11.12 (Sat) 18:00-20:00 Strange North Series Short Films Screenings and Discussion: Ice Floe, All Hallow's Week, Totem, and To Open To See

11.20 (Sun) 18:00-21:00 Youth Screening and Discussion

11.26 (Sat) 18:00-21:00 Three Sisters Screening and Discussion

Ice Floe

Director: Maria Loyter

Genre: Drama

Country: Russia

Runtime: 22 min.

A shy teenage girl Alya lives in a Russian orphanage. She secretly admires her music teacher Svetlana, the only person who is nice to her at school. Alya and Svetlana establish a connection during singing classes. The moment when Svetlana stands up for Alya in front the principal leads to a surprising event—Alya kisses Svtelana on the lips causing a radical change in their relationship.

All Hallow's Week

Director: Jussi Hiltunen

Genre: Drama

Country: Finland

Runtime: 18 min.

Aki (Antti Luusuaniemi) is a bouncer in his thirties whose workplace becomes the setting for a senseless shooting. Kati (Rosa Salomaa) is a high school student that witnesses her sister’s violent death. Feeling helpless, the two eyewitnesses are left to mull over their feelings. Why did they survive, and could they have changed the course of the events? Their grief is mixed with guilt and unanswered questions as Aki and Kati try to move on.

Totem

Director: Marte Vold

Genre: Drama

Country: Norway

Runtime: 20 min.

Through five mundane scenes from the life of a thirty-something hipster couple in the suburbs of Oslo, Totem explores the vulnerabilities and relentless discomforts of togetherness.

To Open To See

Director: Camilla Figenschou

Genre: Drama

Country: Norway

Runtime: 15 min.

A group of children is taken on a trip to a beach. While separated from adult supervision, they discover a stranded porpoise. It is dead. They open it up.

The film has won many prizes including the Terje Vigen Award in The Norwegian Short Film Festival, Best Norwegian Short Film in 2013 Minimalen Short Film Festival, and Special Mention in the 2013 Leuven International Short Film Festival.

Youth

Director: Geng Jun

Genre: Drama

Country: China

Runtime: 106 min.

Wu Li has returned to Hegang from far away Beijing and is ready to get an education to find a dignified job and get married to Jincai. But good intentions and amorous feelings are not enough on their own. Without work or a dowry, the families do not consent to the marriage. If even a genuine love story comes up against economic obstacles, little or nothing remains for the youngsters in a small town. In Heilongjiang province, on the edge of the Siberian steppe, there is no trace of the Chinese economic miracle, if not in the tales of those who return, perhaps just to complete a passport application before leaving again for other destinations. Jinbao, Guoqing and the friends who have stayed behind plaster their walls with posters of Bruce Lee and Andy Lau, vainly hoping to create an identity as a gangster, something they consider more dignified than the job of a miner or a worker willing to risk their life for a few bucks. Money is the measure of every relationship.

Three Sisters

Director: Wang Bing

Genre: Documentary

Country: China

Runtime: 153 min.

The film introduces viewers to 10-year-old Yingying, 6-year-old Zhenzhen, and 4-year-old Fenfen, who live alone in Xiyangtang, a tiny rural village in the high mountains of China's Yunnan province. Their father is away working in the city; their mother left the family long ago.

The girls help their grandfather or aunt in exchange for meals. They spend their days at grueling tasks: herding sheep, goats and pigs, searching for firewood, collecting dung. Games are few and far between. The eldest, Yingying, is her sisters' primary caretaker, shouldering responsibilities far beyond her years.

Vincent Wen (Translator)

Vincent is the assistant curator for Beyond Frozen Point (BFP) Film Festival, translating all the films of BFP in 2015 and 2016. He has been worked as a translator and subtitle producer for many art videos, independent films, and documentaries. His work includes Silenced Voices for NORDOX, Mr. Zhang Believes director’s cut, and Norwegian documentary Brothers.

Teng Jimeng (Translator)

Full time associate professor, Center for American Studies, Department of English, Beijing Foreign Studies University. He is director Geng Jun's long-term collaborator as English translator.

Geng Jun (Director)

born in the city of Hegang, Heilongjiang province, has directed short films that include Hawthorn, Diary in Bulk, The Hammer and Sickle Are Sleeping; the feature-length documentary Poetry and Disease; and the feature films Barbecue, Youth, and Free and Easy. Youth was selected by China Independent Film Festival in 2008 and the main competition of Rome Film Festival in 2009.

Brosseau Elodie (Director)

French director. Graduated from French Oriental Languages and Civilisations Institute in Paris in 1996. 20 years working in various French and Chinese fields of media, culture and cinema, with roles as editor, assistant director, producer’s assistant, translator, and consultant.

In 2008 she received training in documentary film directing at “Ateliers Varan” (workshop in Paris). After short documentary films, her first full length documentary was produced by French National Center for Scientific Research in 2012: Yaodong, a little treatise on construction (89 mins.) It won the Intangible Cultural Heritage Award at the International Ethnographic Film Festival - Jean Rouch, second prize at the French Youth Researcher’s Film Festival in 2014, and was selected in 2015 for the Chinese Documentary Film Festival in Paris.

BARCO