Hangzhou New Cinema

As the old Chinese saying goes, ‘What Paradise is to heaven, Suzhou and Hangzhou are to the earth.’

Curated and Programmed as part of NFTS Film Studies, Programming and Curation MA, this online film season celebrates the city of Hangzhou and its batch of new, exciting filmmaking talent. These auteurs, who are either originally from or studied in Hangzhou, all share an innate understanding of the city’s topography, local culture, and unique character. Their films are informed by their personal experiences and speak to an emerging emphasis on geographical perspective prevalent in modern Chinese cinema.

Located near Shanghai, Hangzhou acts as the modern capital of the Zhejiang Province, its serene vistas along West Lake having inspired poetry and folklore for generations. Hangzhou is also home to China's top high-tech industries with a huge population, which has led to rapid urban renewal and several economic changes. These combined qualities of natural beauty and modernity converge to form a city which has fostered the development of new directors who have created, with modest budgets, strikingly fresh films ranging from documentaries to fiction narratives, from confessional video diaries to experimental flashes of ingenuity.

Our journey begins with the mysterious adventure of a 14-year-old girl during one humid summer in Vanishing Days before charting a course through the entrancingly enigmatic coming-of-age tale Suburban Birds. Frank Fang, A Hangzhou Observer regards the city streets and buildings with a cinephile’s giddy excitement. By journey’s end, the Hangzhou New Talents shorts programme guides us through the private emotions of life nearly overlooked in Hangzhou, leaving us in quiet awe of a city whose secrets have only begun to be revealed.

Running from 15-18th December 2020, this online season will stream on the NFTS Screening Room platform.

Gu Pengyuan, Film Curator

Instagram: @HZNewCinema

Twitter: @HZNewCinema

Facebook Page: @HZNewCinema

Download Programme Brochure (PDF)

Opening Film | Vanishing Days | Tuesday December 15th

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Vanishing Days | UK Premiere

Dir. Zhu Xin | China | 94 min | 2018 | Debut Feature

Trailer

In Surrealist terms, the film is like a flâneur taking a leisurely stroll through Hangzhou and its environs, pondering family relationships and gender identities along the way. In terms of contemporary Chinese cinema, it’s one of a kind. – Tony Rayns (Asian Film Expert, Film Critic).

It is summer of 2009. In a southern Chinese town, it is stiflingly hot before the arrival of a rainstorm. Li Senlin is bored and stuck doing homework. Auntie Qiu, a boatwoman who hasn’t shown up for years, suddenly makes a visit, and recounts the tale of a strange encounter on an abandoned island. Li Senlin loses her turtle while her father is away on a business trip. There's another "Senlin" that keeps on being mentioned by her parents. She faintly suspects that Auntie Qiu is actually her biological mother. The summer rain pours down as memory and reality interweave into one another. The water of the Great Canal dampens each individual that roams along it.

Notice: The full note of Vanishing Days by Tony Rayns will be available in Hangzhou New Cinema social media and the digital brochure. More exclusive content will also be available in the digital brochure and NFTS Screening Room.

Double-Bill | A Personal Film about My Past 22 Years + abandoned landscapes: prologue 2D/3D | Wednesday December 16th - Friday December 18th

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A Personal Film about My Past 22 Years | UK Premiere

Dir. Frank Fang | China | 36 min | Documentary | 2018

Trailer

Frank Fang’s seminal film-essay A Personal Film about My Past 22 Years broaches the emotionally wrenching changes in his city. Fang watched this happening as he grew up and he has documented many of the changes: the requisitioning and demolition of entire neighbourhoods, the landscapes of rubble, a ‘graveyard’ of broken bicycles. He even dug out some old home-movie footage shot by western visitors in the 1930s to show what Hangzhou looked like in the old days. Of course Fang’s recordings of the physical changes to the city have a great documentary value, but their interest goes beyond that. Because his own grandmother has dementia and no longer recognises him, he’s been thinking about memories and their erasure. In this respect, some of his work parallels the Japanese director Koreeda Hirokazu’s explorations of the mysteries of brain damage and the inexorable approaches of senility and death, particularly in his early TV work. – Tony Rayns (Asian Film Expert, Film Critic)

No matter how deep the memory is, it will become blurred and untraceable with the passage of time. So Fang decided to make this film, he made it as a container of his most important memories to keep them from the fading of time. Photos and videos that Fang shot in his past 22 years, combined with newly shot footage and driven by his narration, this is the personal film about Fang himself, written by life itself.

abandoned landscapes: prologue 2D/3D | UK Premiere

I can particularly recommend the 3-D version of Fang’s Abandoned Landscapes: Prologue for its almost expressionist pictures of large areas reduced to desolation: this is not ‘pure’ documentary but a fully fledged vision of apocalypse and loss, in some ways comparable with Zhao Liang’s Behemoth. – Tony Rayns (Asian Film Expert, Film Critic)

Due to the massive urban modernization in Hangzhou city, many buildings considered old were demolished or abandoned. These places were left in corners of this city, and abandoned landscapes is an ongoing experimental documentary project about these forgotten places. prologue is a 3D piece, using the leftover 3D materials shot when during Fang’s search of such places.

Notice: These screenings are part of Frank Fang-A Hangzhou Observer. The full note by Tony Rayns will be available in Hangzhou New Cinema social media and the digital brochure. More exclusive content will also be available in the digital brochure and NFTS Screening Room.

