Wed Oct 10 | 8 pm
Tsai Ming-liang: The Wayward Cloud (Tian Bian Yi Duo Yun)
Taiwan/France, 2005, 112 min., 35mm
Los Angeles premiere
“In drought-stricken Taipei, the feverish, sensual and emotional journey of a two-bit porn actor (Lee Kang-sheng, Tsai’s muse) and a young woman (Chen Shiang-chyi) toward an unexpected amour fou unfolds against a droll and surreal background. This is ”the most audacious film to date from visionary director Tsai Ming-liang… As in The Hole (1998), he adds campy musical numbers into the narrative that play against the raw sex scenes, creating a bizarre, existential chaos… His stationary camera perfectly illustrates the isolation and exploitation the characters are trapped in. They are indeed wayward clouds, drifting through life without purpose, in a world without water. And prepare yourself for the film's unbelievable final scene, which manages to be both weirdly erotic and profoundly disturbing.” (San Francisco International Film Festival).

Thu Oct 11 | 8 pm
Wu Wenguang: Fuck Cinema
China, 2006, 170 min., MiniDV
International premiere
It took real courage to famous documentarist Wu Wenguang to release this yet moving exploration of the cruel unbalance created by the booming film industry between the people in power and the perennial outsiders: a homeless peasant who tries to peddle his script about Beijing; young girls from the provinces auditioning for the part of a hooker; a seller of illegal DVDs chased by the police.
– Don’t you see Wu Wenguang is manipulating you, making you running all around town?
– It does not matter in whose hands I am now, I’m still a puppet.
– Your script is about crowd scene extras?
– Yes, it’s a true story about my life.
– So now you’re working as an extra for Wu Wenguang.
– Much better, I am the leading actor…

Preceded by
Jia Zhangke: Ten Years
China, 2007, 8 min., 35mm
Print courtesy of Cyberport and Digital Media Centre
Ten years after the retrocession of Hong Kong to China – a train ride from Taiyuan – a document or a staged metaphor?

Fri Oct 12 | 8 pm
Queer Night!
Zhang Hanzi: Tang Tang
China, 2004, 92 min., Betacam SP
Los Angeles premiere
An alluring mixture of documentary and fiction about the fabulous nights (sequins, wigs, feathers, high heels, make-up, glittery camp outfits bought in discount stores), grey mornings and cross-gender love affairs (here a man, there a lesbian) of a drag queen—sorry, “reversed role actor”— in Beijing. A certain kernel of truth is forever missed – more tease than strip here, and the film sometimes takes the spectator on a ride of cheap thrills – but there are moments (staged or not) in which the real asserts itself with a quiet violence: an exchange of gaze between two tired show-girls in a dingy dressing room, two male lovers buying underwear together, a ride in a taxi, a domestic quarrel in an unkempt apartment.

Followed by:
Cui Zi’en: Withered in a Blooming Season (Shaonian Hua Cao Huang)
China, 2005, 90 min. Betacam SP
U.S. premiere
Looking at post-socialist dysfunctional families, Cui, godfather of the queer underground, follows Cocteau’s tropes in his description of a claustrophobic situation between a young girl and the brother who is obsessed by her – while being attracted to a very gay lad. He weaves it with the Fassbinder-inspired plot of a hard businesswoman mother who sleeps with her young staff – and, upon discovering that the man has impregnated her daughter, forces him to break up with her on the phone. Mixing melodrama and sassiness, Cui coins a totally queer story: two boys in bed, a girl near them, a baby en route, grown-ups are shit, so is the outside world, my sister, my love, my sissy boy, aren’t we happy.

Sat Oct 13 | 2 pm–midnight
Festival Award Winners Marathon
This program features a quartet of festival award winners focused on questioning gender and family relationships and the place of women in contemporary China.

Sat Oct 13 | 2 pm
Sheng Zhimin: Bliss (Fu Sheng)
Hong Kong/China, 2006, 96 min., 35mm
U.S. premiere
NETPAC Award, Locarno International Film Festival
Asian New Talent Award, Shanghai International Film Festival
In his second feature Sheng Zhimin – a former assistant to Fruit Chan (who produced the film), as well as Jia Zhangke, Zhang Yang and others – follows the life of old policeman Lao Li’s family, in the city of Chongqing (Sichuan Province). Factories close and Li’s daughter-in-law loses her job, while her husband, a cab-driver, works long hours and mourns an old love affair. As Li receives the ashes of his first wife, his second wife’s teenage son gets mixed with local gangs. A country girl is sold by her family to a brothel, yet discovers love in a scene or perfect lyricism involving an umbrella and a waterfront… In this masterful study of subtle emotional changes, the characters constantly surprise us, and bliss comes in discrete yet illuminating ways.

