Source: The China Project (8/26/22)
Gaey Wa’r (Streetwise): A Chinese arthouse film from Cannes
Five years in the making, Manchu director Nà Jiāzuǒ’s 那嘉佐 feature debut embraces style over substance.
By Amarsanaa Battulga

Still from Gaey Wa’r

Gaey Wa’r — known also by its English title Streetwise — is a gritty drama of youthful angst. Premiered at last year’s Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard section, which focuses on the discovery of original films with high aesthetic quality, the low-key crime drama is an example of an “arthouse genre” film whose artistry prevails over its narrative.

The story follows Dongzi (李九霄 Lǐ Jiǔxiāo), a 21-year-old who works as a henchman for a local debt collector, Xijun (余皑磊 Yú Áilěi), to pay for the medical treatment of his father (姚橹 Yáo Lǔ), who the film implies used to be a local boss. Off work, Dongzi finds comfort in the presence of Jiu’er (黄米依 Huáng Mǐyī), the owner of a local tattoo parlor, but their relationship is in limbo because she’s also the former spouse of Mr. Four (沙宝亮 Shā Bǎoliàng), a criminal boss who remains dangerously obsessed with her. To further complicate matters, Xijun is skimming off Mr. Four while Dongzi and Jiu’er plan an escape from their little town. Alas, you know what they say about the best-laid plans. Continue reading Gaey Wa’r review →

Source: Mekong Review 28 (August 2022)
Hollywood Folly
By Anne Stevenson-Yang
Review of YING ZHU, Hollywood in China: Behind the Scenes of the World’s Largest Movie Market (The New Press: 2022)

Matt Damon in The Great Wall. Photo: Universal

Movie stars and directors feel like second-degree personal friends, the kind you see at reunions and on Facebook. We keep up on their personal lives and wonder whether the current project is a reaction to a recent divorce or a new love interest. No one wonders those things about captains of industry or politicians, because the work those people do has a much more tenuous tie to their psychology. Film is very personal.

It’s that personal connection that makes a book like Hollywood in China satisfying. While it provides analysis of the economic development of China’s film industry, it also offers some of the dishy pleasure we look for from movie magazines, like how Jiang Qing (Mao’s wife) held private showings of Hollywood movies for her friends, that Mao himself liked Greta Garbo and Jiang Zemin, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, watched Titanic three times. Continue reading Hollywood in China review →

Source: SupChina (8/5/22)
Palme d’Or-winning short film ‘All the Crows in the World’
“All the Crows in the World” impressed judges at Cannes last summer and won the top prize in the short film category. This 15-minute film is currently available for streaming.
By Catherine Zauhar

Still from All the Crows in the World

All the Crows in the World (天下乌鸦 tiānxià wūyā), Táng Yì’s 唐艺 2021 Palm d’Or Winner, condenses a century’s worth of China’s misogyny into a short film with humor and ease. We follow our protagonist, the precocious and wry high schooler Shengnan (played by the equally comic and subtle Chén Xuānyǔ 陈宣宇), through a single night as she enters a surreal world of sexist men and their many toxic delights.

Continue reading All the Crows in the World →

Source: LitHub (7/21/22)
How Madame Mao Remade Hollywood For Chinese Audiences
Ying Zhu on Jiang Qing’s Influence On Mid-Century Chinese Film
By Ying Zhu

VIA THE NEW PRESS

After decades of successful screening in China, Hollywood films vanished from the Chinese screen during the Mao era. Yet, hidden from the public eye, many Western films, including classic Hollywood films, were available to the party rank and file as well as to key film professionals. These became known as “internal reference films.”

The phenomenon of clandestine viewing of Hollywood films lasted until the end of the Mao era; watching poisonous films was a common ritual among the privileged few with access. The studio responsible for the translation of many such internal reference films was the Shanghai Dubbing Studio.

Despite the ban on Hollywood films early on, and on Soviet films later, foreign films became available through restrictive internal screening to film practitioners for professional needs and to an exclusive group of ranking party officials led by Mao Zedong’s fourth wife, Jiang Qing. A second-rate movie actress herself during the Republican era, Jiang Qing was a closeted Hollywood devotee with a trove of Hollywood films, mostly dubbed but some in original versions, at her private disposal, even when she was attacking Hollywood in public. Continue reading How Madame Mao remade Hollywood for Chinese audiences →

I interviewed the brilliant Chinese independent director and artist Qiu Jiongjiong in the new issue of Cinema Scope Magazine. Qiu’s A NEW OLD PLAY is the most exciting new Chinese language film I’ve seen in years. In the interview, we discuss Qiu’s seven short and long films, his background growing up in a Sichuan theatre milieu, and his film style and structure. – Shelly Kraicer

Source: Cinema Scope Magazine (nd)
Send in the Clowns: Qiu Jiongjiong on “A New Old Play”
By Shelly Kraicer

Still from A New Old Play

The brightest light in the Chinese independent cinema world at this moment is Beijing-based filmmaker and artist Qiu Jiongjiong. In an atmosphere in China of increasing surveillance and control of non-official, unauthorized artistic activity in China, Qiu, now 44, stands out as an artist with a powerful, complex, engaging vision who has found a way to continue to work without compromise. His new film, A New Old Play, premiered at the 2021 Locarno Film Festival and is now having a series of screenings in North America, after following its pickup by Icarus Films via their dGenerate Films Collection.

Qiu grew up steeped in the backstage atmosphere of traditional Chinese theatre, and most of his works remain infused with the sounds and sights he absorbed there. He first became famous in Chinaachieved domestic fame among art collectors, who buy up, at rather high prices, his semi-fantastical, humorous (and perhaps faintly menacing) portraits of bald, bulbous-headed men. He aAcquireding a mini -DV camera in 2006, and he started filming his family and friends, who were prominent in the traditional Sichuan opera world of Chengdu and Leshan. Portraiture is one of the constants in Qiu’s art, both on canvas and video: he makes playfully experimental family portraits of his aunts, uncles, and grandparents, and has also made a series of three portraits of extraordinary individuals—a retired cop, a transsexual performer, and a persecuted elder “rightist.” Continue reading Interview with Qiu Jiongjiong →