11th Reel China Biennial at NYU

Still from Bad Women of China

11th Reel China Biennial at NYU
Nov. 1-3, 2024

This edition of Reel China once more brings back to NYC innovative and bold works by veteran filmmakers in the PRC along with diaspora and emerging Sinophone voices. In this year’s edition, an acclaimed female first-person-plural documentary reflects on generation gaps and transnational kinship against the backdrop of modern China’s history. Among other selections, experimental animations show the processing of the Pandemic experience. The short and long films, fiction and non-fiction in various forms, bear sharp and delicate witness to the momentous changes in China and the world in the 21st century.


Co-presented by

The Asian Film & Media Initiative, Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies
The Center for Religion and Media


Co-sponsored by
NYU Center for Media, Culture and History; Center for Research and Study (Tisch); Department of East Asian Studies; Department of History.


Co-organized by

Zhen Zhang, Cinema Studies, Director of Asian Film Media Initiative, NYU
Angela Zito, Religious Studies and Anthropology
Cristina Cajulis, Events Coordinator, Cinema Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU


Thanks to

CathayPlay.com

Venues:

Nov. 1 Cantor Film Center, 36 E 8th Street
Nov. 2 Michelson Theater, 6th Floor, 721 Broadway
Nov. 3 Michelson Theater, 6th Floor, 721 Broadway

Image credit: Bad Women of China (HE Xiaopei, 2021)

This is an in-person event, open to the public. Prior registration is required at least 48 hours before the start of the event. Non-NYU attendees will receive emailed instructions for building access and may be asked to present a government-issued photo ID upon arrival. NYU attendees must present their NYU ID.

Program for Reel China 2024

Program for Reel China 2024

Program

Friday Nov. 1
Cantor Film Center, 2nd Floor, E. 8th Street, NYC


4:30pm
Here, Hopefully 希望在哪里 (ZHOU Hao, 2023, 11min.)
Bad Women of China 中华坏女人(HE Xiaopei, 2021, 80min)
Q & A with He Xiaopei

6:45pm Break

8pm Shanghai Stories
Romance in Factory 厂工之爱情  (WANG Yuchen, 2016, 20min.)
Residual Monsoon 余风 (SHEN Hancheng, 2023, 26min.)
The Memo 备忘录 (Badlands Film Group, 2023, 30 min.)
Q & A with filmmakers (online)


Saturday Nov. 2
Michelson Theater, 6th Floor, 721 Broadway, NYC


1:30pm
The River That Holds My Hand 那河牵我手 (CHEN Jianhang, 2023, 34min.)
Drolma 走红 (Tamding Tsering, 2024, 20min.)

2:30pm Coffee break

3pm
Baya芭雅 (JI Dan, 2023, 180min.)
Q & A with filmmaker


Sunday Nov. 3
Michelson Theater, 6th Floor, 721 Broadway, NYC


1:30 pm
My Grandfather Liu Wencai 我的爷爷刘文彩 (SHI Jian, 2023, 87min.)
Q & A with filmmaker

3:30pm Coffee break

4pm
Big Characters 大字 (JU Anqi, 2015, 17min.)
What Is Art 艺术是什么 (JU Anqi, 2018, 25min.)
Q & A with filmmaker

5:15pm The Pandemic Trilogy
Drowning Dogs During the COVID-19 Pandemic 疫情期间的落水狗 (CHEN Qiang, 27min.)
I Infected the Universe 疫情期间的飞天狗 (CHEN Qiang, 20min.)
Bad Days Are Like Mad Dogs 疯狗童话 (CHEN Qiang, 2023, 15min.)
Q & A with filmmaker

Closing reception

About the films (in order of screening schedule):

Here, Hopefully 希望在哪里 (ZHOU Hao, 2023, 11 min.)
A nonbinary aspiring nurse from China strives to start a new life in Iowa. After graduating from nursing school, they work tirelessly and anxiously to pass the national licensing exam in hopes of obtaining a work visa.

Figure walking in front of green landscape

HERE, HOPEFULLY

Bad Women of China 中华坏女人 (HE Xiaopei, 2021, 80min.)
In what began as an attempt at reconciling with her mother through her daughter, He Xiaopei’s first feature length film takes us from the 1920-2020s through the lives, desires, and willpower of her mother, herself, and her daughter as they experience political and social revolution. Breaking all the rules and desperate for a life to call one’s own, each woman passes to the next generation the most tender love and unintentional trauma.

One woman sitting down, one woman standing in front of the other.

