‘Ride the Waves’ — Get Ready for DCCFF’s 80s-90s Retrospective
This September, for four days (9/21–9/24), let’s ‘ride the waves’ and go back in time. Which waves?
In a special curation, we bring you the following classic Chinese-language movies from the 1980s & 1990s:
Farewell My Concubine (1993) dir. by CHEN Kaige
“It is one of those very rare film spectacles that deliver just about everything the ads are likely to promise: action, history, exotic color, multitudes in confrontation, broad overviews of social and political landscapes, all intimately rooted in a love story of vicious intensity, the kind that plays best when it goes badly, which is most of the time.” - New York Times
Suzhou River (1999) dir. by LOU Ye
“Though its human protagonists are intriguing enough, the most complex and arresting presence in ‘’Suzhou River’’ may be the title character, a grimy man-made waterway that snakes through the industrial districts of Shanghai. The narrator of Lou Ye’s moody exercise in modernist film noir is a videographer — unseen except for an occasional hand reaching in front of the camera — who trawls the river for images and stories. As he makes his way through the shadowy criminal demimonde at the river’s edge, he is drawn, like a character in a Borges story or a Paul Auster novel, into a looking-glass world of crossed destinies, urban legends and mistaken identities.”
- The New York Times
The Sandwich Man (1983) dir. by HOU Hsiao-Hsien, ZENG Zhuangxiang, WAN Ren
“In a way The Sandwich Man is a bit like its title character, literally an advertisement for cinema, a showcase for a new breed of Taiwanese film, calling onto audiences to come see an authentically local type of cinema.” -Cinescope
Taipei Story (1985) dir. by Edward YANG
“One of the great masters of urban malaise, Edward Yang captures the alone-in-a-crowd feeling of withdrawn city life through isolating static shots of his subjects in their environments, as well as recurring imagery of portals — doors, windows, windshields, glasses — that suggest transition but always reflect stasis. There’s a lilting sense of dread, rhythmic but never fully musical, that permeates Taipei Story and infects the people and objects that populate the frame.”
-Movie Mezzanine
Rebels of the Neon God (1992) dir. by TSAI Ming-Liang
“The film is a clinical, cool-suspicious dissection of disaffected youth maneuvering Taipei’s grimier, noisier corners. As a first film, it is incredibly accomplished, its influences (French New Wave, Wong Kar-Wai) apparent but integrated. Most telling, though, is that when Tsai uses a camera pan or tracking shot, it feels hesitant, obligatory. But when he locks it down to bask in the alienation, cut after cut, you can see a director falling in love with the poetics of minimalism.” - Los Angeles Times
Mr. Vampire (1985) dir. by Ricky LAU
“Imagine Jackie Chan and Peter Jackson are in a car crash, as horrifying as that sounds. Their brains are smashed together with incredible force, and the resulting entity has sat down at a word processor to write a script. Now you’re somewhere near the right mindset to watch Mr. Vampire.”
- Horror Freak News
An Autumn’s Tale (1987) dir. by Mabel CHEUNG
“Beautiful cinematography, finely crafted performances by the leads, and a simple, yet touching screenplay help rank this low budget production as one of the finest Hong Kong films of the 1980’s.”
- City On Fire
A Great Wall (1986) dir. by Peter WANG
“‘A Great Wall’ is billed as the first American movie made in China. The film opens by cutting between vignettes of the daily lives of the Fangs in California and the Chaos in Peking. Mrs. Chao is Leo Fang’s sister, and they’ve been corresponding for 30 years. We see Fang engaged in a showdown with his boss at work, and then we see Chao in his tiny garden, performing his morning tai chi ritual, which climaxes in a highly satisfactory burst of flatulence.” - Roger Ebert
Now that you know which movies will be screening, MARK YOUR CALENDAR!
9/21–9/24
9/21–9/24
9/21–9/24
Ticketing info will be available soon!
Please see link below for our announcement in Chinese.
