Love and Death in Montmartre 蒙馬特之愛與死 (2019): Screening and panel discussion
Love and Death in Montmartre 蒙馬特之愛與死 (2019): Screening and panel discussion
Friday May 5, 6:00 pm – 9:00pm
Michelson Theater, 721 Broadway, 6th FloorRSVP required
Acclaimed filmmaker Evans Chan’s evocative documentary is a tribute to the life, work, love and death of Qiu Miaojin 邱妙津, the iconic, openly lesbian young writer and artist from Taiwan who took her own life in Paris in 1995. Weaving performance, interviews (including with her teacher Hélène Cixous and American poet Eileen Myles), and footage of Qiu’s short films, Chan’s deeply researched, and beautifully composed film places the self-exiled pioneer queer writer’s legacy in relation to Sinophone women literature as well as Taiwan’s gay rights movement that eventually led to the same-sex marriage law, the first in Asia, in Taiwan in 2019.
The post-screening panel features Evans Chan and Edwin Frank, joined remotely by Ari Larissa Heinrich and Shi-yan Chao.
Organizer and moderator: Zhen Zhang (director of the Asian Film and Media Initiative).
Free and open to the public.
About the filmmaker and the panelists
According to British film critic Tony Rayns, EVANS CHAN “has made a singular contribution to Hong Kong cinema and at the same time a major contribution to the whole spectrum of contemporary film-making.” Originally from Hong Kong, Chan is a New York-based critic, librettist and an independent filmmaker of more than a dozen fiction and documentary films — which have been screened at the Berlin, Rotterdam, London, Moscow, Vancouver, AFI-Docs, and Taiwan Golden Horse film festivals, among others. His subjects range from American avant-grade music, anti-Asian murder in New York subway, to constitutional reform in late imperial China. His two-part documentary features, “Raise the Umbrellas” (2016) and “We Have Boots” (2020), explore the recent political upheaval in Hong Kong.
Edwin Frank is the founder and editor of the New York Review Books Classics series, which published QIU Miaojin’s two novels, thereby launching her posthumous global, literary career. He is also the author of Snake Train: Poems 1984-2013.
Ari Larissa Heinrich is an arts writer and scholar as well as the translator of Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words from Montmartre (New York Review Books, 2014) and other works. Heinrich is currently Director of the Gallery of the Australian Centre on China in the World, and co-curator of the exhibit “Double Witness” by the Sydney-based artist Meng-Yu Yan, who created 20 video letters in Paris tracing Qiu Miaojin’s final days as chronicled in Last Words From Montmartre: Australian Centre on China in the World - ANU
Shi-Yan Chao is a research fellow at Chulalongkorn University in Thailand. He holds a Ph.D in Cinema Studies from New York University, and has taught at NYU, Columbia University, Hong Kong Baptist University and Lingnan University. He is the author of Queer Representations in Chinese-language Film and the Cultural Landscape (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), along with various articles in academic journals and anthologies.