Queer Films @ Crossroads Centre

春节的活动
Spring Festival Events at the Crossroads Centre

中文信息：请查看 http://weibo.com/crossroadcoffee

If you’re staying in Beijing over the holidays, come to the Crossroads Centre, where we’ll be showing films and having talks by directors. The films will be in Mandarin Chinese with English subtitles.

Entrance: 40RMB (student rate 30RMB), including a beer or hot drink. Drinks and snacks will be available to buy.

To secure your place, please RSVP at the following email address: hello@jiaochadian.org (On the 31st, Yang Lina will only be present if 20 people confirm their attendance in advance).

Please spread the word, hope to see you there!

Address: No.18 Da Shiqiao Hutong, Jiu Gulou Dajie, Xicheng Disctrict / 北京市西城区旧鼓楼大街大石桥胡同18号

Directions: Come out of GulouDajie station exit G, then cross the road and pretty much opposite is Dashiqiao Hutong. Walk down about 5 minutes until you see the Crossroads Centre on the left (literally at the crossroads).

Schedule (For Film Descriptions See Below)

Saturday Feb 1

4pm – Our Children

7pm – Big Fog + Q&A with Han Tao

 

Sunday Feb 2

4pm – Civil Investigation

7pm – Next Generation + Q&A with film makers

 

Monday Feb 3

4pm – Lethe

7pm – Surviving Evil

 

Tuesday Feb 4

4pm – One Tree, Three Lives

7pm – Siberian Butterfly

 

Wednesday Feb 5

4pm – Last Train Home

7pm – Blind Shaft

 

Thursday Feb 6

4pm – Queer China, ‘Comrade’ China + Q&A with LBT activist Xu Bin

7pm – Silent Summer

Film Introductions:

The Next Generation
Does your past determine your future? Does your sexual orientation influence your hopes and dreams? What is love? Come and hear the answers given by Chinese students in this fascinating documentary.

Lao An/ The Love of Mr. An
This small-scale Chinese documentary by Yang Lina is an intimate look at relationships and while it is culturally specific in some ways, the unexpected emotional drama that unfolds is universal. Lao An is a slightly rumpled but charming eighty-nine-year-old Chinese man. He loves to dance at the neighbourhood park, where locals crank up a big speaker and spend hours doing the latest ballrooms dancing moves. It was at the park that he met Xiao Wei, a woman in her early fifties, unglamorous but with a grand appreciation of the possibilities of life. The Love of Mr An is a small powerful film and while it makes no grand pronouncements about life it is most profound.

Lao Tou / Old Men
In an ordinary community of Beijing, there is a group of elderly people who go out on time every day, as if to go to work. They gather under a tree in summers, and enjoy sunlight in winters. The routine of their day, sicknesses, and deaths are captured by the camera, and as time goes on, members of the group are replaced by new people.

Wild Grass
A bracingly unsentimental take on emotionally-charged material, Chinese-French co-production “Wild Grass” (“Ye cao”) documents a group of orphans over 12 years. The circumstances faced by Hongjun and his friends have clearly been very tough, sometimes horrifically so, as when one hapless passer-by is casually identified as having had had his arms chopped off by a crazed parent. But the sense of camaraderie amid the “struggle” is palpable throughout: They are “all in it together … brought together by mistake.”
Yang and Stephen’s no-nonsense approach allows us to sympathize with their subjects without crossing the line into mawkishness or tear-jerking kiddie-misery. And it endows the occasional more poetic touch — as when Hongjun, who describes the orphans as “twisted trees,” is shown sitting on a swing in the drizzling rain of this coastal city — with a genuine, unobtrusive grace.

Big Fog
Reveals the problems which different classes face and how their values based on their interest shaped the foundation of society. The documentary has three parts. The first shows Chinese right ring intellectuals who criticized the modern Chinese culture which undermined independence and ethical belief, and commemorates those who fought and sacrificed for the truth. The second part follows the progress of a new cancer drug. The documentary then focuses on a Chinese village where a farmer has committed suicide because of land grabbings and forced evictions. An official is forced to resign due to pressure from the media, but problems are completely resolved for the villagers….

One Tree, Three Lives
One Tree, Three Lives is an intimate documentary focusing on the Chinese American novelist Hualing Nieh Engle. Hualing Nieh Engle is a Nobel Peace prize nominee and author of 23 books of fiction and non-fiction, who has been a major influence on generations of writers in the Chinese Diaspora, and beyond. At times sad, at times funny, this inspirational film reveals a woman of unusual charisma, integrity and determination, and a person in continual exile.

Our Children
Reviews from different individuals on casualties caused by collapses of schools during the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake. By drawing on everyday people’s testimonies and an abundance of images from digital phones and cameras, Our Children succeeded in preserving both individual and public traumatic memories and allowed some people to heal.

Civil Investigation
This documentary shows the efforts of volunteers independently investigating the casualties caused by the collapses of schools during the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake.

Last Train Home
This critically acclaimed documentary follows a Chinese family as they leave their daughter and family to look for work in more industrialized areas. As well as focusing on the immigrants train journey to their home province, in what is the biggest migration in human history, the film spans over two years observing the family’s struggles for money as they attempt to keep their relationships intact.

Silent Summer
Zhouzhou is a lonely 12 year old living with his grumpy alcoholic father, and whose mother has long since left the family home. Father and son embark on a bike ride, encountering trouble, and many strange people, but as the summer wears on both father and son undergo changes.

Siberian Butterfly
The Siberian Butterfly is a documentary that explores issues of creativity and sexual identity in an intimate portrait of a Chinese folk artist. He learned the traditional Chinese art of paper-cutting from his mother in his birthplace of Shaanxi Province, China. But as a child of China’s Cultural Revolution, his homosexuality was deeply repressed by social convention, and so he followed the path of most men of his generation and married, having children. Still, he found an outlet for his true identity through the themes in his artwork. In this richly woven exploration of the creative process, the artist`s inner world is revealed as he patiently carves out space for his true identity through his paper cuts. Now that his children are grown and he has moved to Beijing, he discovers who he really was all along, calling himself The Siberian Butterfly.

Blind Shaft
Blind Shaft is a 2003 film about a pair of brutal con artists operating in the illegal coal minesof present-day northern China. The film was written and directed by Lina Yang (李杨), and is based on Chinese writer Liu Qingbang’s short novel Shen Mu (Sacred Wood). Most of the filming took place 700 meters underground on the border between the Hebei and Shanxi provinces of northern China. Li and his crew were harassed and threatened during the filming Blind Shaft has won at least twelve awards, including the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Achievement at 2003 Berlin International Film Festival

Surviving Evil
A documentary about the victims of rice-bran oil contaminated with PCB (a toxic chemical that may cause cancers and birth defects) in Taichung in 1979. It won the top prize at the 2008 South Taiwan Film Festival and prompted the public to find the first local support association for victims in 2009.

Queer China, ‘Comrade’ China
China’s most prolific homosexual filmmaker Cui Zi’en presents a comprehensive historical account of the queer movement in modern China. QUEER CHINA, ‘COMRADE’ CHINA documents the changes and developments in Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender culture that have taken place in China over the last 80 years. Unlike any before, this film explores the historical milestones and ongoing advocacy efforts of the Chinese LGBT community. The film examines how shifting attitudes in law, media and education have transformed queer culture from being an unspeakable taboo to an accepted social identity. The film culminates with the submission of Dr. Li Yinhe’s Same-sex Marriage Bill to the Legislative Affairs Commission of the National People’s Congress in 2003, a major landmark event in the ongoing struggle for acceptance of queer identity in China.