Vancouver International Film Festival 2007

Review by John Packman.

Diao Yinan's film Night Train belongs to that blackest strain of comedy, the kind which coaxes its laughs from situations so painful that laughter is almost a defensive response. The film concerns an ennui-stricken woman (Liu Dan) employed by a particularly grim division of the Chinese government and a man (Qi Dao) who is ostracized by nearly everyone for reasons both circumstantial and personal. The two misfits act out their frustrations through a number of arbitrary sexual dalliances before another cruel twist of fate brings them together. What results is a strained simulacrum of a relationship that is shot through with an odd mixture of antipathy and desparate need.

As the film piles on layers of exposition and character development, its tone slowly veers from darkly comic to darkly... dark, and begins to take a hard look at the myriad forms of isolation experienced by its protagonists, whether figurative or literal. The acting is capable across the board, but the real star of Night Train is its fluid and vibrant cinematography, which slowly and deliberately pulls away from the nightclubs and apartments of provincial China to reveal an incredibly stark post-industrial landscape that resembles nothing so much as a sci-fi dystopia as imagined by Edward Burtynsky. This backdrop handily serves to reinforce the general malaise on display and underscore the yawning distance between two lonely people trying to connect. Depressing, sure, but who cares when it looks this cool?

Night Train
Diao Yi'nan | China | 2007 | 91min

Mon. Oct. 8 | 9:15pm | Empire Granville Theatre
Wed. Oct. 10 | 12:00pm | Empire Granville Theatre

Review by Gorrman Lee.

Director Li Yu’s Lost In Beijing tells an odd story of love, lust, rape, extortion, child bearing, and kidnapping. The plot sounds dark, but Li Yu manages to inject a lot of humour into this “dramedy”.

The boss of a massage-parlour, Lin Dong, stumbles into one of the massage rooms one day to find Liu Pingguo, one of his employees, drunk on the bed. Pingguo is madly in love with her husband, window washer An Kun, and is drunkenly fantasizing about the sex they had the previous night. When Lin Dong tries to remove Pingguo before a customer can see her in her drunken state, Pingguo begins to make advances at her boss, mistaking him for her husband. Now aroused, Lin Dong takes advantage of the situation and rapes Pingguo - while An Kun the window washer watches from outside. He now sees an opportunity to extort Lin Dong for money, essentially asking for money in exchange for not reporting the rape to the police.

I won’t spoil the rest of the story, but I will say that the film touches on an important issue in mainland Chinese culture. It seems that throughout the film, Pingguo is just being screwed around but the men in her life. In fact, all of the women in the film are just being screwed around. An Kun uses his wife’s rape as an excuse to get money, never once thinking about how it might affect her. When he negotiates a deal with Lin Dong, the two men basically plan out Pingguo’s life without ever asaking her what she wants. All the while Lin Dong’s own wife witnesses everything. The film is truly about the evil that men do to women, and given how Chinese culture is especially patriarchal, this film should speak to many women.

Aside from its powerful approach to important issues, Lost In Beijing gets lost in between two genres. It is far too comedic to be a serious drama, and even too overtop to be considered a dramedy (or dark comedy), yet it is too dark to be a light-hearted comedy. That said, if you are prepared to laugh as much as you will cry, you will really enjoy this film.

Lost in Beijing
Li Yu | China | 2007 | 113min

Thur. Oct. 4 | 9:30pm | Ridge Theatre
Mon. Oct. 8 | 11:30am | Empire Granville Theatre
Thur. Oct. 11 | 9:30pm | Empire Granville Theatre

Review by Richard Toews.

When a theatre full of high school students sits quietly enthralled by a movie with subtitles, and laughs at all the right places, one can only conclude that the movie is a hit. Zhang Yang’s Getting Home, is definitely a hit.

Getting Home is a delightful and bittersweet tale of a man trying to fulfill a promise made to his recently deceased friend/workmate to return his body to his home village at Three Gorges Dam for burial. This journey of unusual twists and turns also begins in a most unusual manner. Zhao Benshan, the hero, books two seats on a coach, one for himself and one for the corpse, which Benshan fobs off as a drunken passenger sleeping it off. When Benshan and his dead friend are removed from the coach, he continues the journey as best he can, carrying the body on his back. Benshan meets generous and equally quirky people who help him along the way, and each meeting allows Benshan to share something he has learned about life. He also learns from the people he meets, such as the man who stages his own funeral simply to see who would come. Turns out that most of the “friends” are paid mourners (Benshan is the most genuine mourner). But even this allows the not-dead man a moment for dispensing wisdom to Benshan. Others along the way include a lovelorn trucker, a woman who scavenges to pay for her son’s education, and a family that collects honey and lives in a van.

