Chinese films at Watershed this winter
So Long, My Son - Fri 6 - Thu 12 Dec
Pioneering director Wang Xiaoshuai (Beijing Bicycle) returns with this magnificent, wrenching drama - an epic family saga spanning three decades that charts the collective damage, trauma and emotional history of China’s one-child policy and the Cultural Revolution.
Yaojun (Wang Jingchun) and Liyun (Yong Mei) were once happy, but when their young son dies in a tragic accident, the couple never truly recovers. Grieving, they leave their factory jobs and move away from their friends, until years later and many other events in their entwined histories, Yaojun and Liyun decide to return. Caught up in the terrible human cost of China’s one-child policy they and others find their lives entangled in the gears of a society in the throes of constant dramatic change.
Poetically moving between past and present and told in sweeping tableaux, this part critique, part melodrama, is a film of considerable emotional power. It also contains two of the most moving performances you’ll see this year (Wang Jingchun and Yong Mei were winners of the Best Actor and Best Actress at Berlin) – who are the beating heart of what is an immense story of loss, love and redemption.
Long Day's Journey into Night - Fri 27 Dec - Thu 2 Jan
This dreamy, noir-tinged film from Chinese director Bi Gan - about a man trying to track down a past lover - has been hailed as a remarkable new kind of cinema experience.
The film chronicles the return of Luo Hongwu (Huang Jue) to the hometown he fled many years before, where he searches for a lost love (Tang Wei) who continues to haunt him. As its English title suggests, this ravishing and rapturous fever dream of a film leads us on a nocturnal, labyrinthine voyage, one that both reveals and conceals a world of passion and intrigue...
The second half of the film is an astonishing hour-long unbroken take in 3D as we travel with Luo through trance-inducing environments. Described as the most intoxicating cinema experience of the year ("a full body swoon of a movie" - Los Angeles Times), this hushed, gorgeous study of memory and time is truly unlike anything you have ever seen before - absolutely exquisite.