Latest update September 23rd, 2014 4:34 PM
UCLA Confucius Institute Launches 2nd China Onscreen Biennial
LOS ANGELES (Sept. 15, 2014 ) - Showcasing some of the best new film and media art from China, the China Onscreen Biennial (COB) returns from October 17 to November 14, 2025 with screenings and events in Los Angeles, Washington DC, and Hawaii. The 2014 COB attempts to address a gap to bring a slate of 15 Chinese features and 7 shorts to American audiences. The curation by an American team of film curators highlights a multiplicity of voices, from emerging to established, and the myriad connections between cinemas past and present.
Acclaimed Sixth Generation director Wang Xiaoshuai (Beijing Bicyle) opens the COB with his latest work Red Amnesia(2014) which debuted in the main competition at Venice, while the Closing Film honors goes to Diao Yinan and his Berlinale Golden Bear winner, the chilly noir thriller Black Coal, Thin Ice (West Coast Premiere, 2014).
The Spectrum section of the COB presents an exciting selection of new features and shorts, including the World Premieres of Xu Tong’s documentary of a folk-singer with balls-out attitude in Inner Mongolia, Cut Out the Eyes(2014) and the alluringly fragmented Erdos Rider, (2014) partially shot in Mongolia by the young award-winning director Wang Haolin.
Three first features receive their North American Premieres: The Continent(2014), celebrity blogger-author-racecar driver Han Han’s slacker road movie, a summer independent hit in China; Nezha (2014), Li Xiaofeng’s delicate tale of adolescent girl angst which heads to the COB from the Busan film festival’s Asian “New Currents” competition, and Zhou Hao’s The Night (2014), where an alley, a male hustler and nostalgic Mandarin pop map power, longing and desire. The last screens in a “queer nocturne” with another NA debut, the eloquently sans dialogue short I Love You, Boss (2014) by the award-winning Zhang Yuan (East Palace, West Palace). Making its US Premiere is Uncle Victory (2014), the third movie by the director of The Piano in a Factory, Zhang Meng. Uncle Victory won the Jury Award at the recent Shanghai film festival despite being controversially denied public screenings during the festival.
Stratum 1: The Visitors (2013), Cong Feng’s spellbinding performance-reflection on contemporary urban ruins in China, an award winner at the 2013 Beijing IFF, makes its West Coast bow as part of the COB Spectrum. The Golden Era (2014), the closing night pick of the Venice film festival and Hong Kong director Ann Hui’s portrait of the turbulent life and times of the May 4th woman writer Xiao Hong, will have its first Los Angeles screening.
Two animated shorts make their International debuts: the magnificent and surreally-inspired What Happened in Past Dragon Year (2014) by the multi-talented Sun Xun, and the Beijing opera-inspired Divergence (2013) co-directed by Shi Yi and Chen Hailu.
In the “Wild Women” program combining NA and LA Premieres, a trio of wickedly sassy shorts by young filmmakers - The Private Life of Fenfen (2013, d. Leslie Tai), The VaChina Monologues (2014, d. Fan Popo) and Female Directors (2012, d. Yang Mingming) - mock, probe and tweak Chinese gender politics.
This year’s COB also features two auteur homages. The “Tribute to Wu Tianming” remembers the accomplished director who died this March. As chief of the Xi’an Film Studio in the 1980s, Wu nurtured the groundbreaking cinema of the Chinese Fifth Generation. The COB Tribute revives two rarely screened landmark early works by Wu: the critically acclaimed The Old Well (1986), starring a young Zhang Yimou who did double-duty as a cinematographer on the film; and River Without Buoys (1983), Wu’s solo directorial debut that also posed one of the earliest filmic critiques of the Cultural Revolution. The COB is proud to present River in a 35mm print from the China Film Archive. The late director’s daughter Janet Wu Yanyan will introduce the October 18 screening of The Old Well.
With “Jiang Wen: Let the Movies Fly,” the COB salutes the actor-director best-known in the US for more recent work like his deliriously madcap Let the Bullets Fly (2010). In the Heat of the Sun (1994) adapts “hooligan” writer Wang Shuo’s irreverent tale of coming of age during the Cultural Revolution. L’immagine Ritrovata’s digital restoration of the film will screen in its NA Premiere. The Sun Also Rises (2007) stars an ensemble including the teenage Jaycee Chan, Hong Kong actor Anthony Wong, Joan Chen and Jiang himself in four story vignettes whose interconnected whimsy presages the prodigious genre hybridity of the later Jiang.
A non-profit initiative of the UCLA Confucius Institute, the COB is a unique cross-continental collaboration among American cultural and educational institutions to promote US-China dialogue through film.
The 2014 COB is presented by the UCLA Confucius Institute in partnership with AFI FEST presented by Audi, Film at REDCAT, Pomona College, and UCLA Film & Television Archive in Los Angeles; Freer and Sackler Galleries of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC; and Hawaii International Film Festival presented by Halekulani in Hawaii.
The COB curatorial team includes Cheng-Sim Lim (Chief Curator), Bérénice Reynaud (Film Curatorial Advisor, Film at REDCAT), Shannon Kelley & Paul Malcolm (UCLA Film & Television Archive), Tom Vick (Freer and Sackler Galleries) and Jonathan Hall (Pomona College).
More info can be found on www.global.ucla.edu/cob
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