“˜Cinema on the Edge’ to Take Chinese Movies to New York1 min read
Reading Time: < 1 minuteLast August, Li Xianting, the organizer of the Beijing Independent Film Festival, received an unexpected visit from dozens of police officers and local officials at his offices in Songzhuang, a village on the eastern outskirts of Beijing. They confiscated documents, computers and films and temporarily detained two of the event’s organizers, effectively shutting down one of China’s most prominent independent film festivals.
“Seeing the empty shelves where they once had a giant collection of DVDs of experimental films and archives of their printed materials was shocking,” said Shelly Kraicer, a movie critic and festival programmer of Chinese cinema who visited the site last last year. “It made us want to go beyond expressions of solidarity.”
“We thought: Quite simply, if the films can’t be shown in Beijing, then we’ll show them in New York,” he added.
The result is “Cinema on the Edge: The Best of the Beijing Independent Film Festival 2012-2014,” a selection of movies that were shown at previous editions of the Beijing Independent Film Festival or that were intended to be shown at the festival before it was shut down. The films, including works by Ai Weiwei, Hu Jie, Li Luo, Zou Xueping and Yang Mingming, will be screened at various cinemas in New York from Aug. 7 to Sept. 13.
View the full article here >>Via Sinosphere, The New York Times