Sat Oct 13 | 4 pm
Zhang Lu: Grain in Ear (Mang Zhong)
China/South Korea, 2005, 110 min., 35mm
ACID Award, Cannes Film Festival, International Critics' Week
New Cinema Award, Pesaro Film Festival
Best New Asian Filmmaker of the Year, Pusan International Film Festival, New Currents
Cui Shunji (Liu Lianji), a young Korean-Chinese woman lives with her little boy on the city outskirts, selling kimchi. Less quietly droll than Tang Poetry (2003), this finds Zhang Lu entering the territory Fassbinder once made his own: melodrama with a social conscience, executed with slightly shell-shocked restraint. The climactic act of revenge is inspired by a real-life incident, but the context is pure fiction: a social-realist fable which illuminates the gap between haves and have-nots in ways that Marx never dreamed of. Zhang still thinks in cine-formalist terms (the camera never moves until the very end) but he’s clearly edging towards an engagement with drama, with a real sympathy for his heroine, as long takes and painterly compositions suggest her complex interior life. – adapted from a text by Tony Rayns.

Sat Oct 13 | 7:45 pm
Li Yu: Dam Street (Hong Yan)
China, 2005, 93 min., 35mm
Los Angeles premiere
Standard Audience Prize, Vienna Film Festival
Print provided by The Global Film Initiative
After shaking the film world with Fish and Elephant (2001), Li Yu continues to assert herself as a major female voice in Chinese cinema, and explores the plights, troubles and pleasures of women in a changing society. Dam Street deciphers the complex personal life of a young singer in a down-and-out Sichuan opera troupe, Yun (Yi Liu), who was once thrown out of school for getting pregnant in the early ’80s. Now she has to deal with the demons of the past and the challenges of the present. A “fallen woman,” she can only rebuke the unsavory advances of businessmen, engage in a hit-and-miss affair with a married man, till an unexpected friendship with a teenage boy forces her to take a different look at herself.

Sat Oct 13 | 9:45 pm
Ying Liang and Peng Shan: The Other Half (Ling Yiban)
China, 2006, 111 min., DVCAM
Los Angeles premiere
Special Jury Prize KODAK VISION AWARD, Tokyo, Filmex
Special Jury Award, Jeonju International Film Festival
Special Jury Award, Singapore International Film Festival
For their second feature following the award-winning Taking Father Home (2005), the boyfriend-and-girlfriend team of Ying and Peng made giant leaps: frontal composition, fractured narration and a savvy mixture of documentary and fiction show how sexual impasse and ecological catastrophes intersect in the Sichuan town of Zigong. “The Other Half” denotes women who, in Chinese mythology, hold the vault of the sky; not an easy task, if one follows the travails of Xiaofen (Zeng Xiaofei), a legal secretary having to deal with a slacker boyfriend, her mother’s eagerness to find her a husband, the victimization of women by her law firm and an industrialist’s ruthless contempt for the welfare of his workers and the safety of his town. “The Other Half is one hell of a beautiful film.”– Variety

Special thanks to: Li Yang, Kaili Peng, Zhang Hui, Cui Zi’en, Chow Keung, Teresa Kwong, Qi Wang and Hou Liang.

Screenings of New Chinese Cinema: The Unofficial Stories of Tang Tang, Piggy, Little Moth and Others at the UCLA Film & Television Archive at the Billy Wilder Theater

Fri Oct 5 | 7:30 pm
Jia Zhangke: Still Life (Sanxia Haoren)
China/Hong Kong, 2006
35mm, Mandarin, Sichuan dialect w/ English s/t, 108 min.
Los Angeles Premiere
Shot digitally as a companion piece to Dong, Jia’s masterful film intertwines two narrative strands in the ruined city of Fengjie, which was demolished and gradually submerged by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. Hired as a demolition worker, a peasant/coal miner looks for his estranged wife, while a young nurse tries to locate her elusive engineer husband. Still Life was awarded the Golden Lion at the 2006 Venice Film Festival.

Fri Oct 5 | 9:40 pm
Jia Zhangke: Dong
China, 2006
HDCam, Mandarin w/ English s/t, 70 min.
US Premiere
Following the painter Liu Xiaodong in the Three Gorges area as he was making monumental portraits of the demolition workers, Jia shot this documentary back-to-back with Still Life. Later he accompanied Liu to Thailand where his sitters were young female sex workers. While crafting the complex, fascinating portrait of a major Chinese artist at work, Jia powerfully explores the relationship between art and reality, fiction and documentary.

Sat Oct 6 | 7:30 pm
Yau Nai-hoi: Eye in the Sky (Gun Chung)
Hong Kong, 2007
35mm, Cantonese w/ English s/t, 90 min.
US Premiere
For his directorial debut, seasoned Johnny To screenwriter Yau Nai-hoi explores the intricate maze of Central Hong Kong with the intimate knowledge of a native son and the cleverness of a semiotician. Every street corner, every small event, becomes a meaningful sign in the cat-and-mouse game played by master criminal Tony Leung against ace cop Simon Lam, with a young female rookie (code name: Piggy) thrown in the middle.

