Screening of "Perfect Life"

Presented by Melnitz Movies and the UCLA Asia Institute.

DIRECTOR: Emily Tang
In Mandarin, Cantonese, and Dongbei dialect with English subtitles
HDCam, 98 min

Welcome to the belly of the beast: capitalism, Chinese style. In a kind of distaff take on Jia Zhangke territory (and produced by Jia), visually contrasted storylines track two lost souls losing their grip at different ends of the food chain: a young hotel maid in a grim northern city who is trying to better herself amidst a cycle of exploitation, and a Hong Kong woman who finds her comfortable middle-class marriage unraveling and fights for custody of her children. - Film Society of Lincoln Center

Official Selection, 2009 Rotterdam International Film Festival
Official Selection, 2010 Film Comment Selects

"Composing, through light, impressionist touches, an intimate and complex picture of the female condition in China, Perfect Life reasserts Tang as an original, insightful, and highly talented director." – Bérénice Reynaud, critic/historian/theoretician/curator, CalArts/REDCAT

"the most accomplished of this current crop of [independent] Chinese films...Tang achieves something like cinema magic with Perfect Life...It’s uncanny how she fuses two genres, two modes, two subjects, two times, two locations. A theatrical audience watching the film is subtly transformed, as the film’s own special intimate power and beauty radiate in unexpected and compelling ways from a big screen." -Shelly Kraicer, CINEMASCOPE

Special Instructions

Tickets are avilable on a first come, first served basis (one ticket per person) at the Melnitz box office the day of the screening, one hour before showtime.