Festival Award Winners Marathon

Part of the Jack H. Skirball Screening Series - New Chinese Cinema: The Unofficial Stories of Tang Tang, Fourth Child, Little Moth and Others

This program features a quartet of award winners—from the Locarno, Tokyo, Vienna and Cannes festivals—focused on questioning gender and family relationships and the place of women in contemporary China.

Sheng Zhimin: Bliss (Fu Sheng)
Sat Oct 13 | 2 pm

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.

Zhang Lu: Grain in Ear (Mang Zhong)
Sat Oct 13 | 4 pm

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.

Li Yu: Dam Street (Hong Yan)
Sat Oct 13 | 7:45 pm

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.

Ying Liang and Peng Shan: The Other Half (Ling Yiban)
Sat Oct 13 | 9:45 pm

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.