The point of a journey is usually its end, but, in Getting Home, the ending provides the final irony. Death is supposed to have a certain logic to it - you live, you die, and you are buried. In the case of Benshan’s friend, death is supposed to get him home, but the Three Gorges Dam, China’s economic miracle and the dead man’s home, raises serious questions about what it means to have a home. Home is the common theme of all of Benshan’s encounters. In each case, their individual stories revolve around themes of family and community, nurturing the soul, and longing and hope. But, with the discovery that Benshan’s friend’s home has been destroyed, that there will be no burial in the ancestral home, it seems that honour, the life-blood of the people of rural China, has no capital in the new China, and people are left to carry their dead dreams and aspirations on their backs.

Getting Home
Zhang Yang | China | 2007 | 97min

Fri. Sept. 28 | 7:00pm | Ridge Theatre
Thur. Oct. 4 | 1:00pm | Empire Granville Theatre

Review by Kiefer Doerksen.

Mid-Afternoon Barks by director Zhang Yuedong is either a rapturous or alienating film depending on how you like your cinema served up. There are three stories: a shepherd abandons his flock to travel to a nearby village; a repairman cannot find work; and a farmer sells watermelons. None are connected by narrative and all feature little in the way of drama. Dialogue is sparse; each character goes about his daily life until it comes time for all of them, together, to plant a large wooden pole in the ground. The contemplative nature of the film is both an asset and a curse.

The director uses a DV camera that creates a feeling of hyper-reality. Some of the images are beautifully shot, including the opening scene where three men try to erect a pole in the snow. However, the shots are mainly static and do little to quicken the pace of the film. You learn just about as much about the characters in the film as you would passing by them in the street. In a short Q&A after the screening, the director was asked about the significance of the film’s title. He replied that it was suggested by a filmmaking friend who noticed the barking in the soundtrack. The “mid-afternoon” portion came from the time the crew usually woke up each day. He did not discuss the themes of the film and said there was really no story. What is the significance of the raising of the wooden poles? Do any of the characters go through any real change? The film’s meditative tone could simply be matched by taking a walk outside.

Mid-Afternoon Barks
Zhang Yuedong | China | 2007 | 77min

Tue. Oct. 2 | 7:00pm | VanCity Theatre
Wed. Oct. 3 | 1:15pm | VanCity Theatre

Review by Cameron Maitland.

When I’d heard that VIFF programmed an experimental, one-take 63-minute long “feature” like Kim Jong-Guk’s Obbah, I was overjoyed to see that they were expanding their scope to include non-traditional narratives. After seeing the film though, it’s obvious the festival doesn’t program experimental works because it has little-to-no standard for them. In film school, I sat through Derek Jarman’s 79-minute blue screen, Micheal Snow’s 49-minute zoom and Kenneth Anger’s 39-minute silent acid trips but I’ve never felt as disinterested and assaulted by nonsense as I did watching Obbah.

The video follows a flaneur camera as it voyeuristically meanders during a farmer’s rally at Seoul Station. The ‘plot’ follows five characters: a mumbling (un-subtitled) street musician, a silent old street preacher and a couple running and the old friend they run into. The majority of the action centers around the friends as they slowly, awkwardly and melodramatically reveal the secret tensions within their relationship. Most of the plot points are moot though as the subtitling is so bad it skips over engrish into complete unintelligibility. My Korean friend who also attended was quick to assure that the bad sound and uninteresting plot points weren’t just a product of the language barrier.

When Jong-Guk took the stage after the film he revealed the liberal use of basic film ‘don’ts’ within the movie such as not thinking of the story first, deciding the plot based on budget and using the rehearsal as the final cut rather than trying another take. With his long take being the only experiment—and an oft-used one in art film—and his narrative being hack-work the only interest and amusement came from passersby running out of the way of his camera or staring straight into it, not knowing what was going on. With Obbah, Jong-Guk tried to get the best of both the narrative and experimental worlds but. in trying to make his film both of these things. he managed to do neither successfully.

Obbah: A Girl's Elder Brother
Kim Jong-Guk | South Korea | 2007 | 63min

Mon. Oct. 1 | 9:30pm | VanCity Theatre
Tues. Oct. 2 | 3:45pm | VanCity Theatre

Review by Cameron Maitland.

First-time director Robin Weng turns the lens of his first feature on his home in China, the embattled Fujian province. Jumping off from the well-publicized deaths of illegal Fujianese workers in Morecambe, Fujian Blue interweaves two tales of people from the province, which faces trouble from being along the Taiwanese border as well as being the epicentre of the so-called “golden triangle of illegal immigration”.

The first story “Neon Knights” follows a group of young hoodlums spending most of their time partying and financing their partying through blackmail (mostly of women who are cheating on their husbands working overseas). When the pseudo-leader of the gang, the aptly titled Amerika, decides he’s tired of his mother’s philandering ways he sets his own gang on her without realizing her connections to the Fujianese underworld. The second story “At home, At sea” follows Dragon, a friend of Amerika’s, as he moves home after stabbing someone and his subsequent attempts to emigrate. When he is left with some ill-gotten money from Amerika, he must choose between saving his family from debt or using it for personal gain.