Bad Women of China 中华坏女人

Romance in Factory 厂工之爱情
Romance in Factory 厂工之爱情

Romance in Factory 厂工之爱情  (Wang Yuchen, 2016, 20min.)
An homage to the custom of the ghost marriage in Chinese tradition, as well as a tribute to the first extant Chinese silent narrative film, Laborer’s Love, this film simultaneously deconstructs folk and cinematic tradition. In it, a young woman pursues a young man and interrupts his work, which eventually leads to a deep level of communication between the two. (2016 Cutting Edge Film Festival, USA) (Courtesy of CathayPlay.com)

 

 

 

Residual Monsoon 余风 (SHEN Hancheng, 2023, 26min.)
In 2018, the influential Ji Feng Bookstore in Shanghai, China, officially closed down. This short film documents the first day after the bookstore closed, when the employees worked together to clear the books. This last group of employees recorded the voiceover for the film, which was shot in one take. (Courtesy of CathayPlay.com)   

Counter at zero

Residual Monsoon 余风

The Memo 备忘录
The Memo 备忘录

The Memo 备忘录 (Badlands, 2023, 30 min.)
A filmmaker couple who were trapped in a small, rented apartment in Shanghai made a video diary of the surreal lockdown of the city for five months in 2022. In the face of endless madness, the camera gradually breaks free from the window and observes a vast social isolation unprecedented in the country's history. (Taiwan Golden Horse Awards’ Best Documentary Short Film; Liberation DocFest Bangladesh-International Competition, Youth Jury Award; Festival international Signes de Nuit, Bangkok-Cinema in Transgression, Main Award.)

 

The River That Holds My Hand 那河牵我手(CHEN Jianhang, 2023, 34min.)
During a visit to an elderly overseas Chinese resident in the village, a young filmmaker glimpses the nostalgia that fills the old woman's heart through a black and white family photograph. Inspired by sudden tender feelings, he embarks on a journey, carrying the photograph aboard a boat to arrive at the ancient port of Saigon. In the streets of Saigon, holding the photograph in his hands, he finds himself entangled in a web of reality, memories, dreams, and imagination, unable to distinguish where he truly exists. (Courtesy of CathayPlay.com)
 

Woman staring out at the green hills

The River That Holds My Hand 那河牵我手

Drolma 走红
Drolma 走红

Drolma 走红 (Tamding Tsering, 2024, 20min.)
The protagonist has gone to the city and taken a job in a foot spa. But back in the village everyone believes she works as a secretary. When a customer takes a photo of her working and leaks it on social media, the girl faces abuse and pressure when she visits home. (Courtesy of CathayPlay.com)

 

 

 

 

Baya 芭雅 (JI Dan, 2024, 180Min.)Special preview screening
Baya (“grandmother” in the Zhuang ethnic language) has lived in the verdant but impoverished mountain regions of Guangxi province in southern China all her life. This luminous film, made over a decade, crafts an intimate portrait of Baya’s capacious character full of vitality and dignity despite a life of struggling to survive. We follow her through the painful experience of nine of her children and grandchildren dying from coal mining accidents and pneumoconiosis that stalks the family.
 

Baya looking out into the green trees

Baya芭雅

My Grandfather Liu Wencai 我的爷爷刘文彩 (SHI Jian, 2023, 87min.)
In the first 30 years of the PRC, in order to maintain and consolidate CCP’s rule, political campaigns were frequently launched. People were divided into two hostile "classes," the "proletariat" represented by farmers and workers and the "bourgeoisie" represented by landlords and capitalists. The eternal "class struggle" between them was proclaimed to have now reached the point of “life-and-death."  Landowner Liu Wencai’s home in Sichuan province became the "Landlord Manor Exhibition Hall," serving to educate people about the class struggle. Tens of thousands visited daily.  The cluster of sculptures entitled "Rent Collection Courtyard" was the subject of a documentary film and the prototype for copies of statues exhibited across the country. The overwhelming media publicity turned Liu Wencai into the representative of the "heinous crimes" of the landlord class and he became a household name, influencing several generations. Liu Xiaofei, grandson of Liu Wencai, has suffered from injustice since his childhood and began his interviews and investigations into this catastrophe for his family twenty years ago, in order to “clear” the charges against his grandfather and restore the historical truth.
 

Still from My Grandfather Liu Wencai 我的爷爷刘文彩

My Grandfather Liu Wencai 我的爷爷刘文彩

Big Characters 大字 (JU Anqi, 2015, 17min.)
Using Google Maps, one can look down from ten miles above upon a no-man’s land in eastern Xinjiang and see thirty enormous Chinese characters and an exclamation point twisting their way through the desolate Gobi Desert. Each character is the size of a football field and they form slogans from the Cultural Revolution, built with crushed stone. A secret military airport was built in just this spot in 1968, and these big characters served as its navigational markings. The camera makes its way through the characters, and there in the Utopian hallucination of the piled stones, the tidal wave of revolution that swept across the world in 1968 appears. Some waves were just beginning, while others were being extinguished.

