FOOD, FILM & FRIENDS – Sino-Cinema Summer Special!
Electric Shadows and The Hutong present a special open-air mini-series of fine Chinese cinema and cuisine. The first and third events will be preceded by a cooking class, and food and drinks will be available to buy at all three screenings. In the case of inclement weather the screenings will be moved indoors.
Third Screening: AUG 25th Cooking Class 5:00, Screening 7:30pm
THE HORSE THIEF Dir: Tian Zhuangzhuang, CN, 1986, 88mins
This is Zhuangzhuang’s dream project: a film about the real Tibet, from the hardship and cruelty of life on the plains to the splendour and mystery of Buddhist ceremonial, a film about life and death in the Buddhist scheme of things. The story is told in pictures, not words. Norbu is a horse thief, expelled from his clan, forced to become a nomad, pitching his tent wherever he can find casual work. He and his wife are devout Buddhists, regularly visiting the temples to turn the prayer-wheels, but their son falls sick and dies. Norbu reaches his lowest ebb when a tribe hires him to carry the death-totem in a ritual exorcism of a plague of anthrax. In desperation, he returns to his clan to beg to be taken back. Filmed on locations in Tibet, Gansu and Qinghai and acted by local people, it offers the most awesomely plausible account of Tibetan life and culture ever seen in the west. It’s one of the few films whose images show you things you’ve never seen before. – TimeOut London
This screening is preceded by a Tibetan cooking class.
Cooking Class + Screening: 280 RMB, 220 for members
Screening Only: 30RMB
Second Screening: AUG 11th, 7:30pm
IN THE HEAT OF THE SUN Dir: Jiang Wen, CN, 1994, 134mins
“Change has wiped out my memories. I can’t tell what’s imagined from what’s real” . One central obsession, time, preoccupies all of the greatest Chinese language films of the ‘90s. Each of these films in some way makes the most radical demands on our experience of temporality, exposes the ideological underpinnings of our preconceptions about time, and insists on a vision of breathtaking, liberating alternatives. A cast made up largely of young teenagers portrays what it might have been like to be young, privileged, and completely unfettered in a Beijing largely depopulated of adult authority figures by Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The film’s politics, though, are implied — mere shadows on its margins. Jiang’s camera, wandering at will through space, and tracking and backtracking through time, embodies an absolute freedom just out of reach of the film’s principals. Ostensibly a nostalgia film about the Cultural Revolution’s “good old days”, this film is much more: a self-consciously post-modern, post-“fifth generation” dismantling of the modern Chinese realist film; an ironic, romance-drenched interrogation of the possibility of eros and passion in a totalitarian era; and a meditation on the traps and opportunities afforded by creative mis-remembering. —chinesecinemas.org
Screening Only: 30RMB
First screening; JULY 28th, 7:30pm
YELLOW EARTH Dir: Chen Kaige, CN, 1984, 89mins
The first ‘modern’ film to emerge from China, and one of the most thrilling debut features of the ’80s. Its storyline couldn’t be simpler. A Communist soldier visits a backward village in 1939, and is billeted with a taciturn widower and his teenage daughter and son. The soldier’s mission is to collect folk songs, and it’s through the exchange of songs that he gradually wins the trust and affection of his hosts. But the girl is to be sold into marriage with a much older man, and all the soldier’s talk of breaking with feudal tradition fills her with unrealistic hopes of escaping her fate. The soldier returns to his base, leaving her to take her future in her own hands… There are political undercurrents here that got the film into trouble in China: the encounter between the CP and China’s peasants is shown not as an instant meeting of minds, but as the uneasy, frustrating, and ultimately unresolved process that it actually was. But what really stirred things up in old Beijing was the film’s insistence on going its own way. Chen Kaige and his cinematographer Zhang Yimou invented a new language of colours, shadows, glances, spaces, and unspoken thoughts and implications; and made their new language sing. – TimeOut London
This screening is preceded by a Shaanxi cooking class, where you will learn to make Biangbiang mian and Shaanxi style sweet rice cakes.
Cooking Class + Screening: 280 RMB, 220 for members
Screening Only: 30RMB
