nwFilmCenter

China

Fri, Feb 8, 2008 at 6 PM Sat, Feb 9, 2008 at 7:30 PM Sun, Feb 10, 2008 at 5:30 PM	TUYA'S MARRIAGE DIRECTOR: WANG QUAN CHINA Winner of the Berlin Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, Tuya's Marriage is a quirky romantic comedy set against China's quixotic campaign to wring profits from the far corners of its hardscrabble geography. The quest to find a good, reliable man in Inner Mongolia is as thankless as it is anywhere else in the world. That quest is given a comic turn by the beautifully defiant Tuya, who herds sheep in the vast desert to support her sick husband and two children. When she gets hurt and can't work anymore, pragmatism kicks in. She decides to divorce her husband and look for a new spouse. In a series of tenderly amusing scenes, various suitors vie for Tuya's affections, but it's not easy to find a man willing to take care of an already established family—which comes with an ex-husband. Print courtesy of Magnolia Films. ( 96 min ) Filmography: Lunar Eclipse (99), The Story of Ermei (04). Sponsored by Portland Monthly. For more information or to vote online visit Oregon Live. ^ Top
Wed, Feb 13, 2008 at 6 PM Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 8:45 PM Sat, Feb 16, 2008 at 1:15 PM	BLIND MOUNTAIN DIRECTOR: LI YANG CHINA A demographic time bomb haunts China today. Den Xiaoping's one-child policy has left too few women available for Chinese men to marry, especially in the less prosperous countryside. Writer/director Li Yang's film uses this society-wide crisis as the basis for a raw and powerful melodrama. The promise of a decent-paying job as a saleswoman for a medical company lures the naïve, ingenuous Bai Xuemei to a desolate farming village in Northern China. Once there, she discovers she's been sold into a marriage that is essentially slavery. Her desperate efforts to find someone to help her escape, and the brutality of the family holding her captive, disclose an ironic pattern of interlocking injustices. Bai's destiny, including a last minute act of resistance, symbolizes an entire society caught in the disorienting crisis of radical change. Print courtesy of The Film Library. ( 95 min ) Filmography: Blind Shaft (03). For more information or to vote online visit Oregon Live. ^ Top
Tue, Feb 19, 2008 at 9 PM Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 6:30 PM	STILL LIFE DIRECTOR: ZHANG KE JIA CHINA Shot on location at the Three Gorges Dam, this Venice Film Festival award-winner is a meditative work in which documentary and fiction merge, producing a painterly, narrative flatness. Jia's camera lingers on the dangerous exploits of the workers and the incredible terrain as much as it follows its loose storylines: a man returns to look for the wife he abandoned, and a woman seeks the husband who forsook her years ago. Alternately apocalyptic and other-worldly, this massive construction zone (the hydroelectric project will relocate 1.2 million people) has become an emble-matic site of sacrifice; nature is making way for a technocratic China. "One of the world's most important filmmakers... A human triumph."—The New York Times. "The best film of the year."—Cahiers du Cinema. Print courtesy of New Yorker Films. ( 108 min ) Filmography: Platform (00), Unknown Pleasures (02), The World (04). For more information or to vote online visit Oregon Live. ^ Top