Chinese characters on the ground from above

Big Characters 大字

What Is Art 艺术是什么 (JU Anqi, 2018, 25min.)
Fifty Chinese artists came to Xinglong County, Hebei Province, 110 kilometers away from Beijing. Here, they were asked to give their own answers to the question: what is art? The film presents varied perspectives of established and emerging artists on creativity, how the environment impacts them, and the challenges the artists have experienced from art itself and society. They demonstrate the complex relationship between art and environment, art and the individual.
 

Poster for What Is Art 艺术是什么

What Is Art 艺术是什么

Drowning Dogs During the COVID-19 Pandemic 疫情期间的落水狗 (CHEN Qiang, 2022, 27min.)
I Infected the Universe 飞天狗 (CHEN Qiang, 2022, 20min.)
Bad Days Are Like Mad Dogs 疯狗童话 (CHEN Qiang, 2023, 15min.)

The creation of this work, the first installment of Chen’s "pandemic trilogy," is, according to the filmmaker, completely "soaked” in the "disinfectant water" of the first lockdown period. The next three years were a continuous cycle of “lockdown,” “reopening,” and then “lockdown” again.  I Infected the Universe was completed during this period, while Bad Days Are Like Mad Dogs was made during the last lockdown (and edited after the filmmaker moved to New York). The sense of helplessness felt especially by the protagonist in Bad Days Are Like Mad Dogs reflects the powerlessness everyone experienced during the pandemic, facing the enormous "machine" of "pandemic prevention." 

Posters for CHEN Qiang's PANDEMIC TRILOGY

CHEN Qiang's PANDEMIC TRILOGY (2022-2023)

ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS

Director Hao Zhou
Director Hao Zhou

Hao Zhou is a filmmaker from southwest China, currently based in Ohio. Exploring queer themes and overlooked spaces, Zhou’s films have been selected by the Berlinale, Locarno, SXSW, Hot Docs, and Hong Kong IFF among other venues. Select past works include The Night (2014), Frozen Out (2021), Here, Hopefully (2023), Wouldn’t Make It Any Other Way (2024), and Like What Would Sorrow Look (2024). Zhou is an assistant professor of film at Kenyon College.

 

 

 

HE Xiaopei is an indie film director and executive director of Pink Space, a Non-Governmental Organization. As a teenager, she was a shepherd in the hills. After graduating from university, she joined the Chinese Mountaineering Team and climbed the Himalayas, on the Namcha Barwa summit. After leaving the mountaineering team, she entered the State Council as an economist, and conducted economic reform research for 14 years. From the 1990s, she devoted herself to the feminist and lesbian movement in China, and took part in the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women. Later she went to the UK to study sexuality and cultural studies. After graduating with a Ph.D degree, she returned to China to set up Pink Space, using films to represent marginalized desires and lives.

Director HE Xiaopei

Director HE Xiaopei

WANG Yuchen, born in 1994, lives and works in Shanghai. His short film Wrinkle of Shanghai was selected for the Experimental Unit of the 2015 China Independent Film Festival. Another short, Goodbye! Lingang!, was selected the 2016 Beijing Independent Film Festival. His feature-length debut, Mrs Mad Mrs Bitch Mrs Man, was a finalist in the Narrative Feature section of the 2022 South Taiwan Film Festival.

Director WANG Yuchen

Director WANG Yuchen

Director SHEN Hancheng
Director SHEN Hancheng

SHEN Hancheng is Editor-in-chief of Film Media [directube]. Shen’s documentary works have been selected in the Shanghai Youth Film Festival, Beijing Independent Film Festival, Guangdong Times Museum-Huangbian Station Exhibition Project. Since 2018 he has served as the Chinese film selector for the Beijing International Short film festival.

 

 

 

 

Directors CHEN Sisi and YANG Xiao (Badlands Film Group)
Directors CHEN Sisi and YANG Xiao (Badlands Film Group)

Badlands Film Group was founded in 2020 by YANG Xiao and CHEN Sisi as a doc duo. Their works focus on the activities and memories of marginalized communities, striving to explore their aesthetics of resistance. For example, THE MEMO documents the video activism of migrant laborers during the Shanghai lockdown period, while THE MOUNTAINS SING (10th Reel China) focuses on the tradition of improvised singing by Zhuang ethnic minority people in the midst of ecological changes.

CHEN Sisi
’s other production credits include the documentary short 14 Paintings, the narrative feature The Silent Ghost, and the narrative short A Short Dream. Additionally, she has co-initiated an image relay experiment with artists, attempting decentralized collective image creation, with the result Dreams for Awakening exhibited at the 2022 Shanghai Bund Art Museum's "Good Life" special exhibition.

