CEAS Film Series

Event
Posted : July 27, 2016

Directed by Kihachi Okamoto (Toho, 1967, 99 min., 35 mm) Nakadai shows his range and pulls out all stops in this marvelous satire of spy movies.   In Japanese with English subtitles. Yale University welcomes Nakadai Tatsuya, one of Japan’s greatest actors.   From Kurosawa Akira’s Ran and Kagemusha to Kobayashi Masaki’s Harakiri and The Human Condition, Nakadai Tatsuya has starred in many of Japan’s greatest films and worked with many of its greatest directors. In a career that spans seven decades, from Shakespeare on stage to starring roles on TV, Nakadai has become one of Japan’s...

Event
Posted : July 27, 2016

Directed by Masaki Kobayashi (Shochiku, 1962, 133 min., 35 mm) A tour de force performance in one of the most damning critiques of the Japanese feudal structure ever.   In Japanese with English subtitles Yale University welcomes Nakadai Tatsuya, one of Japan’s greatest actors.   From Kurosawa Akira’s Ran and Kagemusha to Kobayashi Masaki’s Harakiri and The Human Condition, Nakadai Tatsuya has starred in many of Japan’s greatest films and worked with many of its greatest directors. In a career that spans seven decades, from Shakespeare on stage to starring roles on TV, Nakadai has...

Event
Posted : July 26, 2016

Happy Hour (Directed by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, 2015, 317 min. DVD) The product of workshops with mostly newcomers to film, Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s Happy Hour has won awards around the world, including a Best Actress award at Locarno shared by its four principals. Its leisurely but emotionally dense narration of the lives of four female friends as they confront changes in their work, domestic, and romantic lives, has earned praise around the world, including most recently in The New Yorker and The New York Times as the film was featured in a special run at MoMA in New York. The director will be...

Event
Posted : February 19, 2016

Directed by Hong Sang-Soo (Kino Lorber, 2012, 89 min) A young film student and her mother run away to the seaside town of Mohang to escape their mounting debt. The young woman begins writing a script for a short film in order to calm her nerves. Three women named Anne appear, and each woman consecutively visits the seaside town of Mohang. The first Anne is a successful film director. The second Anne is a married woman secretly in an affair with a Korean man. The third Anne is a divorcee whose husband left her for a Korean woman. A young woman tends to the small hotel by the Mohang foreshore...

Event
Posted : February 19, 2016

Directed by Im Kwon Taek (Kino Lorber, 2002, 116 min) Winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s Best Director award, CHIHWASEON is a vivid portrait of the turbulent life and times of Korea’s greatest artist. As remarkably embodied by Choi Min-sik (Old Boy), the temperamental, passionate brush master Jang Seung-up paints with a martial artist’s fervor while indulging a rock star’s single-minded lust for life. Amidst the tumult and destruction of nineteenth century Korea, “Ohwon” as he comes to be called, fights to escape both the rigid artistic boundaries and the social...

Event
Posted : February 19, 2016

Directed by July Jung (Pinehouse, Now Films, 2014, 119 min) The head of a local police substation becomes involved in the case of a young girl experiencing family violence. As she tries to protect the girl from her violent stepfather she becomes aware that she is keeping a secret. Curated and introduced by Dima Mironenko, CEAS Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer in East Asian Languages & Literatures Dima Mironenko is a film and cultural historian of North Korea. His research focuses on the history of everyday. His dissertation, “A Jester with...

Event
Posted : February 19, 2016

Directed by Soh-Young Kim (Third World Newsreel, 2000, 93 min) This documentary traces the trajectory of a Korean diasporic community in the former Soviet Union.  Placed in internment camps by Stalin during World War II, the plight of a generation of Korean-Russians was documented in secret by the artist Shin Sun-nam, whose epic painting ‘Requiem’ has only recently been made public. Curated and introduced by Dima Mironenko, CEAS Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer in East Asian Languages & Literatures Dima Mironenko is a film and cultural historian...

Event
Posted : February 19, 2016

Directed by Soon-mi Yoo (Rosa Filmes, 2014, 72 min) Songs from the North is an essay film which looks differently at the enigma of North Korea, a country typically seen only through the distorted lens of jingoistic propaganda and derisive satire. Interweaving footage from the director’s three visits to North Korea, together with songs, spectacle, popular cinema and archival footage, Songs from the North tries to understand, on their own terms, the psychology and popular imagination of the North Korean people and the political ideology of absolute love which continues to drive the nation...

Event
Posted : February 9, 2016

Directed by Gosha Hideo (Shochiku, 1978, 160 min., 35mm) Kumokiri Nizaemon is a former samurai who leads a band of thieves to attack the castle of his former clan in Gosha Hideo’s powerful adaptation of Ikenami Shōtarō’s novel. Nakadai Tatsuya again stars as Kumokiri in an all-star cast. SOME SPECIAL SAMURAI A trio of Japanese period films featuring unique heroes. All films in Japanese with English subtitles. All screenings at the Whitney Humanities Center Auditorium, 53 Wall Street. For More Information:...

Event
Posted : February 9, 2016

Directed by Okamoto Kihachi (Toho, 1966, 119 min., 35mm) Okamoto’s masterful adaptation of Nakazato Kaizan’s epic novel, The Great Bodhisatva Pass, which featured the most nihilistic samurai of all time, Tsukue Ryūnosuke, here expertly played by Nakadai Tatsuya, descending into madness. SOME SPECIAL SAMURAI A trio of Japanese period films featuring unique heroes. All films in Japanese with English subtitles. All screenings at the Whitney Humanities Center Auditorium, 53 Wall Street For More Information:...

