Friday, May 18th, 2012
The Transition Period (dir. Zhou Hao)
Description:
Filmed with unprecedented access to a Communist Party leader, investigative filmmaker Zhou Hao offers a startlingly candid look inside Chinese politics at the local level.
As Chinese Communist Party secretary, Guo Yongchang was the most powerful man in his county, located in the rural inland province of Henan. Guo invited acclaimed documentary filmmaker Zhou Hao to record his final months in office. Through Zhou’s lens, we see Guo work tirelessly to achieve his greatest desire: for Henan to match the affluence of booming coastal areas. Zhou also captures the sordid details of local-level politics in pursuit of growth: lavish parties with foreign investors, threats to local workers protesting unpaid wages, and offers of bribes and kickbacks.
Hailed by international press as an exceptional work of investigative filmmaking, The Transition Period captures the daily life of a Chinese official with incredible ground-level detail. With boastfully candid interviews from Guo and fly-on-the-wall coverage of closed-door dealings, Zhou lays bare the unsavory dynamics within China’s top-down power structures. Penetrating in scope yet objective in its approach, The Transition Period reveals the conflicting forces shaping China’s path to prosperity.
Address: 215 Centre Street New York, NY 10013 (212) 619-4785
For more info, click here.
Friday, May 18th at 6:30 pm and Saturday, May 19th at 3:00pm
Old Dog (dir. Pema Tseden)
Description:
A family on the Himalayan plains discovers their dog is worth a fortune, but selling it comes at a terrible price.
The Tibetan nomad mastiff is an exotic prize dog in China, fetching as much as millions of dollars from wealthy Chinese. When a young man notices several thefts of mastiffs from Tibetan farm families, he decides to sell his family’s dog before it is stolen and sold on the black market. His father, an aging Tibetan herder, is furious when he discovers their dog missing. When the father seeks to buy the dog back, it leads to a series of tragicomic events that threaten to tear the family apart, while showing the erosion of Tibetan culture under the pressures of contemporary society.
Pema Tseden (The Silent Holy Stones, The Search) is the leading filmmaker of a newly emerging Tibetan cinema and the first director in China to film his movies entirely in the Tibetan language. His third feature Old Dog is both a humorous and tragic allegory and a sober depiction of life among the impoverished rural Tibetan community. The masterful HD cinematography “perfectly incorporates the desolate living conditions of these outpost towns whilst magnificently capturing the majestic Himalayan scenery which surrounds them” (Patrick Gamble, CineVue). Pema Tseden “shows Tibet through Tibetan eyes, as it is lived and experienced by ordinary people” (The Culture Trip).
Address:
Harvard Exit Theatre 807 East Roy Street Seattle, WA 98102
(206) 781-5755
Tickets & More Information here.