Event overview
The Department of Art Master Classes programme invites Chinese filmmaker Zhao Dayong for a rare screening of his 2014 film 'Shadow Days' and a Skype Q&A with Zhao.
Zhao Dayong (Born 1970) is a Chinese independent filmmaker whose film and photography has explored the central themes of existential anxiety and spiritual bankruptcy in the face of a rapidly transforming China. History, culture, meaning, and even love and family, are often destroyed in the pursuit of mirages of prosperity.
“While Dayong’s powerful ‘Shadow Days’ underlines how inhuman China’s one-child policy can be when enforced to the extreme ... the strength of the film is in how it conveys a chilling sense of outrage against the whole dehumanizing system in which Chinese society finds itself caught. While this is Zhao’s second feature film, he is known above all as an outspoken documentarist. ‘Shadow Days’ is set in Zhizilou, the same remote community on the China-Myanmar border explored in his 2008 documentary ‘Ghost Town’. Here the word “ghost” again stands in for psychological perversions of the human mind, which lead to ruin and destruction. The glorious natural landscape of verdant mountain ranges could be the setting of a mystical film about finding oneself, yet here Dayong and co-screenwriter Fu Xinhua turn that genre on its head. The little town where Renwei (Liang Ming) and his pregnant girlfriend Pomegranate (Li Ziqian) seek shelter from life’s storms is anything but the rural idyll it first appears to be. And the film’s spiritual moments, are relegated to a Christian church tucked away outside town. The film’s real power is coldly portraying the horrors people visit on one other, and no need for ghosts there.” [Deborah Young]
Dayong is considered to be one of “China’s New Guerillas”. Although films must be submitted for censorship in China, Zhao Dayong refuses to do so, ‘the film’s topic is not a sensitive one and isn’t political: it’s social reality’. With all of Zhao’s work, ‘the main topic has never changed: lives becoming shallower through economic development, having faith in and the culture of cash, the destruction of a natural form of living, and helplessness and ignorance’. ‘In reality, there is not much of a difference between documentary filmmaking and fiction, because I use the images to express things I want to say and stories I want to tell.’(ZD)
This event is free. No booking is required. All welcome.
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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15 May 2017 | 5:00pm - 8:30pm |
Accessibility
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