Event
Posted : February 9, 2016

Directed by Kurosawa Akira (Toho, 1961, 110 min., 35mm) The film that introduced the most famous of samurai heroes, the nameless rōnin played by Mifune Toshirō, and which influenced many from John Belushi to Sergio Leone. This samurai inserts himself into a war between two rival gangs and, à la Red Harvest, prompts their mutual destruction. SOME SPECIAL SAMURAI A trio of Japanese period films featuring unique heroes. All films in Japanese with English subtitles. All screenings at the Whitney Humanities Center Auditorium, 53 Wall Street. For More Information:...

Event
Posted : October 27, 2015

Things Left Behind (2012) explores the transformative power of the first major international art exhibit devoted to the atomic bomb. The exhibition, at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, featured large-format color photographs of clothing once worn by those who perished, taken by renowned Japanese photographer Ishiuchi Miyako. Ishiuchi brought the garments—still colorful and fashionable nearly seven decades later—out of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial archive and photographed them in the light, to trace the spirits of those who once wore them. A cinematic reverie about art’s...

Event
Posted : October 27, 2015

Directed by Jia Zhangke (2013).  125 minutes.  Mandarin Chinese with English Subtitles Film & stills courtesy of Kino Lorber Screening followed by a Panel Discussion with  Professor Dudley Andrew (Film Studies) Professor Deborah Davis (Sociology) Dr. Mia Liu (East Asian Studies) Professor Jiwei Xiao (Fairfield University) SYNOPSIS from Kino Lorber A “brilliant exploration of violence and corruption in contemporary China” (Jon Frosch, The Atlantic), A TOUCH OF SIN was inspired by four shocking (and true) events that...

Event
Posted : October 26, 2015

Buddha Mountain 观音山 (2010, 104 minutes) Director: Li Yu  Three 20-something friends drift like free-spirits through Chengdu, Sichuan: Nan Feng, a gorgeous and fearlessly feisty bar singer (played by Chinese superstar Fan Bingbing), and her two admirers, bike delivery guy Ding Bo (heartthrob Taiwanese idol Chen Bo-lin) and roly-poly Fei Zao (played by Fei Long). When Nan Feng accidentally assaults a well-connected bar patron, the three need to find not only compensation money but also a new place to live. They find the apartment of Chang Yueqin, a retired but agelessly elegant Beijing opera...

Event
Posted : October 26, 2015

Lost in Beijing 苹果 (2007, 112 minutes) Director: Li Yu  Every year, China’s turbulent economic expansion tempts thousands of impoverished peasants to the prosperous region surrounding the capital of Beijing. The promise of higher wages and an attractive modern lifestyle prompts many a migrant to burn their bridges. Liu Ping Guo and her husband An Kun have recently made the pilgrimage. Having both found jobs, they now earn enough to lead a modest life. Liu Ping Guo works as a masseuse at Gold Basin Foot Massage Palace owned by Lin Dong and his wife. During a party with her colleagues,...

Event
Posted : October 22, 2015

The Japanese film director Zeze Takahisa’s distinguished career has spanned commercial and independent cinema, fiction and documentary, television and motion pictures, art film and genre movies, mainstream film and erotic cinema. Echoing that, his work has also often focused on those in between, on postmodern nomads who wander between competing identities—national, ethnic, or sexual—on the margins of society. We are pleased to bring this important filmmaker to Yale to present two of his films and conduct workshops with students. Heaven’s Story is his magnum opus, a 4½ hour epic that won...

Event
Posted : October 22, 2015

The Japanese film director Zeze Takahisa’s distinguished career has spanned commercial and independent cinema, fiction and documentary, television and motion pictures, art film and genre movies, mainstream film and erotic cinema. Echoing that, his work has also often focused on those in between, on postmodern nomads who wander between competing identities—national, ethnic, or sexual—on the margins of society. We are pleased to bring this important filmmaker to Yale to present two of his films and conduct workshops with students. Heaven’s Story is his magnum opus, a 4½ hour epic that won...

Event
Posted : October 22, 2015

A Soul Haunted by Painting 画魂 (1994, 125 minutes) Director: Huang Shuqin The film focuses on the rise of a Chinese painter, Pan Yuliang (1899-1977), as she went from prostitute to famed artist in Paris. The film opens with then 12-year old Pan working in a brothel in a small rural town. She is soon hired to become a prostitute after the head hooker retires and is killed. She meets her eventual husband, Zanhua, on her very first night. He already had a wife, but he married Pan anyway, and they moved to the city where Pan studied painting at the Shanghai Arts Institute. The institute is closed...

Event
Posted : October 19, 2015

Woman Demon Human 人鬼清 (1987, 115 minutes) Director: Huang Shuqin The fictional life and career of a famous actress in Chinese opera, a woman who goes against tradition by specializing in playing male roles, especially that of Zhang Kui, a benevolent ghost who appears in several Chinese operas. Although the actress’s career brings wealth and fame, it is attained only through considerable struggle against an anti-female system and an unhappy personal life. Retrospective of Chinese Women Directors (1950s - Present) Series This film series will present the works of four remarkable women...

Event
Posted : October 19, 2015

Sacrificed Youth 青春祭 (1985, 92 minutes, 35mm print) Director: Zhang Nuanxin During the Cultural Revolution, seventeen-year-old Li Chun, daughter of urban intellectuals, is sent to a mountainous village in a Tai (Dai) minority region in Yunnan. Assigned to a family that includes ‘Dadie’ (Father), ‘Yiya’ (Grandmother) and ‘Dage’ (Elder Brother), Li joins a brigade of women who chop bamboo. Envious of the Tai uninhibitedness and sensuality, Li eventually discards her Han clothing and demeanor to ‘go native’. Trouble arises when she befriends a male Chinese intellectual, named Ren Jia, and...

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