A Touch of Sin (2012, Jia Zhangke)
The London Chinese Visual Festival (CVF) is proud to announce its 2014 edition, which runs from May 7th – 18th at King’s College London, with events also being held at Riverside Studios in collaboration with DocHouse.
For 2014, the festival is thrilled to welcome two of the most important filmmakers in modern independent Chinese language cinema, Jia Zhangke and Pema Tseden. In addition to a preview of his latest work, the award winning A Touch of Sin at the BFI, Jia will also host a very special screening session at King’s of his rarely seen short films. Acclaimed Tibetan director Pema Tseden opens the festival with Old Dog, as well as screening his other works and taking part in panel discussion sessions on Tibetan Culture and filmmaking. CVF is also delighted to be collaborating with Newcastle University in holding a celebration of ten years of the China Independent Film Festival (CIFF), one of the most vital and enduring Chinese language film events. To help mark this remarkable anniversary, CVF will be hosting a special animation session, as well as welcoming CIFF’s Cao Kai and Zhang Xianmin for what promises to be a fascinating panel discussion.
Now in its fourth year, CVF has significantly expanded to include the very best in Chinese language independent fiction as well as documentary, art and experimental cinema. The 40+ films screened this year cover a fantastic range of contemporary themes, genres and issues, from mainland Chinese gangsters in Burned Wings and E Huang Mountain to humanist Taiwanese documentaries such as A Rolling Stone and creative experimental cinema in Deformity Sci-Fi and Kun 13: Criticising Ai Weiwei and Wu Haohao.
As usual, CVF guests will be joined by a rich variety of leading academics and key figures in the film industry and related social studies, who will take part in Q&A sessions as well as a program of talks and symposiums, making the festival a lively forum for discussion and debate. This year, audiences will also have the chance to attend sessions with noted writer, commentator, film festival programmer and screenwriter Tony Rayns, who will be presenting “The Secret History of Independent Chinese Films.”
By highlighting creativity in both art and film, CVF this year offers something a little different to the usual art exhibition with artist Wang Xin presenting in person her installation The Gallery, which transforms the Anatomy Museum of King’s College Strand Campus into a space for ephemeral art. Up to two of 15 projects will be shown each day, and within the “walls” of the gallery the possibilities are endless – an artist can create a gallery within a gallery, a stage for performance, a café, a creative workshop, a cinema, or even a space for meditation. Through the use of social media and video conferencing, the interactive installation will become a hub of creative exchanges between cities around the world and an ephemeral festival for artists and audiences, local and global.