The Institute for Contemporary Culture (ICC) at the Royal Ontario Museum is proud to present the ICC Shanghai Film Festival. The festival is organized in conjunction with the exhibition, Shanghai Kaleidoscope, presented by Manulife Financial, on display until November 2, 2008. The series consists of four feature-length films to be screened in the ROM’s Signy & Cléophée Eaton Theatre on Monday and Tuesday, June 16 & 17, 2008.
The films present the city of Shanghai in its various modern guises, emphasizing its reputation as a decadent colonial port, its status as an occupied city, and its more recent incarnation as a free, economic centre where urban memory is compromised by modern development.
Two films will be presented each evening at 7:00 pm and 9:15 pm.
See below for admission prices and film information or visit www.rom.on.ca/icc.
Monday June 16
7 pm - Sentinels Under the Neon Lights (1964)
Directed by Wang Ping
Language: Chinese (Mandarin) only
This 1964 propaganda film presents a traditional, almost-mythical view of Shanghai as a decadent, international metropolis, in direct opposition to the communist ideals of Maoist China. Dramatizing the 1949 liberation of the city by the People’s Liberation Army, the film portrays the young Communist soldiers as conscientious reformers, resisting the city’s many entertainments and temptations; jazz music, movies and available sex. The film also addresses the role of cinema in Chinese society, in a critique of the corrupting influence of imported, Western films.
9:15 pm - A Beautiful New World (1999)
Directed by Shi Runji
Languages: Chinese (Mandarin), Chinese subtitles, English subtitles
The boundless optimism generated by Shanghai’s economic boom of the 1990s provides the backdrop for this light-hearted comedy. It tells the story of a country bumpkin who arrives in the city believing that he has won a new apartment in the lottery. Beset by a host of slick wheeler-dealers, he triumphs by dint of hard work and through his recently discovered entrepreneurial skills. The film is part of a new genre of Shanghai film-making, emphasizing the promise and challenge of the present, rather than the faded glamour of the colonial past.
Tuesday June 17
7 pm - Purple Butterfly (2003)
Directed by Lou Ye
Languages: Chinese (Mandarin), English subtitles, French subtitles
Set in the turbulent world of 1930s Shanghai, this tale of intrigue and divided loyalties stars the beautiful Zhang Ziyi (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Memoirs of a Geisha) as a member of Purple Butterfly, a powerful resistance group in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. An unexpected encounter reunites the agent with an ex-lover and officer of the secret police, who is on a mission to dismantle Purple Butterfly. In the tradition of film noir, the Shanghai presented here is dark, brooding, and drenched in perpetual rainstorms. Revenge, betrayal and lost love are the order of the day.
9:15 pm - Nostalgia (2006)
Directed by Shu Haolun
Languages: Chinese (Mandarin), English subtitles
Nostalgia pays tribute to an intimate, family-centred way of life that is rapidly vanishing in 21st-century Shanghai. In this first-person, documentary essay, the filmmaker revisits the central Shanghai neighborhood in which he grew up. Through interviews with elderly neighbors, who lived their entire lives in this neighborhood, Haolun creates a record of life in the communal laneways of the once-common, longtang townhouse complexes. Haolun began work on the film when he learned that this area was slated for demolition to make way for a new construction project, part of the steady wave of re-development that has engulfed the Shanghai since the early 90s. In this poignant invocation of community memory, the young filmmaker reflects upon the human ramifications of city’s rapid transformation into a skyscraper metropolis.
Ticket Prices (on sale at the door):
Single film: General Public, $10; ROM Members, $8; Friends of the ICC, $6;
Double feature: General Public, $15; ROM Members, $12; Friends of the ICC, $10
Website: www.rom.on.ca/icc
Presented by: Manulife Financial
Exhibit Patrons: Cathay Pacific Airways Limited
INTERBRAND CANADA
Program Collaborator: Chinese Cultural Centre of Greater Toronto