|
|
|
|
|
|
BEIJING STORIES
Co-presented by
From March 9-21, the Vancouver International Film Centre presents Beijing Stories, a wide-ranging series reflecting on the recent history and culture of the host city of the 2008 Summer Olympics. Part of our city's Cultural Olympiad, the series includes a diverse selection of rarely screened films, many from one of the most fertile periods of Chinese mainland cinema, when the traditional filmmaking of the "Fifth Generation" gave way to the independent-minded "Sixth Generation." The Sixth Generation filmmakers bring a more individualistic, anti-romantic view to filmmaking, and pay more attention to contemporary urban life, especially those affected by disorientation, a theme ringing true in any large metropolis worldwide.
|
|
 |
THE LAST EMPEROR
March 9, 8:00 (7:30 opening reception); March 16, 6:30
China/UK/France/Italy 1987 // Director: Bernardo Bertolucci // 160 min // 35mm
|
|
The first feature film that the Chinese government allowed to shoot inside the Forbidden City, Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor won nine Oscars, sweeping every category in which it was nominated. The power and scope of the film was, and remains, undeniable—the life of Emperor Pu Yi, who took the throne at age three, in 1908, before witnessing decades of cultural and political upheaval, within and without the walls of the Forbidden City. Recreating Qing dynasty China with astonishing detail and unparalleled craftsmanship by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti, The Last Emperor is also an intimate character study of one man reconciling personal responsibility and his political legacy.
|
|
|
MY MEMORIES OF OLD BEIJING
March 10, 7:00; March 18, 9:15
China 1982 // Director: Yu Yigong // 96 min // 35mm
|
|
|
The sublime My Memories of Old Beijing is a prime example of the second phase of the Fourth Generation of post-Cultural Revolution Chinese filmmaking, when an initial spurt of aesthetic frenzy gave way to a classical view of filmmaking and history. The film looks back to the Beijing of the 1920's, as seen through they eyes of an 11-year-old girl Yingzi. The film is rigorously restricted to Yingzi's point of view, and tells of three distinct episodes that she recalls as an older woman who has moved to Taiwan after the revolution. Wu's perfect control of tone, camera movement, decor, and performances makes My Memories an undersung masterpiece of Chinese cinema. This is Wu Yigong's paean for an irretrievably lost world, for a China whose past is now only accessible via a heartsick, fragmented, and aestheticized memory.—Shelly Kraicer
|
|
 |
THE BLUE KITE
March 10, 9:00; March 17, 7:00
China 1993 // Director: Tian Zhuangzhuang // 138 min // 35mm
|
The Blue Kite describes the fate of one Beijing family, their neighbours and friends, as they experience the political movements and social upheavals of the 1950s and 1960s in China. Their story is told from the perspective of a little boy, Tietou, an only son who was born soon after the Communists took power. The film still offers the clearest picture of what it meant to live under the Communist government in its chaotic formative years. However, The Blue Kite is not only a film of daring political candour. In asking how ordinary people could hold their lives together when the state redefined all "personal" matters in "political" terms, it offers a deeply humane and acutely felt account of street-level passions and struggles.
|
|
|
THE DAYS
March 12, 7:00; March 17, 9:30
China 1993 // Director: Wang Xiaoshuai // 80 min // 35mm
|
|
|
The independently produced film that established Wang Xiaoshuai as a major Chinese voice, The Days might mark the onset of the Sixth Generation. A 1989 graduate from Beijing Film Academy, Wang's fresh perspectives and ideas presented a different look at society than previously existed in Chinese film. The Days centres around Xiaodong and Xiaochun, graduated from a Beijing art academy. Lovers since high school, they stay at the academy as tutors, living in a hostel until their income from their paintings allows them to escape. Their relationship is slowly dying away, as nothing seems to break its monotony. Prototypes of their generation, neither of them can admit that their love is coming to an end.