Sun Oct 7 | 7 pm
Huang Weikai: Floating (Piao)
China, 2005
DVCam, Mandarin w/ English s/t, 93 min.
Los Angeles Premiere
Yang is a long-haired, alt-rock street musician in Guangzhou who cultivates a glib attitude to his music, the cops and his string of unhappy girlfriends. But Yang’s nonchalance masks defiance—like millions of other rural migrants to China’s urban centers, Yang could be arrested for vagrancy at any moment. With oblique intimacy, Huang Weikai’s documentary camera captures the contradictions of this hipster anti-hero as he saunters edgily through a “sleepwalking” existence, at the mercy of a government he refuses to take seriously.

Followed by Yang Heng: Betelnut (Binglang)
China, 2006
DVCam, Mandarin w/ English s/t, 112 min.
US Premiere
Two young loafers idle away their summer in a small southern riverine town stealing mopeds, frequenting internet cafes, singing drunken karaoke with the boys, getting into scrapes with other boys, hanging out on a river barge and falling in love. Echoing I Vitelloni by way of Jia Zhangke, this gently observational portrait of youthful aimlessness displays a precision of composition and pacing startling for a first feature.

Wed Oct 17 | 7:30 pm
Cao Baoping: Trouble Makers (Guangrongde Fennu)
China, 2006
35mm, Mandarin w/ English s/t, 103 min.
West Coast Premiere
Four brothers—salt traffickers, rapists and profiteers—rule over a backwater village. Unable to fight this new “Gang of Four” through official channels, the local Party Secretary, Ye Guangrong, assembles a colorful posse of assorted riff-raff, thugs, coarse peasants and fed-up villagers. And then they fight dirty—joyfully pouring out the foulest, most vulgar and imaginative language heard in recent Chinese cinema.

Fri Oct 19 | 7:30 pm
A Tribute to Edward Yang: A Brighter Summer Day (Guling Jie Shaonian Sharen Shijan) Director’s cut
Taiwan, 1991
35mm, Mandarin w/ English s/t, 237 min
Introduced by John Anderson, film critic and author of Edward Yang (2005)
Edward Yang (Yang Dechang, 1947-2007), one of the pillars of the New Taiwan Cinema, died this past June, seven years after receiving the Best Director Award at Cannes for Yi Yi (2000). Tonight’s Tribute screening pays homage to his exceptional talent. In 1960s Taipei, kids listen to Elvis Presley and join street gangs. Between their and their parents' generations lies a tragic gap that only emotional excess and violence can fill. Young Xiao Si’er falls hard for Ming, a lovely and complex teenage girl who “belongs” to the leader of a rival gang. Edward Yang based this film’s story on an actual event, a murder committed by one of his schoolmates.

Sat Oct 20 | 7:30 pm
Peng Tao: Little Moth (Xue Chan)
China, 2007
DigiBeta, Mandarin w/ English s/t, 99 min.
US Premiere
Bought for 1,000 yuan, 11-year old Xiao Ezi (“Little Moth”) can’t walk, but her new “parents,” Luo Jiang and his wife Guihua, have a use for her, as they’re trying their luck at a new trade: begging in the streets. First-time director Peng Tao extracts masterful performances from his non-professional actors, and, for a haunting moment, we share the gaze of a little girl staring at the off-screen void.

Followed by Lu Yue: Thirteen Princess Trees (Shisanke Paotong)
China, 2006
35mm, Mandarin w/ English s/t, 98 min.
US Premiere
This bracing look at a year in the lives of a group of high-school delinquents refreshingly features a teenage girl at the center. Feng has trouble at home, and runs with the tough crowd at school. When a new boy transfers from Lhasa, he seems at first to be a roughneck, but the film turns ever so delicately on Feng’s shift in perspective and sexual interest. Director Lu Yue (Mr. Zhao) is also an accomplished cinematographer, best-known for his work with Zhang Yimou on Shanghai Triad.

Fri Oct 26 | 7:30 pm
Ann Hui: The Post-Modern Life of My Aunt (Yimade Houxiandai Shenghuo)
Hong Kong/China, 2006
35mm, Mandarin w/ English s/t, 110 min.
West Coast Premiere
In this radical character study, her “best made-in-China film yet” (Tony Rayns), Ann Hui keeps a fine balance between absurdity, raunchy humor and melancholia. First presented as a harmless “auntie” lost in the shuffle and bustle of Shanghai modernity, Ye Rutang has a convention-breaking affair, experiences tragic-comic misadventures, while her true identity as a bad mother, and, ultimately, an orphan of Chinese history slowly emerges.