Cinema China Festival Unveiled

I've been dying to make a post about this for weeks now, but have been sworn to secrecy (not that this blog is exactly a hub of activity - I'm going to have to try harder to drum up an audience). This morning, rather yesterday morning as I am writing this past midnight, saw the launch of Cinema China '07, the biggest festival of Chinese cinema ever held in Britain. I have been involved with it for a little under a year now, after meeting the co-director Mark Cousins whilst studying my MSc at Edinburgh University (the other director is my old tutor Dr Dorota Ostrowska). I worked first as a print researcher, then a general researcher and copy editor, and I even helped to compile the clip reel shown during the launch with my housemate, which seemed to go down very well, and included such stylistic audacities as cutting between Spring in a Small Town and In the Mood for Love, with Shigeru Umebayashi's music playing over both.

Over the year it has been a pleasure to see the festival grow from a mere outline to something of such magnitude; 26 films, spanning 80 years and touring 20 UK cities, with special guests including the wonderful Maggie Cheung and the filmmaker Xie Fei, whose rarely seen works chronicle the social problems of modern China with a striking degree of frank realism. For more information on the programme, which spans films from action (One-Armed Swordsman and A Touch of Zen) to melodrama (Love Eterne) and everything in between, visit: http://www.cinemachina.org.uk/

Of course the nature of such an event, supported as it is by the Beijing Film Academy and to be documented by China Central Television (CCTV) for a predicted audience of 20 million(!), might suggest political compromises had to be made. On the contrary, at the heart of the festival is a programme of films chosen with passion and verve within the positively unpolitical spirit of internationalism. It is an act of outreach on a very human, rather than geo-political, level; as Mark Cousins says there is no better way to learn about a country than through its films. That said, the programme is incredibly daring in its selection of films that courageously broach topics such as sexuality and politics. The fact that the film Yellow Earth, the key work of the famous 5th generation directors of the Beijing Film Academy, is being shown for the first time in a generation despite its significance and despite the fact that it is still - I think - banned in China demonstrates the good faith in which everyone has acted. This is not an easy film to track down (I know because at one point I was the one trying to find it - its amazing how such major films can disappear without a trace into the vague matrix of cinematic distribution) and like many of the films on offer (like such classics as the 1940s melodrama Spring in a Small Town or the Hong Kong proto New Wave film The Arch) it is a rare, possibly exceptional, opportunity to see this masterpiece on the big screen.

The festival will serve to construct a tentative cannon in the minds of the British audience and will paint a broad outline of the history of cinema in the three Chinas (Mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan), making it an unbeatable and timely introduction to a national cinema that is crying out to be discovered in the West, following the recent successes of films like Hero. By displaying the nation's riches the festival will show how the medium has been innovated by Chinese artists; from the pictorial beauty and brilliant visual storytelling of Zhang Yimou - a focus in the festival - to the devastating atmosphere of ennui and alienation evoked by of Jia Zhang Ke and Tsai Ming-liang, via the sumptuous formalism of Wong Kar-wai, who is surely one of the great poets in cinema and certainly one of its only impressionists. As Mark Cousins maintains "If we have one aim, it is that audiences will get to know the scale and beauty of Chinese language film and, through it, an insight into China and its people."

Of course the most exceptional thing is that Maggie Cheung, one of the most beautiful, multi-talented and fascinating actresses in the world, will be in attendance. Apparently she has even been brushing up on her scots, emailing Mark only yesterday to say 'cannae wait'. Neither can we.