which covers the winter months, shows them struggling to get paid by bosses who skip town or try to drive down wages. The workers begin to organize, but it’s a battle with little chance of victory.

In “Homecoming,” as the title suggests, many young people return to their remote villages for the New Year’s break when the factories slow down. We travel with them on packed, long-haul trains and traverse muddy mountain paths. Now families enter the picture, identified in the film only by their relationships to the laborers. Two of the subjects, Shi Wei and Fang Lingping, marry their romantic partners during this downtime. Others converse with loved ones about their plans or other subjects. Eventually the young people go back to Zhili, only to discover that employment is not always easy to come by. Continue reading Wang Bing’s Youth (Homecoming) →

Cave of the Silken Web

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The Chinese Film Classics Project is pleased to announce the publication of Christopher Rea’s translation of “Cave of the Silken Web” 盤絲洞 (Dan Duyu, dir., 1927), with a new musical score by Donald Sosin.

A live screening of the film will be held at the UBC Asian Centre at 12noon on Halloween (Oct. 31), followed by a discussion with film scholars Mila Zuo and Christopher Rea:

https://asia.ubc.ca/events/event/special-halloween-screening-cave-of-the-silken-web-1927/

This newly-translated restored copy was shared with the Chinese Film Classics Project by the National Library of Norway, and features subtitles in both Chinese (translated by Christopher Rea) and Norwegian (translated by Bjørn Giertsen), and is available on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IyxoaYyEc0

ABOUT THE FILM

Spiders, spiders—everywhere! Cave of the Silken Web is adapted from an episode in the Ming dynasty novel Journey to the West, in which Tripitaka is kidnapped by a cave of spider-women. Will the good monk succumb to these magical vixens’ temptations of the flesh? Will Pigsy, Sandy, and the Monkey King succeed in rescuing him before he is forced to marry the Spider Queen? What does the Fire Slave have cooking for the unwilling guest? How do spiders, centipedes, and turtle-spirits celebrate a wedding? And who will ultimately meet their end in the Cave of the Silken Web? Continue reading Cave of the Silken Web →

Fan Bingbing returns to film

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Source: NYT (10/17/24))
Fan Bingbing, Once China’s Top Actress, Returns to Film Years After Tax Scandal
Fan was a megastar until 2018, when she was fined tens of millions of dollars over unpaid taxes and her career tanked. “Green Night” is her first film since the scandal.
By Jin Yu Young and Claire Fu

A woman in a red dress stands behind a glass window.

Fan Bingbing in Beijing in 2019. The year before, she was at the peak of her career. Credit…Yan Cong for The New York Times

Fan Bingbing will return to the screen on Friday with the online release of “Green Night,” six years after one of the biggest names in Chinese cinema spectacularly fell from grace over a tax scandal.

Fan was at the peak of her career in 2018, with a long list of blockbusters and lucrative deals with luxury brands, when she disappeared for months. She re-emerged in October that year with an apology. The authorities in China fined her the equivalent of almost $70 million in unpaid taxes and penalties.

The scandal halted Fan’s film career in China, the biggest movie market outside the United States. She avoided criminal charges, however, and remained in the public eye as she expanded a beauty product business, Fan Beauty.

In her return to film, Fan is the lead in “Green Night,” a film by Han Shuai, a Chinese director, and set in South Korea. It will be available to stream in the United States on Friday after making its debut on the festival circuit in Berlin last year.

In “Green Night,” Fan, now 43, plays a Chinese woman who partners with a young South Korean woman to break free from oppression. The film is about “women helping women and women redeeming women,” she said last year at the Busan International Film Festival in South Korea. “Some of my experiences and some stories in recent years are integrated into the character I present in the movie.” Continue reading Fan Bingbing returns to film →

Asian Cinema Studies Society Conference 2025–cfp

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14th Asian Cinema Studies Society Conference 2025
Call for Papers: What is Asian Cinema?
University of Hong Kong (May 22-24, 2025)

We invite paper and panel proposals to present at the 14th Asian Cinema Studies Society conference to be held at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) during May 22-24, 2025. As a non-profit scholarly organization, the Asian Cinema Studies Society (ACSS) actively fosters international research in Asian film and media and publishes the flagship peer-reviewed journal Asian Cinema (Intellect). With the support of the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), the Master of Arts in Literary and Cultural Studies Programme (MALCS), and the Department of Comparative Literature of HKU, ACSS brings its first face-to-face meeting since the global pandemic back to Hong Kong, a major Asian metropolis, transport hub, filmmaking capital, and connective node of regional, inter-Asian, and transpacific cultural globalization.

ACSS 2025 invites participants to present papers on any aspect of Asian film and media, though we encourage proposals that address the question: “What is Asian cinema?” Although often understood as cinematic practices, institutions, cultural formations, and critical discourses in or from Asia, the term “Asian cinema” belies its contradictions and complexities as an idea. Historically, scholars challenged such simplistic and binaristic understandings by investigating: how “Asia,” “Asian,” and “cinema” were defined under colonialism and postcolonialism; the way transnational productions trespass national and regional boundaries; the complex relations between home/ancestry/ethnicity/linguistic sharedness and diaspora; as well as how cinema itself often redefines and rewrites the meanings of “Asia” and “Asian.” Recently, theorists posit that the term “Asian cinema” implicitly constructs “cinema” and “media” as universal concepts modified by a particular concept: “Asian,” a construction that perpetuates the orientalist knowledge formation of Asia as an exception to the norm. Continue reading Asian Cinema Studies Society Conference 2025–cfp →

The Little Angel

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The Chinese Film Classics Project is delighted to announce the publication of Kristen Tam’s translation of the film The Little Angel 小天使 (Wu Yonggang 吳永剛, dir., 1935).

CFC website: https://chinesefilmclassics.org/the-little-angel-1935/

My thanks to Kristen Tam for sharing her translation with the Chinese Film Classics Project and to Tamar Hanstke for creating the subtitles.
– Christopher Rea

About the Film

The Little Angel, the second directorial effort of Wu Yonggang, echoes many of the themes found in Wu’s silent classic Goddess 神女 (1934). A poor but loving family devotes all of its resources to the education of an intelligent and sensitive young boy, supporting him through various moral challenges he encounters in the neighborhood and at school. While father is fighting at the front and doing disaster relief work, three generations—mom, big sister, and grandpa—pitch in to help the boy succeed. The angelic Huang Min, inspired by “A Lesson in Love” he learned at school, reciprocates by secretly helping the family back…but takes doing good deeds too far. When, after saving another child’s life, Min’s own life is threatened, who will make the sacrifice to save him? Continue reading The Little Angel →

11th Reel China 2024

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11th Reel China Biennial at NYU
Nov. 1 – 3 2024, Friday – Sunday
5:00 PM — 10:00 PM

Image credit: Bad Women of China (HE Xiaopei, 2021)

NYU provides reasonable accommodations to people with disabilities. Please submit your request for accommodations for events and services at least two weeks before the date of your accommodation need. Although we can’t guarantee accommodation requests received less than two weeks before the event, you should still contact us and we will do our best to meet your accommodation needs.

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11th Reel China Biennial at NYU
Nov. 1-3, 2024

This edition of Reel China once more brings back to NYC innovative and bold works by veteran filmmakers in the PRC along with diaspora and emerging Sinophone voices. In this year’s edition, an acclaimed female first-person-plural documentary reflects on generation gaps and transnational kinship against the backdrop of modern China’s history. Among other selections, experimental animations show the processing of the Pandemic experience. The short and long films, fiction and non-fiction in various forms, bear sharp and delicate witness to the momentous changes in China and the world in the 21st century. Continue reading 11th Reel China 2024 →