Three dGenerate titles were recently reviewed by VCinema, a podcast and blog devoted to Asian film, media, and culture.
Pema Tseden’s ‘Tharlo’
Writing for VCinema, Rowena Santos Aquino reviewed Pema Tseden’s Tharlo, the story of a Tibetan shepherd whose isolated routine and sense of identity is irrevocably displaced when he travels to the city in search of an ID card and stumbles into contradictions of “the opposing existential temporalities of bureaucracy/imposed history…and of land/localness…and how this opposition impinges on identity.” Addressing Tseden’s heartbreaking story of misplaced affections and broken assumptions, Aquino writes “The staggering irony about Tharlo’s journey to obtain his I.D. card, a document whose purpose is to disclose and/or confirm one’s identity in image and words, is that in the course of doing so, he loses the identity that he has …this irony is the power of Tseden’s film.”
Wang Bing’s ‘Three Sisters’
Aquino’s review of Wang Bing’s documentary Three Sisters offers reflections not only into Wang’s film on “shifting…compositions of family,” but also into the “mosaic” that makes up Wang’s eclectic canon of work. In describing the story of three young sisters who shuffle them between family members’ homes amid stark economic hardship, Aquino praises Wang’s filmic rhythm as “improvisatory and loose” and comments that the low camera angles Wang employs to create spatial congruency with his young subjects serves as “not just a technical decision but also like a tacit gesture of solidarity, or at the very least empathy, in the midst of the sisters’ uncertain everyday and destitute environment.”
John Berra reviewed Yang Mingming’s Female Directors, a mockumentary investigation into the close, albeit fractious, relationship between two young film school grads, their “taboo breaking” antics, and the omnipresent camera they wield like a weapon. Addressing topics that range from the oft-mentioned “Mr. Short” or “Short Stuff”—a lover and benefactor on whom both the women rely—to the true nature of honesty and “relative honesty,” “Female Directors is a candid meta-commentary that deconstructs not only its titular pair’s varied, at times contradictory responses to male-dominated society but the methods used to examine such conditions in the digital age.
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