CIFA (the Chinese Independent Film Archive) has recently helped restore The Crack, a low-budget independent film made on 35mm, which has been screened only four times to a small circle in China since its completion in 2000. This semi-autobiographical film, set during the Cultural Revolution, provides the missing link between the roots-seeking and scar literature and art of the 1980s and the performance art of the 1990s and 2000s. It grounds many of the embodied extremes of China’s famous performance art in the persistent psychosexual fetishes and neuroses produced by the extreme denial of individual desire under “mass line” socialism.
In a country whose people have just been successfully persuaded of their superiority and the justification for military expansion by the fiery speeches of a dictator, the bacillus of a highly destructive form of leprosy has spread.
Córdoba, Spain. Lord Killarney, representative of the British Museum, acquires an Arabic incunabulum at an auction; but he is murdered and the book disappears.
An injured amnesiac woman is discovered by a reclusive mountain man in the remote wilderness, igniting a quest for lucidity that would be better left undiscovered.
Based on the Ayyat train accident that killed 361 in 2002, this ensemble drama delves into the intense human stories of the passengers in a third-class coach car during the hour and a half before the crash.
Jean just quit her coveted job as an investment banker on Wall Street. After a soul-searching journey traveling around the world, she retreats to an empty vacation home owned by a friend's rich family.
The Baltic captain Terje Wiggen works as a pilot on the island of Muhu. When the mate of the ship “Carola” calls in sick, he jumps at the chance of reviving his life as a sailor.
"Complexity" is about a young woman stuck in a place of complete uncertainty. When she meets Scott, a man who will turn her world upside down and make her question her decisions, things turn from bad to worse.
By a stupid coincidence, single mother Tanja and her two children have to share their vacation home on the Cote d'Azur with the writer Paul Wackernagel.
Two years after the events of Tough Love, Lenny Milton has been transferred, but still finds that he is hated by his colleagues, who have branded him a grass.
After being bitten by a genetically altered spider at Oscorp, nerdy but endearing high school student Peter Parker is endowed with amazing powers to become the superhero known as Spider-Man.
Tracking the country’s oldest beauty contest—from its inception in 1921 as a local seaside pageant to its heyday as one of the country’s most popular events—Miss America paints a vivid picture of an institution that has come to reveal much about a changing nation.
A young woman, recently released from a mental hospital, gets a job as a secretary to a demanding lawyer, where their employer-employee relationship turns into a sexual, sadomasochistic one.
Comments
Have you watched The Crack yet? What did you think about it?