|
|
 |
BEIJING BICYCLE
March 12, 8:45; March 18, 7:00
France/Taiwan/China 2000 // Director: Wang Xiaoshuai // 113 min // 35mm
|
Ever since Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thief, the theft of a bike has implied a kind of filmmaking that is both humane and socially aware. Guei is an economic migrant, a not very smart country boy newly arrived in the big city, looking to earn a better living than he could back home. He finds work as a bike courier, with the promise that the vehicle becomes his when he completes enough jobs. The bike is stolen before that happens. It turns up in the hands of Jian, a schoolboy who bought it from a dealer because his father broke a promise to buy him a new one. Jian won't give it back to Guei, but Guei won't give up demanding it. Through this storyline Wang says a lot about Beijing now, about the class differences between kids from the city and the countryside. Official film Site: http://www.sonyclassics.com/beijing/index-withflash.html
|
|
|
SUNFLOWER
March 13, 7:00; March 20, 9:15
China 2006 // Director: Zhang Yang // 129 min // 35mm
Vancouver Premiere
|
|
|
Sunflower, the decade-spanning soap opera of Zhang Yang, concerns the troubled relationship between a man and his son, but the film's true interest comes not from the plot but rather the evocative visual portrait of an evolving Beijing. The central characters are Gengnian, an artist who has just been released from a six-year incarceration in a labour camp in 1976, and his young son Xiangyang. The child has led a carefree life, but his father wants the boy to pursue the artistic life that he himself was unable to follow. Xiangyang indeed becomes an artist, but personal issues continue to keep the father and son at odds, much to the frustration of Gengnian's loving mother (Joan Chen). Meanwhile, the physical landscape changes over the years, with the small, alley-strewn neighborhoods making way for massively scaled high-rises, and the legions of bicycles getting replaced by pollution causing automobiles.
|
|
 |
SPICY LOVE SOUP
March 13, 9:15; March 19, 7:00
China 1998 // Director: Zhang Yang // 109 min // 35mm |
|
A major commercial hit and runaway winner of several film awards in mainland China, Spicy Love Soup's five tales of love in contemporary Beijing mark a refreshingly accessible new direction for Chinese cinema...Visiting high schools, shopping malls and housing blocks, capturing teenagers, yuppies and retirees, the film changes tone and feel for each segment, yet follows a certain charming rhythm and style. One obsessed youth uses his recording skills to edit together an "I love you" from his crush, while another boy hopes to reconcile his bickering parents by putting a magic love potion into a homemade dinner. An overworked husband and wife rediscover love through electric toy cars... while a younger couple recount their own courtship in voiceover and flashbacks. Surprisingly warm and humanistic in its glimpse of life in modern Beijing...—San Francisco International Asian Film Festival
|
|
|
EAST PALACE, WEST PALACE
March 14, 7:00; March 16, 9:30
China 1996 // Director: Zhang Yuan // 94 min // 35mm
|
|
| Zhang Yuan's fifth feature changed Chinese cinema as a whole as decisively as Chen Kaige's Yellow Earth did in 1984. Not because it was another "illegal" independent, or the first "gay movie" from China, but because Zhang raised the stakes to a new level. His story about a downtrodden but unbowed gay kid, A-Lan, and the homophobic cop, Shi, who hauls him in for overnight interrogation starts from the assumption that sadomasochism is endemic in China—the state enjoys exercising its power, the individual citizen enjoys receiving—and takes off from there. "Zhang's fearless exploration of this taboo—fully matched by his two brilliant actors—makes East Palace, West Palace--the most Genet-esque movie ever."—Tony Rayns |
|
 |
THE WORLD
March 14, 8:45; March 20, 7:00
China 2005 // Director: Jia Zhangke // 133 min // 35mm |
|
China's headlong rush to modernize continues to throw up endless problems and contradictions, not least the awkward gap between the country's image of itself as a sophisticated "developed nation" and the widespread desire among Chinese people to travel abroad. Jia Zhangke addresses that gap head on in his first non-underground feature, set in and around a "World" theme park with scale replicas of the Eiffel Tower, the pyramids, Tower Bridge, the Taj Mahal...Tao (Zhao Tao) is a singer and dancer in the park's shows; her boyfriend Taisheng is a security guard. Around them are assorted go-getters, gangsters, social climbers and sleazeballs, all of them as emblematic of "New China" as the villagers who flock to Beijing to earn big money doing dangerous jobs in the construction industry...—Tony Rayns
|
|
|
HOW IS YOUR FISH TODAY?
