It’s always amazing to discover the global reach of some of our films. Some way or another, they find their way out of China and into theaters, festivals, and screens everywhere. Daily we hear from indie Chinese film enthusiasts from around the world and read reviews from publications we’ve never heard of. Woke up this morning to see that the Irish Left Review has named Oxhide one of the top 100 films of the decade. Here’s what the ILR says about Oxhide:
I don’t expect that many people will rush out to watch this, a two-hour docudrama shot on low-resolution DV, entirely in a tanner’s workshop in Beijing, in long static takes, using the director’s family (including herself) as cast. It looks gloopy green and the camera never moves once but it is completely entrancing. The director Liu was only 25 at the time and she did practically everything on this film in an astounding piece of DIY filmmaking; as ever with prodigies of the sort, it has an incredible maturity and the performances she draws out of her cranky family’s quotidian life are marvellous. Despite the best efforts of the Chinese government to marshall cinematic output there is still good stuff being made and the freshness of the work never lets up.
Hopefully they are wrong about the first sentence, but the rest we can fully get behind.