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Painting For The Revolution: Peasants Paintings from HU County

Hu County, in suburban Xi’an, is famous for its peasant paintings, produced in 1958 during the Great Leap Forward. It became particularly famous during the Cultural Revolution, when these works were hailed as model paintings. In 2005, the directors visited the county and interviewed both the painters and their teachers. Comparing different political languages and artistic imaginings across the ages, the film draws on diverse sources: old documentary film clips, new propaganda paintings, Beijing Opera in the local “Qin” accent, and traces of the old amongst the new. All these elements are engaged to help us better understand the painters and the phenomenon of propaganda paintings

Painting For The Revolution: Peasants Paintings from HU County

NR 2005
San Yuan Li

San Yuan Li, the collaborative project by Ou Ning, Cao Fei, and the members of U-thèque Organization, is a case study of the typical “urban village” phenomenon of Guangzhou in 1990s. Armed with video cameras, the crew penetrated San Yuan Li as “city flâneurs,” presented a highly stylized portrait of the village, attempting to rethink the debt of history, to document the confrontation and reconciliation between the newly urbanization and the patriarchal-clan-based traditional community, as well as the weird architectures and cultural landscape emerging from this previously rural area. At the end, all the colored footages were eidted into a piece of black-and-white video poetry. The project was exhibited in the 50th Venice Biennale for the first time, and then screened worldwide.

San Yuan Li

5.5 2003
BREATHE

The movie is about a normal family living in the southern area of Beijing,China. The mother of the family is a elevator worker and has no passion for life, every day she works in the elevator taking the people up and down. After work she goes go the resident of the building to clean to make some extra income. The father of the family was “bought out from the national factory”,-the national factory is not responsible for him anymore- after that he started working in a restaurant as a chef’s assistant. What he like to do is date with his gayfriend. The son of the family is in middle school, who doesn’t like to communicate with other people much, including his mother, father and the rest of his family. The only thing he likes to do is to sit in the internet bar all day long. At first sight this family looks like a very normal family,but because problems often arise the family gets more and more frustrated.

BREATHE

NR 2009
River People

He Jianjun follows fishermen on the banks of the Yellow River in the Shanxi Province. Partly in documentary form, partly as fiction, River People shows traditional life as it passes the generations, calm and irreversible as the river itself, apparently unaffected by economic changes in the city. People live without medical care, social provisions, without tax. It's about the cousins and best friends Baowa and Laba (who sometimes tell the story). An old uncle, who taught everyone the craft, is afraid of the outside world because so many relatives have been so unfortunate there. He doesn't want to think about leaving and has forbidden Baowa, the only one to go to school, ever to mention it. But for the young man, a boat looks like a coffin. When Laba's parents buy a bigger boat, the brothers are faced with an inevitable choice. River People is the story of people who are happy with their lives, but slowly see the modern era creep in.

River People

NR 2008
Singapore GaGa

Singapore GaGa is a 55-minute paean to the quirkiness of the Singaporean aural landscape. It reveals Singapore's past and present with a delight and humour that makes it a necessary film for all Singaporeans. We hear buskers, street vendors, school cheerleaders sing hymns to themselves and to their communities. From these vocabularies (including Arabic, Latin, Hainanese), a sense of what it might mean to be a modern Singaporean emerges. This is Singapore's first documentary to have a cinema release. With English and Chinese subtitles.

Singapore GaGa

NR 2005
Jiang Jie

Jiang Jie is famous throughout China: the “Chinese Joan of Arc,” in the words of director Zhang Yuan, a communist heroine executed by the Kuomintang in 1949, on the eve of the revolution. Zhang Yuan’s film, a passionately engaged tribute to the 1964 “revolutionary opera” based on Jiang Jie’s life, follows the original closely...The Revolutionary melodrama plot, not that different from Verdi’s 19th century versions, has of course a completely different resonance today. The Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) enshrined this kind of “revolutionary opera” — based on traditional Beijing opera, but with substantial stylistic and formal revisions — as the epitome of Maoist propaganda art. In the past ten years, Chinese and Western experts have begun to re-evaluate the art behind the propaganda, to find creativity, and even shocking beauty under the layers of kitsch and repellent politics the works have sometimes embodied. —Shelly Kraicer

Jiang Jie

NR 2002
Mapi

Springtime, Maoshan Town, Taizhou Shi, north Jiangsu Province in China. As the villagers of Maoshan prepare for their annual temple fair to pay their respects to Chairman Mao, tempers are reaching boiling point. Organizing this festival is a not easy matter, as director Jin Shifang will attest. Not only does he have to deal with wayward loudspeakers and corrupt police, but he also has to put up with infighting and subordinates just waiting for him to make a wrong move. This observational film captures the lives of ordinary people in rural China caught in changing times, letting audiences to think it over.

Mapi

NR 2002
Backyard – Hey, Sun Is Rising!

The film depicts a young man, or rather four young men, as they try to retain the sentimental feeling that is about to escape them when the sun comes up in the morning. In the expectations that they would never meet, they dressed up in the old military uniform and bathed in the morning sun. Their yawning drifts away with the wind; a wooden sword is the only attainable thing in their arms. The puppet-like laziness is shattered by the dancing sword, and they communicate in the anger of love and hate, but no real pain is ever felt. They attempt to capture the fiber of Peking Opera within the melody, but are accidentally brought above the city sky of their memories.

Backyard – Hey, Sun Is Rising!

NR 2001