Both sparse plots serve as miniature sociological parables examining the circumstances for illegal activity and emigration in the province. While this choice leaves the characterizations thin and the plot sparse, the visual elements of the film more than make up the difference. Weng focuses visually on the scenes of rural decay and urban decadence in the province and his camera points out the ironies of the anti-stowaway propaganda covering almost every wall in the cities. Combine all of this with naturalistic acting and Weng has created a compelling portrait of the motivations and pressures facing the people of Fujian.

Fujian Blue
Robin Weng | China | 2007 | 87min

Mon. Oct. 1 | 7:00pm | VanCity Theatre
Tue. Oct. 3 | 1:15pm | VanCity Theatre
**JUST ADDED** Sat. Oct. 6 | 10:45am | VanCity Theatre

Review by Richard Toews.

In his first feature documentary, Yu Guangyi returns to his home in Heilongjiang (the former Manchuria, now Northeast China), where he joins a gang of timber cutters in the Black Bear Valley, some 1,600 meters above sea level. Guangyi should not be judged for his lack of training as a filmmaker, which is quickly evident; instead, Guangyi should be praised for presenting an unsanitized story that is gripping, bringing viewers face to face with the power of film to touch lives.

In his simple yet effective style, Guangyi avoids the impulse to give us a cliché ridden didactic account. Guangyi lets the community of men tell their story, which is at best reminiscent of a Dickensian world. Life lived in this community is hostile. And yet the men find enough in their harsh lives to banter as they eat and sleep around a primitive brick oven.

The finesse of the professional documentarain is markedly absent as Guangyi, who at no time pulls his punches. The images are visceral. Logging in the Black Bear Valley is far from modern - labour is intensive, transportation of logs by horse is primitive, and life seems to be uncertain and cheap. Six of the eight horses in the camp are worked to death. One cannot help but wonder at the fragility of life for these workers; at the end of this particular season, logging in the Black Bear Valley had come to an end, which marked the beginning of disruption of the loggers livelihood.

Timber Gang
Yu Guangyi | China | 2007 | 90min

Sun. Sept. 30 | 9:30pm | VanCity Theatre
Mon. Oct. 1 | 3:45pm | VanCity Theatre

Review by Sunny Oh.

You’ll watch Ying Liang’s The Other Half not for the protagonist’s story, but for its context and its secondary plotlines. Clunky acting in poignant moments and predictable plotlines prevent the audience from empathizing with the protagonist Xiaofen, a young woman struggling to deal with her match-making mother and her difficult boyfriend.

Rather, the interesting stories come from the people -mostly women - who file into the law firm where Xiaofen works and narrate their life stories and problems. Their stories demonstrate the self-absorption and petty bitterness that arise when social networks disintegrate. The topics cover everything from adolescent rebellion and financial corruption, to polygamy and revenge.

As a backdrop to the squabbling citizens of Yigong City, a local chemical plant struggles to manage its industrial accidents. The plant and its troubles provide a glimpse into the environmental costs of China’s rapid industrialization. The Other Half provides frank images into the urban ugliness of contemporary China.

The Other Half
Ying Liang | China | 2006 | 111min

Thur. Sept. 27 | 7:15pm | Empire Granville Theatre
Sun. Sept. 30 | 11:00am | Pacific Cinemathque

Review by Richard Toews.

In Useless Jia Zhangke turns his cinematic eye on the production of clothing in China. The result is a story in three parts, equally distanced and yet intricately linked. Each story organically blends itself into the next.

The film begins with a visual masterpiece of lighting and colour as we are ushered into one of China’s many large-scale clothing factories. The profound reality is the disconnect between people and their social reality. Here the workers fully experience alienation from both their labour and their social surroundings.

Set in tension against the large-scale manufacture is Ma Ke, a clothing designer whose passion is to infuse life into her designs. Indeed, “things made in China don’t feel right,” she says. The irony, however, is that for things to feel right in China, one must go to Paris, to the centre. It is an odd journey she makes, when, for Ma Ke, the fundamental essence of what it is to be Chinese is to return to memory. Memory of what, one might ask, when western models legitimate her Chinese fashions.

The final story, introduced by Ma Ke, embraces the memory she - and presumably Zhange - holds dear. Jia returns to his hometown of Fenyang. Here we see a way of life still lived out in a rural China where clothing has a pragmatic function and nothing more.

The title of the film is borrowed from Ma Ke’s clothing label, but the film is anything but useless. Honing in on the functionality of clothing, Useless becomes an intelligent examination of life in the context of social interaction between individuals who produce clothing as well as between these people and what they produce.

Useless
Jia Zhangke | China | 2007 | 80min

Sat. Sept. 29 | 12:30pm | Empire Granville Theatre
Mon. Oct. 1 | 9:45 | Empire Granville Theatre
Thur. Oct. 4 | 3:30pm | Empire Granville Theatre