Curator’s Notes

FIPRESCI Prize, and Caligari Film Prize, Berlinale Co-Winner, Golden DV Award, Hong Kong International Film Festival Winner, Dragons and Tigers Competition, Vancouver International Film Festival

“With only 23 static, unhurried shots, each scene becomes a rich tableau for intimate glimpses into this nuclear family’s life. Some of the best scenes are at the dinner table, when the mother gossips and the father instills his old-fashioned wisdom upon his daughter... Despite the constant quarrels, the film communicates an inescapable tenderness -- it’s the director affectionate ode to her parents”
--Hong Kong International Film Festival

“The father, Liu Zaiping makes and sells leather bags but is slowly going bankrupt; he has frequent arguments with his wife Jia Huifen and his daughter, Liu Jiayin… All three of them are nervous and sleep badly. No solution to the problems is in sight. Liu sees a fundamental irony: her father works with ox-hides and is himself so thick-skinned that he’s impervious to ideas that could save his life and family... The tension between "reality" and artifice pushes the film into darker and more troubling psychological areas than cinéma-vérité has ever reached: Liu takes the film language of "realism" into an entirely new dimension.”
--Tony Rayns, Vancouver International Film Festival

Production Notes

“You can hear the sound of the train in Oxhide, because the film was shot in a small apartment near the railway. This is my home... The actors who acted as the parents and their child are my parents and I in real life. The movie is about our lives, our home and our difficult situation. I chose 23 scenes from our daily life, and directed this movie. For my parents, the whole shooting was akin to uncovering a scar. Through the lens I saw our life -- even though I couldn’t describe it. My home is 50 square meters. But the screen ratio is 1:2:35. It is my family the way I see it: narrow, depressive, dim and warm. The film took me 40 days to shoot. During these days, once I was back from school, my mom back from the factory and my dad back from the shop, we started to shoot. A major part of the shooting took place at night. The story continues in real life.” -- Liu Jiayin

Liu Jiayin was born in Beijing in 1981. She entered the Beijing Film Academy in 1999, where she majored in screenwriting. She is now getting her Master’s Degree. Oxhide is her first film.

This program is presented in collaboration with the Film and Video Center, University of California, Irvine. http://www.humanities.uci.edu/fvc/