Chinese movies

[RTH10260]

‘Little by little, the truth is being discovered’: the archive rescuing China’s forbidden films
A golden era of Chinese cinema was brought to a halt by Xi Jinping’s regime, but now, thousands of miles away, a rich world of banned documentaries and dramas is being studied and celebrated

Amy Hawkins
Tue 20 Feb 2024 06.00 EST

On the wall of an unassuming second- floor room in Newcastle University sits a map, Blu-Tacked, unframed. At first glance it looks like any other map of China. But on closer inspection, the cities labelled on the map are not just the major urban centres. They are the places that have hosted important film festivals over the years, the details of which are annotated in colour-coded text.

Covering the final years of the so-called golden era of the scene, the map shows dozens of film festivals that used to be active across China. There was the China Independent Film Festival (Ciff) in Nanjing, the Beijing Independent Film Festival (Biff), and the Yunnan Multiculture Visual Festival (Yunfest), among others. In 2024, China’s film community is a shadow of its former self. All these festivals – and more than a dozen others – have been forced to close in the years after Xi Jinping, China’s ultra-repressive leader, took office in 2012.

Visitors to the archive can access a world of knowledge about China that is nearly impossible to discover within its borders

And so it is that an archive containing nearly 800 indie films and oral interviews with more than 100 film-makers came to be preserved around 5,000 miles away from Beijing. Newcastle’s Chinese Independent Film Archive (Cifa), which opened in September 2023, is the world’s largest publicly accessible archive of independent Chinese films. It is also “the first of its kind outside China that is housed at a university and is accessible”, says Karin Chien, a film producer and the co-founder of dGenerate Films, a distributor of Chinese indie cinema.

The archive is the brainchild of Sabrina Qiong Yu, a film and Chinese studies professor at Newcastle University. The idea came about after she organised a 10th anniversary event for Ciff in Newcastle in 2014. Ciff had started in 2003, and was one of the major independent film festivals to flourish in the years when cheap, digital equipment started to become widely available, empowering indie film-makers in a period of relative openness in the country.



https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/f ... -newcastle

[Slim Cognito]

I may be comparing apples to oranges but, as you all know, I lurves me some Jackie Chan movies. Most of his were made in Hong Kong, or across the globe, but his third Police Story installment, Super Cop (with Michelle Yeoh and a freakin' awesome scene where she jumps a motorcycle ONTO the top of a moving train - NO CGI!! She really jumped the bike), was made "in cooperation with The People's Republic of China" where the movie is set, although it's mostly shot in Hong Kong.

Anyhoo, long story short, I wonder if its availability has been affected.