Closing Film | Suburban Birds | Friday December 18th

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Suburban Birds

Dir. Qiu Sheng | China | 113 min | 2018 | Debut Feature

Trailer

Qiu's directorial touch is remarkably gentle-while rhyming images and stories across plotlines, he avoids schematic logic in favor of a light mystery of unity, seeking a quiet depth beyond sensory perception. – Chloe Lizotte, Film Comment Magazine

Some ground subsidence has occurred in a suburban area and a team of engineers, including Hao, is dispatched to investigate the cause. After days of wandering around in the empty suburb looking for answers and carrying his heavy gear, Hao walks into a primary school where he finds a diary chronicling the story of a boy and the separation of what seems to be an intimate group. As the investigation keeps going, Hao discovers that this diary might contain prophecies about his own life.

Notice: More exclusive content will be available in the digital brochure and NFTS Screening Room.

Shorts Programme | Frank Fang-A Hangzhou Observer | Tuesday December 15th - Friday December 18th

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When Frank Fang wanders the streets and buildings of his city, filming as he goes, he brings the eye of a cineaste and the mind of a cinephile. Fang has been making his personal films for only six years and his thinking about filmmaking has evolved very rapidly. Some of the changes have taken the form of technical experimentation, using different types of camera, an optical printer, digital manipulations, his own version of a Steadicam and, in a few shorts, the old anaglyph 3-D system which uses red and green filters. But the more crucial changes have been aesthetic. His increasingly sophisticated editing tries out various formal strategies, juxtapositions of stillness and movement, and the space between subjectivity and objectivity. And he’s begun thinking seriously about the relationship between film and time, particularly the tricks and traps of film’s capacity to ‘capture’ a moment of time. This has brought him into the arenas explored by the great ‘underground’ filmmakers of the New American Cinema since the 1960s – there are reminiscences of the formal playfulness of Ken Jacobs and the vivid abstractions of Stan Brakhage in some of the films – but he’s never imitative. On the contrary, his best work is charged with a spirit of enquiry and discovery that’s entirely his own: that’s what makes it so exciting to watch. – Tony Rayns (Asian Film Expert, Film Critic)

Part 1: Cinephile, Film Format & Personal Life | UK Premiere

Part 2: City Landscape, Ruins, Community & Public Events | UK Premiere

Notice: The full note of Shorts Programme: Frank Fang-A Hangzhou Observer by Tony Rayns, film synopsis and technical specifications will be available in Hangzhou New Cinema social media and the digital brochure.

Shorts Programme | Hangzhou New Talents | Tuesday December 15th - Friday December 18th

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Hangzhou New Talents, a section of shorts from Hangzhou new filmmakers, offers an intriguing opportunity to look back at their early work to trace the origins of their feature-length debuts. In Qiu Sheng's Distant Thunder, the audience can detect the traces of Suburban Birds’ coming-of-age tale, bridged by a seamless connection between daily life and nightmares. In Zhu Xin's On that Afternoon and Fragile Women, the enigmatic wanderlust of Vanishing Days can be seen in its nascent, visual stages. This program also features many other filmmakers who are not appearing in the feature-length screenings. Zheng Lu Xinyuan and Zhang Zimu collaborated on the Guangzhou urban-village film project Just Like Any Other Night, which is a mirror of some Hangzhou shorts, perfectly blending the Chinese cities' rapid changes with fleetingly intimate sensations. In Every Meeting Seems Parting, the experimental filmmaker Wang Ping, a graduate of the China Academy of Art (based in Hangzhou), reflects on themes such as art, kinship, and the self through the moving image as she attempts to explore the spiritual dilemma inherent in confronting time, mortality, and fate. In The Stone Lost in North, Shen Ruilan, a video artist who lives and works in Hangzhou, constructs a memory model about seasons and space set to Wu Bai’s signature number Summer Night Wind. All of the selected short films are UK premieres.

Distant Thunder | Dir. Qiu Sheng | 8 min | 2017

Trailer

A group of children are playing hide and seek. Lei goes the furthest. He sits by the river and nobody finds him. 20 years pass in the blink of an eye.

On that Afternoon | Dir. Zhu Xin | 16 min | 2017

On that afternoon, an old man quarrels with the driver on a bus that runs between the old town and the new.

Fragile Women | Dir. Zhu Xin | 7 min | 2018

At a picnic in the countryside, the woman accidentally strikes a shuttlecock into water. The man leaps into the river and then I hear the mountain wind.

Just Like Any Other Night | Dir. Zheng Lu Xinyuan & Zhang Zimu | 29 min | Collaborative Film Project | 2018

A ghostly image emerges in the dark, weakly lights up its surrounding —a city ruin awaits renewal. Deep in the darkness, a girl murmurs a scattered diary of her lonely soul amid the city life. An intimate archive of fleeting sensations amid China’s rapid urbanization, especially on the Urban-Village, one of the most drastic scenes of Chinese urbanization. It was realized with the collaboration of young urban-villagers in Guangzhou, China.

Every Meeting Seems Parting | Dir. Wang Ping | 35 min | Documentary | 2015

Trailer

As many of her friends die around her, the filmmaker’s mother finally broaches the subject of death with her daughter, asking that her ashes be spread in the ocean. For over sixty years, these rural parents’ lives were isolated from modern society; they have never seen the sea. As their only daughter, Wang Ping decides to film a trip they take together to the ocean, to Weizhou Island.

The Stone Lost in North | Dir. Shen Ruilan | 4 min | 2019

An old lady in deep sleep, back in time, dreaming of her past lover…

Notice: More exclusive content will be available in the digital brochure and NFTS Screening Room.