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On a 1980s evening, the topmost clown-actor of the 20th century Sichuan opera, Qiu Fu passes away in an accident and half-unwillingly sets off for the Ghost City under the escort of two underworld officials. Along the way, he meets old friends. As they recall the past, a history of the living is conjured up.
Qiu Jiongjiong's stark black-and-white series of interviews with transsexual cabaret singer Madame Bi Langda. Madame Bi's recollections of past experiences explicitly touch on how she performs her way through life, whether interacting with friends, lovers or her audience. More than a document of the increasingly complicated gender identity politics in China, it's also a poignant testimony of a life dedicated to articulating the aesthetics of living.
Part of Qiu Jiongjiong’s 'chatterbox' oral history trilogy, this short documentary focuses on current storyteller and ex-cop Huang Songnian. Qiu playfully splices montage cuts between Huang’s wildly entertaining, sometimes very dark stories of intrepid forensic police work (including a super queasy tale of maggots and a body, and another of rural cannibalism), and disruptive yet oddly suitable Sichuan opera excerpts, pigeon portraits, and Qiu’s charming chalk drawings.
First film by director Qiu Jiongjiong -- about a restauranteur, his patrons, and the culture of art, poetry, and performance that surrounds them.
An essential background for Qiu Jiongjiong’s recent A New Old Play, this dazzlingly playful short documentary remixes a Sichuan opera company’s dress rehearsal for its tribute to Qiu Fuxin, the director’s grandfather – who was a legendary opera performer of 'clown' comedic roles, and the real-life subject of A New Old Play. This exuberant celebration of a not-yet-lost past re-activates the memories of ageing, but irrepressibly vital, stage artists.
Zhang Xianchi is a man thrown into the Cultural Revolution and its afterimage, plunged into the ideological deadlocks of the era and suffering its consequences beyond it. Born into a family that supports the nationalist Kuomintang, Zhang eventually became a leftist and joined the Communist Party. But his family’s background eventually catches up with him, and in a series of bureaucratic measures, he is labelled as a Rightist, leading to a slew of irrational yet life-affecting consequences. His story is told through an exhilarating hybrid of forms, blending documentary-styled interviews and spectral theatrical displays within an ever-mutating studio-space. Hypnagogic in its imagery and ironic in attitude, Mr. Zhang Believes is a tour-de-force treatise of a man caught within dogmatic political maneuverings, which it critiques indirectly with creative and stoic fervour.
The film continues to blend myths, legends, literature and folktales to further expand his narrative of history and weird tales. The story, set in Sichuan cuisine, is divided into four parts: a funeral banquet more than 4,000 years ago in which a grandmother cuts off her own tail to give to her children and grandchildren; a Spring Festival more than 3,000 years ago in which an ancestor king returns in the guise of a bird and is crucified at the banquet; a Mid-Autumn feast in the 1990s in which the gods gather to pay tribute to a millennia-old poet; and a birthday banquet in which a wandering child meets the gods of the underworld .
Through deeply personal interviews with her siblings and an examination of the photographs, letters, and belongings left behind, Mariska assembles a new portrait of her mother Jayne Mansfield, an extraordinary and complex woman.
Director Michael Apted revisits the same group of British-born adults after a 7 year wait. The subjects are interviewed as to the changes that have occurred in their lives during the last seven years.
In an intimate and joyful story of love in the face of loss, celebrated poets Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley find strength—and unexpected hilarity—in what might be their final year together.