Tian Zhuangzhuang's The Go Master
If China is economically a crouching tiger, then it is also culturally something of a hidden dragon. Its indigenous movies enjoy increasing success domestically, with the annual revenue of its motion picture industry rising 25 per cent each year since 2002 (15 per cent higher than the annual rise in its gross national product) – but those Chinese films that have had any release at all on these shores have tended to be confined to chopsocky shenanigans or wuxia epics.
London's Institute of Contemporary Arts has been trying to redress this skewed view of Chinese cinema since the 1980s, when it championed films from the Chinese New Wave like The Yellow Earth and The Horse Thief – and now, with the torch relay due in London on the 6th April as it makes its way to the Chinese Summer Olympics, the ICA (in association with Film London, the China State Film Bureau and the Mayor of London) is running its own marathon event, Spotlight Beijing, in celebration of the diversity of Chinese filmmaking. From March 20 to April 10, there will be a season of a dozen Chinese features, as well as a series of international shorts focused on Beijing.
Highlights of Spotlight Beiijing include an extended release of The Go Master (2006), the latest film from one of China's most acclaimed 'fifth generation' directors, Tian Zhuangzhuang. Dramatising the way in which Chinese-born Wu Qingyuan found peace, friendship and spiritual enlightenment in Japanese Go tournaments last century, during three of the most turbulent decades of Sino-Japanese relations, it is a biopic full of great delicacy, stillness and poetic grace. Alongside this there is a retrospective of four other Zhuangzhuang films: The Horse Thief (1986), The Blue Kite (1993), Springtime In A Small Town (2002) and the documentary Delamu (2004).
Amongst the newer films, there will be a gala showing of Hao Ning's comic crime caper Crazy Stone (2006), with the director and cast present for a Q&A session, plus screenings of Jacob Chang's manga-based period action epic A Battle Of Wits (2006), Qi Jian's woodlands revenge thriller The Forest Ranger (2006), and the Shanghai-set portmanteau film 3 City Hotshots (2007), with episodes directed by Li Xin, Wu Tiange and Mao Xiaorui.
Rounding off the festival are three documentaries. Hasi Chaolu's The Old Barber (2006) records the daily life of a 93-year-old Beijing haircutter who devotes his free time to working on an ancient clock. The Secret Trip (2006) collects previously unseen archival footage and newsreels concerned with China's postwar diplomatic missions and the experiences of Communist politician Zhou Enlai. A Great Master Recaptured (2006) offers an archival portrait of the twentieth century's most important Beijing Opera master.
For more details about Spotlight Beijing, as well as many of the other Chinese cultural events taking place throughout London during March and April, visit:
