UCCA Beijing

KNOCKING ON MEMORY'S DOOR WITH A VIDEO CAMERA--DOCUMENTARIES OF THE FOLK MEMORY PROJECT OF CCD WORKSTATION

2012.4.7 - 2012.4.8
See film schedule.

Cinema Arts
Location:  UCCA Art Cinema
Language:  Chinese and English Subtitles.

ABOUT THIS PROGRAM

We are walking down Memory Lane. We are continuing to remember.

CCD Workstation began the Folk Memory Documentary Project in 2010. More than twenty participants travelled back to their family villages to film and interview village elders. Their research focused on the years from 1959 to 1961, a period known as the Great Chinese Famine.

A handful of people took video cameras and went back to their respective villages. They went in search of the old generation that was still living there in dim, stark houses. They went to uncover the memories hidden deep inside them. Each filmmaker had some prior relationship to the village. Some of them were born or grew up there, some still live there, some had never lived in the village but had parents or grandparents who had. For the old people in the village, this was the first time anyone had come with a camera to ask them to open their memory chests. Here was the younger generation, leaping over their parents’ generation-- that generation wiped clean of memory- to ask the elders about the past. This meeting may be awkward and uncomfortable but it is also an exciting adventure. Their stories are now documentary films presented in this program.

Wu Wenguang and film director will attend each screening and the Q&A.

*Visit http://e.mosh.cn/10455 for online ticketing.
*Share this event:http://www.tanghooloo.com/pub/4535

FILM SCHEDULE

April 7 (SAT)
14:00—15:28 Satiated Village
16:30—17:57 Self-Portrait: At 47 KM
19:00—20:20 Luo Village: I and Ren Dingqi

April 8 (SUN)
16:00—16:30 My Grandpa’s Winter
16:30—17:40 Back to Huamuling
19:00—20:15 Listening to Third Grandmother’s Stories

*Every screening followed by Q&A with director

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Wu Wenguang was born in south-western China’s Yunnan province in 1956. After graduating from high school in 1974, Wu was send to the countryside, where he worked as farmer for four year. Between 1978 and 1982, he studied Chinese Literature in Yunnan University. After the University, Wu worked as a teach at a junior high school for three years, and later, he worked in the television as a journalist for four years. Wu left the television, moved to Beijing in 1988 to be an independent documentary filmmaker, freelance writer and creator and producer of dance/theater. Wu has completed 10 documentaries, which like Bumming in Beijing (1990), 1966, My Time in the Red Guards (1993), Jiang Hu: Life on the Road (1999), Fuck Cinema (2005), Bare Your Staff (2010), Treating (2010), and has screened in many film festivals in the world. Also his four books (no-fiction) have published. In 2005, Wu found the Village Documentary Project, and in 2010, found the Folk Memory Project.

PARTNERS & SPONSORS

Partner: CCD Workstation