March 15, 7:00; March 19, 9:15
China/UK 2006 // Director: Guo Xiaolu // 83 min // DigiBeta
Vancouver Premiere
|
|
|
Author and filmmaker Guo Xiaolu's novelistic debut feature ruminates on the increasing problem of urban isolationism. Blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality, How Is Your Fish Today? tells the engaging story of a scriptwriter, played by Rao Hui, the fictional co-writer of this film. One day Hui accepts a commission to write a screenplay about Lin Hao, a young man from Guangdong who has murdered his lover. Lin flees to Mohe, the most northerly village of China, and as Hui writes about his long journey, he travels there himself, becoming intrigued by this place that people believe is permanently bathed in the glow of the aurora borealis. Interacting with a number of colourful travellers, documentary morphs into drama as he finally arrives in Mohe and meets up with his fictional character.
Preceded by Beijing Holiday (Edgar Hönetschlager, 2007, 13 min). Madame Chiang Kai-shek as Audrey Hepburn.
North American Premiere.
|
|
 |
PEKING OPERA BLUES
March 15, 8:45
China 2005 // Director: Tsui Hark // 133 min // 35mm
|
|
As Quentin Tarantino put it, Peking Opera Blues is simply "One of the craziest movies ever made." Often referred to as "the perfect Hong Kong film," Tsui Hark's bizarre masterpiece might not have been shot in Beijing—Hong Kong soundstages do the filling in—but among its many minor miracles is its ability to capture the confusion and bedlam of life in China's capital in 1913 Beijing, after the fall of the Qing Dynasty. General Yuan Shi-kai has taken power, with the help of large loans from European governments. However, his right-hand's daughter (Brigitte Lin) is secretly working for the revolutionaries, and plots to steal the documents. What ensues is a combination of intrigue, action, screwball comedy, elaborately staged sequences of Peking Opera, and romance that, unbelievably, all holds together.
|
|
|
MORNING SUN
March 14, 7:00; March 16, 9:30
USA 2003 // Directors: Carma Hinton, Geremie R. Barmé, Richard Gordon // 117 min / DigiBeta
DIRECTOR IN ATTENDANCE
|
|
|
Nobody will ever fully understand what happened in China' s Cultural Revolution, the decade-long upheaval that plunged the world's most populous country into chaos and reduced a billion people's culture to one little red book. It was sparked by Mao Zedong as a means of toppling his supposed right-wing enemies in the communist party and reclaiming full power for himself. But the forces it unleashed were beyond anyone's expectations.
Carma Hinton makes a huge contribution to our understanding of what was going on in the minds of the teenage Red Guards, tracing the impulse to rebel back to pop-culture. Morning Sun features previously unseen documentary footage and original interviews, and is assembled with such intelligence and precision that they illuminate an entire period in modern Chinese history with a clarity never seen before.
Carma Hinton will attend, and speak on Chinese film and history after the screening of Morning Sun.
|
|
| VIFF Media Sponsors |
|
|
|
| MEDIA RESOURCES
Screeners available for: Beijing Bicycle, The Blue Kite & East Palace, West Palace
Photos at: http://www.vifc.org/fileshare/login.php
Username: media • Password: download
|
|
| VIFC TICKETS AND INFO |
|
Call the Starbucks Hotline 604.683.FILM (3456) for the latest info and listings. Tickets can be purchased in advance on-line at www.vifc.org or in person 30 minutes before showtime.
Double Bill Pricing!
The Vancity Theatre is offering double bills at a special price. At just $12 for two films ($10 for Students/Seniors and Bronze and above members), it's one of the cheapest (and still most comfy) seats in town!
Note: Double Bill pricing is not available for online sales. However, you can purchase your first ticket online at the regular price and get the double-bill price on the second ticket when you arrive at the box office. Double Bills are two consecutive films on the same day at the Vancity Theatre; rentals and Special Events are not included.
Adult tickets: $9.50 (Double Bill - $12)
Student/Senior $7.50 (Double Bill - $10)
Matinees $7.50
Bronze and above members receive a $2 discount on their tickets. (Double Bill - $10)
Silver and above members also receive a $2 discount for a guest ticket.
As a registered non-profit society, the VIFC screens films that have not always been seen by the BC Film Classification Board. Under BC law, any person wishing to see these unclassified films must belong to the VIFC Society and be 18 years or older. Valid for one year based on the date of purchase, the VIFC basic membership cost is $12, but includes the ticket price of your first film.
Please note that membership benefits and restrictions are valid for VIFC presentations only. They are not applicable to Vancity Theatre "Rental" presentations by other organizations.
For More Membership Information go to http://www.vifc.org/membership.html.
Vancity Theatre is located at 1181 Seymour St. (at Davie) |
 |
|
|