YANG Xiao navigates between being an artist and a filmmaker, fiction and nonfiction, individual and collective roles, exploring the vibrant possibilities of audiovisual media. His works have been exhibited at a range of film festivals and institutions around the world. In addition, he has contributed to the production of several important art films, serving as a storyboarder, assistant director, or editor, with notable works such as Kaili Blues, The Wild Goose Lake, 14 Paintings.

CHEN Jianhang is a filmmaker from Teochew of Southern China. He was a member of the International Film Festival Rotterdam Sessions 2020. His films often blur the boundaries between documentary and fiction, focusing on the Teochew diaspora living in their homeland and scattered worldwide, exploring their living spaces and spiritual beliefs.

Director CHEN Jianhang

Director CHEN Jianhang

Director Tamding Tsering
Director Tamding Tsering

Tamding Tsering is a Tibetan filmmaker, screenwriter and photographer from the Anduo region in Qinghai province. In 2016, he directed and shot The Wind of Winter, which was his second short film. Drolma was selected for 8th Jia Village Short Film Festival, 2024.

 

 

 

 

 

Director JI Dan
Director JI Dan

JI Dan is a veteran independent filmmaker from Heilongjiang Province in Northestern China, Ji started making documentaries (The Elders and Gonbo’s Happy Life) while living in Tibet in 1994-97. In the 2000s, she made Spirit Home set in Shan’xi province, Spiral Staircase in Harbin (Reel China 2010), and When the Bough Breaks in Beijing. She began filming Baya in 2013. From 2017-2022. she participated in the national intangible cultural heritage image recording project as a documentary filmmaker, completing eight of the projects.
Ji Dan’s films have been widely showcased at film festivals to acclaim, including International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam; Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival, New York; Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival; Taiwan International Documentary Festival; Yunnan Multi Culture Visual Festival, China; Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, Japan; International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Netherlands; Gothenburg International Film Festival, Sweden; Documentary Fortnight: MOMA, New York; Millennium International Documentary Film Festival Brussels, Belgium (Best Film Award 2012); and International Women Film Festival in Seoul. She currently lives and works in Dali, Yunnan province in Southwest China.
 

Director SHI Jian
Director SHI Jian

SHI Jian has been in the forefront as a prominent figure in the Chinese television industry in the reform era for twenty years. A graduate of the Beijing Broadcasting Institute, he began working as a documentary director at China Central Television (CCTV) in 1985. In 1988, Shi began producing Tian’anmen, the 8-episode documentary series and co-founded mainland China’s first experimental film group, "SWYC" (Structure • Wave • Youth • Cinema). In 1991, he organized the "Beijing New-Documentary Forum," where the "New- Documentary Movement Manifesto," drafted by SWYC, was announced. This marked the beginning of China’s nationwide New Documentary Movement, focusing on the development of realist documentaries. In 1993, He co-founded the news magazine program “Oriental Horizon.” Other ground-breaking programs he initiated include China's first talk show, “Tell It Like It Is” and “China Law Report.” His independently made films include Chongqing Red Guard Cemetery and My Grandfather Liu Wencai.

JU Anqi is a world-renowned film director and artist, Ju’s works have entered more than forty international film festivals and have shown at top global art institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York, MOMA in New York, and The Center Pompidou in Paris. His debut film There’s a Strong Wind in Beijing (2000) screened at the 50th Berlin International Film Festival and would later become a milestone in Chinese experimental cinema. His 2008 documentary Night in China won the Jury Prize at the 39th Visions du Reel. His 2015 fiction film Poet on a Business Trip premiered at the 44th International Film Festival Rotterdam and won Best Asian Film Award there, as well as the highest award at the 16th Jeonju International Film Festival in South Korea. His latest fiction film, A Trophy on The Sea, won three major prizes at the 3rd Pingyao International Film Festival in China. Since 2019, Ju has been working on the “Chinese Architectural Heritage Trilogy,” the first-ever documentary films about Chinese architectural heritage. Building, the first installment of this trilogy, was finished in 2022.

Director JU Anqi

Director JU Anqi

CHEN Qiang began creating a trilogy of experimental art work: Putrefying, Follow and Heart in 2005. His prolific multimedia works range from, and often combine, experimental film, sound art, performance art, experimental video games, independent animation, mash-up media art, sculpture, theatre, and picture books. He has done exhibitions and academic exchanges with the Dusseldorf City Culture Bureau, Germany; the Auckland Polytechnic University and Ocalan Art Gallery, New Zealand, and in France and in Macau. Chen’s works are collected widely in the North Carolina University Library, the Columbia University Library, and the Dusseldorf City Culture Bureau, Germany, the Li Xianting Film Fund, Hong Kong Arts Centre, and Auckland Polytechnic University, and Sichuan University. https://www.chenqiangart.top/

Director CHEN Qiang

Director CHEN Qiang