Part of the UCLA Confucius Institute's inaugural China Onscreen Biennial （银幕中国双年展）project, an unprecedented bicoastal collaboration among seven distinguished American educational and cultural organizations to promote US-China dialogue through the art of film. October 13-31, Los Angeles | October 26-11, Washington, DC.
SAUNA ON MOON
Director/Screenwriter/Production Designer: Zou Peng. Producer: Chen Zhiheng. Cinematographer: Yu Lik-wai. Editor: Wenders Li. Sound: Zhang Yang. Composer: Wang Lei. Cast: Wu Yuchi, Yang Xiaomin, Lei Ting, Zhan Yi, Meng Yan.
Zou Peng’s dazzling second feature witnesses life at a boisterous sauna/brothel in the Southern Chinese industrial heartland of Guangdong. The sauna workers, older and younger women alike, observe a brisk regimen of rehearsing the art of providing pleasure, in the interest of creating the region’s leading pleasure palace for high-rolling “special guests.” Zou eschews easy moralistic conclusions about the politics of power, preferring instead to portray a social ecology built around the unabashed pursuit and uses of money. The fantastical factory that is the sauna becomes a vortex of ironies, prompting both scopophilic pleasure and an uncanny catalog of the effects of China’s economic divides. – Shannon Kelley
35mm, color, Putonghua with English subtitles, 93 min.
Preceded by
North American Premiere
THE PEOPLE’S SECRETARY 2010
Director/Producer/Editor: Zhang Qing. Cast: Wang Zhixin, Lu Yuzhen, Lu Tinghai, Zhang Weicheng.
Zhang Qing employs the ubiquity of CCTV cameras to amplify a cheeky satire, with multiple video feeds revealing the super-human good works of a party secretary who single-handedly defends pensioners, roots out corruption and shepherds a whole village from poverty to prosperity. An English voiceover recounts these righteous feats in a style that echoes Chinese TV of the 1980s. – Paul Malcolm
DVD, color, Putonghua with English subtitles, 18 min.
UCLA Film & Television Archive
Billy Wilder Theater
Courtyard Level, Hammer Museum
10899 Wilshire Boulevard (at the intersection of Wilshire and Westwood Boulevards)
Los Angeles, CA 90024
Tickets: $10 online. $9 general admission, $8 for non-UCLA students, seniors and UCLA Alumni Association members (ID required) if purchased at the box office only. Free admission for UCLA students (current ID required); free tickets available on a first-come, first-served basis at the box office until 15 minutes before showtime, or the rush line afterwards. Online tickets available at www.cinema.ucla.edu/calendar; click on the individual program.
Parking: Museum parking lot; enter from Westwood Blvd, just north of Wilshire. $3 flat rate after 6:00 pm on Mondays-Fridays and all day on weekends.
Information: www.cinema.ucla.edu, 310.206.8013
Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies, Confucius Institute