For those in L.A. or California, stop voting right now and go to the AFI festival for a four film retro on one of the most interesting Chinese filmmakers of these year -- Jia Zhang Ke.

Afi Festival
presents a special
program of 4 films produced by award- winning Chinese director Jia Zhangke’s production company, Xstream

In 1996, three young men met during the Hong Kong Independent Short Film and Video Awards, struck a friendship and decided to make films together: filmmakers Jia Zhangke and Yu Likwai, and curator Chow Keung. Yu opened a small company, Hu Tong Communications, in Hong Kong (thus bypassing Chinese censorship), that produced Jia’s Xiao Wu (1997), Platform (2000) and Unknown Pleasures (2002). Yu shot all of Jia’s pictures, while pursuing a career as an independent DP and directing his own features. In 2003, Jia, Chow and Yu founded Xstream Pictures, still in Hong Kong. Then, Jia, who had worked outside of China’s official production system, negotiated to be integrated in the mainstream, which happened with The World (2004) – so, in 2006, a branch of Xstream Pictures opened in Beijing. As Jia had become a very public advocate of Chinese independent cinema, Xstream picture became a conduit to produce the work of other young directors – a matrix of energy and talent. Major international consecration came with the Golden Lion awarded to Jia’s Still Life in 2006 – and 2008 is another glamorous year, with Xstream Pictures launching four films: Jia’s 24 City, Yu’s Plastic City, and two gems to discover – Emily Tang’s second feature, Perfect Life and a brand new short by Jia, Cry Me A River.
We are proud to present this quartet of films – a testimony of the creativity of courage of young filmmakers joining forces to change the media landscape around them.
Program curated by Bérénice Reynaud

For Schedule information and to book tickets, go to: http://www.afi.com/

Jia Zhangke’s 24 CITY
Mon. Nov 3, 3:00 pm, Arclight 14
Sat. Nov 8, 7:00 pm, Arclight 14

Emily Tang’s PERFECT LIFE
(plays with Jia Zhangke’s CRY ME A RIVER)
Mon. Nov 3, 7:00 pm, Arclight 14
Sat. Nov 8, 3:45 pm, Arclight 14

Yu Likwai’s PLASTIC CITY
Mon. Nov 3, 10:00 pm, Arclight 14
Sat. Nov 8, 12:00 pm, Arclight 14

24 CITY
ER SHI SI CHENG JI
Homage to Xstream
(China, 2008, 107 mins)
Screenwriter(s) : Zhai Yongming, Jia ke
Directed By: Jia Zhangke

Cast: Joan Chen, Zhao Tao, Chen Jianbin, Lu Liping
Producers: Jia Zhangke, Shozo Ichiyama, Wang Hong
Executive Producers: Chow Keung, Ren Zhonglun, Tang Yong
Director of Photography: Yu Likwai, Wang Yu
Editors: Lin Xudong, Kong Jinlei
Music: Lim Giong
Sound Design: Zhang Yang
Production Design: Liu Qiang

Jia Zhangke goes one (magnificent) step further in his idiosyncratic exploration of both the thin border between documentary and fiction and the self-imposed destruction experienced by China in her march toward a free-market economy. Though factories were once the temples in which socialism was built, with their workers treated as heroes, they are now being dismantled all over the country, and thousands of their employees laid off. Jia documents the closing of the “420” factory (once an airplane engine plant, with military implications) to build a luxury apartment complex, “24 City,” on its site, in Sichuan’s capital city of Chengdu. You see a sign being dragged over gravel, a building imploding as workers are singing “The Internationale”—but mostly you hear the stories, covering a 50-year period, of the people whose lives have revolved around the factory. Among unrehearsed interviews of real workers or ex-workers, Jia inserts staged vignettes: Joan Chen recounts her romantic loneliness as a Shanghai woman exiled in Chengdu; Lu Liping (THE BLUE KITE) remembers losing her little boy in the long trip from Shenyang. Zhao Tao (Jia’s muse) is an apparently cynical, ambitious young woman saddened by the fate of her aging working-class parents. This masterpiece sharply addresses the dilemmas of our changing times. –Bérénice Reynaud

PERFECT LIFE (plays with CRY ME A RIVER)
WAMMEI SHENHUO
Homage to Xstream
(China , Hong Kong, 2008, 97 mins)
North American Premiere
Screenwriter(s) : Emily Tang
Directed By: Emily Tang

