CHINA NOW: INDEPENDENT VISIONS

female_directors_0Celebrating the daring spirit and creative innovation of independent filmmakers and festival organizers in mainland China.

The China Now: Independent Visions tour is modelled on how independent cinema is exhibited in China today. Savvy programmers, producers, and filmmakers have taken to organizing informal networks of screenings to get their works into distribution. In China, packages of new indie films are circulated to an ad hoc collection of art galleries, campus screening clubs, and enterprising independent art spaces, through China’s first, second, and third tier cities, finding local audiences through a new model of grassroots, artisanal exhibition circuits.

four-ways-to-die-in-my-hometown-%e5%9b%9b%e7%a7%8d%e6%96%b9%e5%bc%8f%e6%b5%b7%e6%8a%a5%e5%b1%82%e6%96%87%e4%bb%b6The films we are bringing to audiences around the world are a collection of illuminating documentaries, brilliant shorts, and spellbinding fiction features from the last four years of Chinese independent cinema. Independent Chinese filmmakers are inventing new ways of mobilizing, adapting, and innovating film languageunder pressure from the incredibly rapid and fundamental changes Chinese society is undergoing. These films do various things: intensely engaged meta-journalism, alternative history-making, genre-defying performance/documentary art hybridization, and visually playful experimentalism. All of the films interrogate how cinema art can and should stand against the real, all stretch cinema art under the pressure of seemingly un-representable new Chinese realities, and all invent images and sounds that try to keep up with a present that is changing before our eyes. And it’s not just Chinese realities. China now is actively engaged with and is shaping our own future at the same time.

The series is organized and curated by Cinema on the Edge, a new collaboration formed by three of Chinese independent cinema’s most committed supporters: producer and distributor Karin Chien, critic and curator Shelly Kraicer, and filmmaker and anthropologist J.P. Sniadecki.

Shelly Kraicer will introduce the films during the tour’s stop in Eugene.

 

S C H E D U L Eriver-of-life-poster

Thursday, October 20
2:30pm Female Directors (43 min)
3:30pm Emperor Visits Hell (67 min)
7:15pm Four Ways to Die in My Hometown (90 min.)

Friday, October 21
2:00pm Egg and Stone, directed by Huang Ji (100 min)
4:00pm  The River of Life Directed by Yang Pingdao (101 min)

Location: Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art

Cosponsored with CAPS (Jeremiah/NRC), Academic Affairs, EALL, Asian Studies, JSMA, Office of International Affairs, and Oregon Humanities Center’s Endowment for Public Outreach in the Arts, Sciences and Humanities.