Treating

Wu Wenguang's Treating will be screened at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood.

As part of the series Between Disorder and Unexpected Pleasures: Tales from the New Chinese Cinema, curated by Cheng-Sim Lim and Bérénice Reynaud, Filmforum is proud to host the United States premiere of the Chinese film Treating (Zhi Liao) by Wu Wenguang. It will be playing with the new animated film by Sun Xun: Beyond-ism.

In recent years, independent Chinese cinema has experienced a virtual explosion. Digital media have allowed filmmakers to be bolder, more daring and to explore hybrid forms of documentary and fiction, or mix found and live footage while playing with novel formal strategies. Independent Chinese cinema has also come of age. Reaching beyond nostalgia and social protest, it plumbs surprising corners of  Chinese reality with humor that is at times light, dark, saucy, dry, raunchy or conceptual. Expect the unexpected.

Special Thanks to Bérénice Reynaud, Cheng-Sim Lim, and REDCAT.  Additional funding provided by the UCLA Confucius Institute

Wu  Wenguang: Treating (Zhi Liao) (2010, 80 min., DVD)

Written, directed, edited by: Wu Wenguang
“The film was triggered by my desire to explore the deep emotions caused by my mother’s death in 2007. The focus shifted as was I was sorting through the 12 years of footage I had collected, seeing subtleties I had previously overlooked, or reliving past experiences… Then I realized this film is not just about remembering my mother—it’s also an experiment to bring her back to life. As I am trying to heal myself, my mother is a crucial element. And so, through my mother/ remembrance/the present/healing and self-healing, this film’s structure and way of recounting began to organically materialize.” (Wu Wenguang)

As the filmmaker engages in a self-reflexive analysis of old diaries and intimate footage, he also plunges into recollections of his experiences during the Cultural Revolution –  another incisive merging of proletarian history and personal cinema by one of the founders and spiritual leaders of the “New Chinese Documentary Movement.”

Preceded by: Sun Xun: Beyond-ism (Zhuyi zhiwai)

(Animation, 2010, 8.8 min., DVD)

“In Sun Xun's magical world, which mixes up references to Mao’s poetry, ancient China and tales from Japan, it is the magician who rules the world.” – Rotterdam International Film Festival

Advance ticket purchase available through Brown Paper Tickets.  Click here to purchase.

About Wu Wenguang:

A former schoolteacher and TV journalist Wu Wenguang (born 1956) spontaneously recreated the aesthetics of cinema vérité with the epoch-making Bumming in Beijing – The Last Dreamers (Liulang Beijing – Zuihou De Mengxiangzhe, 1990) and its follow-up, At Home in the World (Shihai Weijia, 1995). Starting with the portrait of five young marginalized artists, he depicts the existential angst, creativity and cultural displacement that characterized his generation after June 1989. 1966, My Time in the Red Guards (1966, Wo de hongweibing shidai, 1993, shown at Los Angeles Filmforum in 1997) recalls the memories of former teenage Red Guards swept by history. For Jiang Hu: on the Road (Jiang Hu, 1999), Wu lived for months with the members of an impoverished ‘Song and Dance Company’ as they lived and performed throughout China.

In 1994, Wu co-founded The Living Dance Studio with his partner, dancer/choreographer Wen Hui, and together they conceived the performance/video Dance with Farm Workers (He Mingong Tiaowu, 2002). In 2005, they founded Coachangdi Workstation, combining a studio/rehearsal space, an independent video archive, training/educational facilities for videomakers and a yearly performance and documentary festival. In 2006, Wu launched the Villagers Documentary Project, in which peasants and students were given the tools to produce video documents about their own communities (the first installment of which was shown at REDCAT in 2007). After the controversial Fuck Cinema (2006, shown at REDCAT in our previous “New Chinese Cinema” film series), Wu stopped directing films himself, until he (re)discovered the concept of “personal cinema” and started working in this vein with Treating and Bare Your Stuff (2010).

About Sun Xun:

After studying printmaking at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou, Sun Xun (born 1980) founded the animation studio Pi in 2006. His meticulous animations have been shown in festivals in China, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Italy, and media art centers in the US. His drawings and installations have been exhibited in galleries and museums in China, Europe and the U.S.

He had his first film retrospective in the US at REDCAT in October 2009.  Sun Xun conceived Beyond-ism while he was an artist-in-residence in Yokohama. The first part of the project consists of 10 huge ink drawings and frames of animation video. The second part is made of the drawings for the animation. The third part is the video. In Xun’s recent solo exhibition at ShanghArt Gallery in Beijing (Jan 16-March 6), the whole process was combined with a site-specific drawing.

This program is part of the series Between Disorder and Unexpected Pleasures: Tales from the New Chinese Cinema, curated by Cheng-Sim Lim and Bérénice Reynaud.

Funded in part with generous support from Wendy Keys and Donald Pels. Additional funding provided by the UCLA Confucius Institute.

This screening series is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission; the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles; and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Additional support is generously provided by the American Cinematheque.