China, 2007, 95 min, 35 MM
In Mandarin with English subtitles
DIR: Li Yang
SCR: Li Yang
PROD: Li Yang
EXEC PROD: Alexandra Sun, Li Shan, Li Hua
DP: Jong Lin
ED: Li Yang, Mary Stephen
CAST: Lu Hunag, Youan Yang, Yuling Zhang, Yunle Ha
In attendance: Alexandra Sun
A demographic time bomb haunts China today. Den Xiaoping’s One-Child Policy has left too few women available for Chinese men to marry, especially in the less prosperous countryside. Writer/director Li Yang’s film, which received sustained ovations at Cannes, uses this society-wide crisis as the basis for a raw and powerful melodrama. The promise of a decent paying job lures the naïve, ingenuous Bai Xuemei (beautifully played by Huang Lu in her screen debut) to a desolate farming village in Northern China. Once there, she discovers she’s been sold into a marriage that is essentially slavery. Her desperate efforts to find help escaping the village and the brutal family holding her captive disclose an ironic pattern of interlocking injustices. Bai’s destiny, including a last minute act of resistance, symbolizes an entire society caught in the disorienting crisis of radical change. And Li, whose film BLIND SHAFT captured the agony of China's unregulated mining industry, establishes himself as his country's most important social-realist director—an Asian counterpart to Ken Loach.
- Larry Gross
Screening Schedule:
Sunday, November 4th Noon
ArcLight Theatre 12 $11.00
Monday, November 5th 10:00pm
ArcLight Theatre 11
(see website for ticket purchase)