Spent the whole day in the university editing suite putting together clips for Xie fei's masterclass. I also managed to watch Xie Fei's Girl from Hunan on video. It is an incredibly powerful film about a twelve year old girl who is married off to a two year old boy in a remote village at the turn of the century. They grow up more like brother and sister than husband and wife, but then the girl, Xiao Xiao, transgresses the clan rules by having an affair with a farm hand, which is shown through soem very inventive metaphoric staging, and becomes terrified at being found out after she witnesses another woman being drowned for committing a similar crime. At the end of the film she perpetuates the cycle of abuse by marrying off her son to a young girl. Somehow i managed to get a part time job at the Languages and Humanities Centre whilst hanging around there. I start on Monday straight after the festival! A theme is slowly starting to emerge from the festival. Almost all films are about sexual repression in various ways, not least Vive L'Amour, a masterful almost wordless drama about supressed homosexual impulses developed by a man (Lee Kang-Sheng) who steals the key to an empty apartment and spies on the sales agent and her lover having sex. I also love the fact that after seeing Tsai Ming-liang's films you can never take a watermelon seriously again - watch it and see. Perhaps this theme is the reason why i like Chinese cinema so much. Its comforting to know that there are over a billion people out there who are as repressed as me (homosexuality excluded of course).
I missed the UK Premier of Zhang Yimou's Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles to do some research on Xie Fei for the interview tomorrow. Alexander saw it and said he had not been so moved by a film in ages. I hope i get to see it soon.
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