News

by Jean-Marc Therouanne, Asian Movie Pulse Special Envoy

The Premises:

Pingyao Festival was founded by the great director Jia Zhangke in the mythical Chinese city of Pingyao, which is 2,800 years old. The old city, classified as a Unesco world heritage site, has preserved its ancient protective walls.

In its heart is a former disused factory, transformed into the festival palace. The originality of this palace is to have been able to preserve the old brick buildings by adapting them to the need to have places in line with the organization of an international film festival. This originality is reinforced by the attribution to certain buildings of the site, a name related to the history of Chinese cinema.

The 550-seat, large indoor cinema is called “Spring in a small town” after the cult film by Fei Mu, father of Chinese auteur cinema in the 1930s in Shanghai. The large open-air theatre...

About the Film

Often cited as the greatest Chinese film ever, “Spring in a Small Town” differs from other films of the era. In a time when most films were colored by the politics of the time, “Spring in a Small Town” is a story of a woman with a love dilemma. Few Mu’s film is based on a short story by Li Tianji, and was produced by the Wenhua Film Company.

Though its reputation suffered after 1949 in mainland China after the Communist revolution, within the last 20 years it had become known as one of the greatest Chinese films ever made.

Synopsis

Taking place in a ruined family compound after the Second Sino-Japanese War, the film tells the story of the once prosperous Dai family. The husband and patriarch, Dai Liyan is an invalid, and spends his days in the courtyard nostalgic for the past. His marriage to Zhou...

South Korea’s 20th Busan International Film Festival (Biff) has announced iconic Taiwanese actress and filmmaker Sylvia Chang will lead this year’s New Currents jury.

The Golden Bear-nominated 20 30 40, which Chang directed and acted in, screened in Busan’s A Window on Asian Cinema section in 2004.

She has also helped discover and produce for new directing talents who previously included Ann Hui and Edward Yang.

Joining her on the jury: Indian director Anurag Kashyap, whose critically-acclaimed innovative works include Black Friday, Dev.D and Gangs of Wasseypur I & II; German actress Nastassja Kinski, whose films include Roman Polanski’s Tess and Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas; Korean director Kim Tae-yong, whose films include Memento Mori, Family Ties and Late Autumn; and Village Voice chief film critic Stephanie Zacharek.

The jury will award $30,000 each to two films in the competition for new Asian directors.

Biff will run Oct 1-10 with the Asian Film Market running Oct 3-6 this year.

Asian...

Hailed as the greatest Chinese film ever made, Fei Mu's 1948 melodrama Spring In A Small Town arrives on DVD for the first time in the UK, courtesy of the BFI. A heartbreaking tale of loyalty, yearning and resilience in the wake of the Second World War, Fei's film was buried by the Communist Party and has only reemerged in recent years, where it is garnering deserved comparisons with the work of filmmakers like Ozu Yasujiro and Wong Kar Wai.In a nondescript region of post-war China, Yuwen (Wei Wei) lives a simple and somewhat isolated life. Married to the once-rich Liyan (Shi Yu), whose health has steadily declined, along with his wealth, during the eight years of their union, Yuwen's role is now little more...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

Opened just last year, the Shanghai Film Museum ranks as one of the world’s most state of the art institutions for people to explore movie history, specifically, movie history in Shanghai, from Twin Sisters to Spring in a Small Town to The Big Road. For the first half of the 20th century, nearly all Chinese films were made in Shanghai, but the city lost much of its moviemaking autonomy when the Communist government moved film operations to the capital of Beijing. This $100 million museum can be seen as a monument to Shanghai’s glamorous cinematic past, brought back to life as an enduring emblem of its future.>> Kevin B. Lee...

Opened just last year, the Shanghai Film Museum ranks as one of the world’s most state of the art institutions for people to explore movie history, specifically, movie history in Shanghai, from Twin Sisters to Spring in a Small Town to The Big Road. For the first half of the 20th century, nearly all Chinese films were made in Shanghai, but the city lost much of its moviemaking autonomy when the Communist government moved film operations to the capital of Beijing. This $100 million museum can be seen as a monument to Shanghai’s glamorous cinematic past, brought back to life as an enduring emblem of its future.>> Kevin B. Lee...

Peter Bradshaw declares his admiration for Fei Mu's 1948 romance, which sees long lost love rekindled among the ruins of the second world war. Zhou Yuwen (Wei Wei) lives with her neurotic husband Dai Liyan (Shi Yu). Their unhappy marriage is tested when Yuwen's former lover, Zhang Zhichen, pays them a visit. Spring in a Small Town is being re-released by the BFI and is in cinemas from Friday Continue reading...

★★★★★This year, the BFI has embarked on a glorious season of screenings that celebrate the last one hundred years of Chinese cinema. Acting as something of a centrepiece is a film that they have been attempting to licence for UK distribution for years, Fei Mu's Spring in a Small Town (1948). Often considered its nation's greatest film, it has now been restored by the Chinese Film Archive who have made significant strides recently in reaching out to showcase the country's cinematic heritage abroad. This crowning achievement is an exquisite melodrama full of yearning and regret. A clear influence on the cinema of Wong Kar-wai, this is a tale of simmering passions held at bay by obligation.

Great news for us lovers of Asian Cinematography. The British Film Institute (BFI) along with Toronto International Film Festival (Tiff) will present one of the largest and most complete retrospective of Chinese Cinema. The films presented will not be only from China itself but there will be productions from Hong Kong and Taiwan too. This awesome event will be held from June until October 2014 so don´t worry you will be able to enjoy the showcase throughout the year.

Each month the BFI will present different programs with different showcases. In total there will be five programs lasting around one month each. During June, The Golden Age the focus will be classic movies from the 1930s and 40s. Also during June there will be another program called A New China which movies were done during the post-war era and focus on melodramas, war films and different satires. On July this change in the Swordsmen,...

After much media hoopla about "Vertigo" toppling "Citizen Kane" in its poll, Sight and Sound magazine have now released the full version of its once a decade 'Top 250 greatest films of all time' poll results via its website. The site also includes full on links showcasing Top Tens of the hundreds of film industry professionals who participated in the project.

For those who don't want to bother with the individual lists and to save you a bunch of clicking, below is a copy of the full 250 films that made the lists and how many votes they got to be considered for their positions:

1 - Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958) [191 votes]

2 - Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941) [157 votes]

3 - Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953) [107 votes]

4 - La Règle du jeu (Renoir, 1939) [100 votes]

5 - Sunrise: a Song for Two Humans (Murnau, 1927) [93 votes]

6 - 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968) [90 votes]

7 - The Searchers (Ford, 1956) [78 votes]

8 - Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov, 1929) [68 votes]

9 - The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer,...

In a city often derided as art-phobic and money-obsessed, the Hong Kong International Film Festival provides an annual opportunity for local audiences to contextualize their own regional cinema alongside the breadth of international contemporary filmmaking. While the glitz of the Hk movie industry is paraded in various galas and a high-wattage opening award ceremony, the programmers have left plenty of room throughout the festival’s seventeen days of screenings for the usual arthouse suspects, student-director and avant-garde showcases, and a strong focus on new Chinese-language cinema. With this diverse slate spread out across multiplex theaters throughout the city, it’s surprising that Hkiff also manages to maintain a certain level of coherence, partly due to the atmosphere created by what seems to be a dedicated viewership and the visibility of well-known Sinophone cinephiles like Tony Rayns and David Bordwell. Since I had just four whole days in the city, I...