Cast: Yao Qianyu, Cheng Taisheng, Jenny Tse
Producers: Chow Keung, Jia Zhangke, Li Xiudong
Director of Photography: Lai Yiu-Fai
Editor: Chow Keung
Production Design: Lam Ching

Emily Tang's second film confirms what was already striking in her debut, CONJUGATION (2001): a gift for combining minute, mundane details to suggest a larger story (in this case, a tale of globalization, internal exile and loss). She interweaves the fates of two young women who never meet, except briefly in a street market in the New Economic Zone of Shenzhen. Born in the dreary northeastern town of Fushun, Li Yueying is one of these 600 million Chinese women whose lives apparently do not matter. She’s uneducated, unskilled and repressed—but, in her burning desire for change, hops on trains, switches jobs and tempts fate. Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, Jenny experiences the collapse of her dreams, as her marriage to a local man is ending in divorce and financial hardship. One woman will move south, the other north. Is Shenzhen the city of broken dreams or mysterious survival? Switching to documentary mode, Tang shoots assembly lines of young female workers in toy factories, sometimes capturing a defiant smile amidst the boredom and fatigue. Composing, through light, impressionist touches, an intimate and complex picture of the female condition in China, PERFECT LIFE reasserts Tang as an original, insightful and highly talented director. – Bérénice Reynaud

CRY ME A RIVER (precedes PERFECT LIFE)
HESHANG DE AIQING
Homage to Xstream
(China , Spain , France, 2008, 19 mins)
North American Premiere
Screenwriter(s) : Jia Zhangke
Directed By: Jia Zhangke

Cast: Hao Lei, Zhao Tao, Wang Hongmei, Guo Xiaodong
Producers: Eva Lam, Zhang Dong
Executive Producer: Jia Zhangke
Director of Photography: Wang Yu

Jia stages this exquisite film-poem over the romantic canals of the historic city of Suzhou during a 10-year reunion of university friends. They used to be poets or writers; now they discuss investment banking. One of them, the editor of a doomed literary magazine, had written, “The end of our generation does not mean the fall of our generation.” If they are not falling, maybe they’re flowing—with the passing of time, the withering away of youth—toward melancholia, middle age, unrequited longing, flowing away and losing themselves. –Bérénice Reynaud

PLASTIC CITY
DANGKOU
Homage to Xstream
(Brazil , China, 2008, 118 mins)
In Portuguese, Mandarin with English subtitles
US Premiere
Screenwriter(s) : Yu Likwai, Fernando Bonassi, Liu Fendou
Directed By: Yu Likwai

Cast: Joe Odagiri, Anthony Wong, Huang Yi, Tainá Müller, Jeff Chen
Producers: Fabiano Gullane, Caio Gullane, Chow Keung, Jia Zhang-ke, Yuji Sadai, Tsui Siu Ming
Executive Producers: Caio Gullane, Rui Pires, André Montenegro, Tom Cheung
Director of Photography: Lai Yiu Fai
Editor: Wenders Li
Music: Yoshihiro Hanno
Production Design: Cássio Amarante

Yu Lik-wai, the cinematographer-poet of postindustrial spaces (LOVE WILL TEAR US APART, ALL TOMORROW'S PARTIES) turns his unbridled visual imagination toward Brazil’s thick jungles and multicultural metropolises through the complex father-son relationship of aging Chinese gangster Yuda (the great Hong Kong actor Anthony Wong, recently seen in Johnny To’s THE EXILES) and Kirin, the young Japanese man he raised (Japanese heartthrob Joe Odagiri). Unfolding the many layers (and many languages) of its narrative at an alluring rhythm, PLASTIC CITY takes the viewer on a roller coaster journey of striking visual images (one idea per shot), including a bloody swordfight and massacre above São Paulo’s spectacular skyline. Territorial feuds and racial rivalries (between Chinese, Japanese and Brazilians from every fraction of the ethnic rainbow) are enacted in impoverished slums, mean streets, industrial waterfronts, dark nightclubs and postmodern shopping malls against a colorful background of unemployed thugs, crafty gangsters turned businessmen, wise-cracking street kids, cynical longshoremen, corrupt politicians and sexy bar girls with feelings. The hearts of men are no less treacherous than the architectural maze of the city, the intoxicating heat of the jungle or the mesmerizing eyes of a white tiger that, as Indians say, will bring you death if gazed at for too long ... –Bérénice Reynaud