CEAS Film Series
Sha’ou 沙鸥 (1981) Director: Zhang Nuanxin This film is about Sha’ou, a member of the Chinese national volleyball team. The film begins in 1977, a few months before the Asian Games, and continues to follow Sha Ou’s life until the end of the film. Sah’ou dreams of being a world champion but faces many tragedies on the path to realizing her dream. Retrospective of Chinese Women Directors (1950s - Present) Series This film series will present the works of four remarkable women directors, each negotiating a perspective or commentary alternative to the mainstream cinema of the time...
Magino Story: Raising Silkworms (1977) 112 minutes, Color, 16mm, English Subtitles After realizing that he still could not understand the farmers, Ogawa and his staff moved to Magino in Yamagata to begin farming themselves. From this experience emerged a series of films, beginning with Raising Silkworms, that interweave local folktales with meticulous records of farm activities, to evoke rural life from within. Another Village: The Radical Documentaries of Ogawa Shinsuke Ogawa Shinsuke was one of the pillars of postwar Japanese documentary, whose influence has spread throughout Asia. Pursuing...
The Unfailing Radio Wave 永不消逝的电波 (1958, 111 minutes) Director: Wang Ping During the Sino-Japanese war and the war of liberation, Chinese commissar Xia Li and his undercover “wife” operate a clandestine radio station in Shanghai between 1938 and 1949. Their actions were at a great personal risk, and the underground radio intelligence they provided was a huge contribution to war efforts. Retrospective of Chinese Women Directors (1950s - Present) Series This film series will present the works of four remarkable women directors, each negotiating a perspective or commentary alternative to the...
The Story of Liubao 柳堡的故事 (1957, 75 minutes) Director: Wang Ping Li Jin, a solider of the New Fourth Army, stayed in Liubao village with his Army. During Lin Jin’s stay, he fell in love with a local girl - Ermeizi. However, he had to leave Liubao with his troops for several years. Lin Jin and Ermeizi lost contact during the war after Lin Jin had left Liubao. Years later, Jin returned to Liubao where he finds Ermeizi again. Retrospective of Chinese Women Directors (1950s - Present) Series This film series will present the works of four remarkable women directors, each negotiating a...
Heta Village (1973) 146 minutes, B&W, 16mm, English Subtitles After years of following the Narita struggle, Ogawa turned his camera from the action towards the way of life of the farmers and what they were trying to defend. Arguably his masterpiece, Heta Village is less a document than an attempt to embody different modes of time and space. The third film in a series of four. Another Village: The Radical Documentaries of Ogawa Shinsuke Ogawa Shinsuke was one of the pillars of postwar Japanese documentary, whose influence has spread throughout Asia. Pursuing committed, independent...
Sea of Youth (1966) 56 minutes, B&W, 16mm, English subtitles Ogawa’s directorial debut records student opposition to government changes in the correspondence school system. Their youth resonates with Ogawa’s independent spirit to produce a passionate portrait of people rethinking education, work, and life. Another Village: The Radical Documentaries of Ogawa Shinsuke Ogawa Shinsuke was one of the pillars of postwar Japanese documentary, whose influence has spread throughout Asia. Pursuing committed, independent documentary, he soon realized that it wasn’t enough to stand...
Please join Academy Award-winning director Oliver Stone and American University History Professor Peter Kuznick for a screening and discussion about Episode 3: The Bomb (60 mins) from their Showtime television series, The Untold History of the United States (2012). The dynamic 10-part series re-examines commonly told narratives about America’s place in the world and the world that America helped shape. Episode 3: The Bomb explores America’s controversial decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan. The filmmakers will be present for a post-screening discussion moderated by Professor Matthew...
Much of what we know about China’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) concerns the experience of officials and intellectuals. Our understanding of these “ten years of turmoil,” which erupted almost fifty years ago, is therefore urban, with a focus on the China’s political and cultural elites. In his new film “Summary of Crimes,” director Xu Xing tackles the question of what happened in the countryside and at the grassroots, in interviews with a group of peasants convicted as counterrevolutionaries during the Cultural Revolution. For many years these peasants had no way of articulating their...
No Man’s Zone Directed by Toshi Fujiwara, 2011 (Run time: 103 minutes) In No Man’s Zone, a man wanders through the 20-kilometer exclusion zone around the stricken nuclear reactors at Fukushima. The cherry trees are in bloom and the radiation is invisible, yet a gaping emptiness looms where the tsunami engulfed streets and houses. The man is wearing normal clothing, just like the people still toughing it out there, and he occasionally encounters white “ghosts” in protective clothing. As in Tarkovsky’s Stalker, No Man’s Zone is both a place and a mental state. A voice...
4:00pm-5:00pm: PANEL DISCUSSION “1911 Revolution and Chinese Diaspora” Yale faculty: Peter Perdue (History) Jonathan Spence (Emeritus, History) Jing Tsu (East Asian Languages & Literatures) 5:00pm-6:00pm: FILM SCREENING “2 or 3 Things about Kang Youwei” Island, utopia, art, and political devastation are topics covered by Evans Chan’s meditative documentary/film-essay on Kang Youwei (1858-1927), modern China’s pioneering dissident/constitutional reformer. The film focuses on Korsholmen, the Swedish island Kang lived on for a few years, speculates on how his love for Sweden reflected his...
Memories Of A Lost LandscapeDirected by Yojyu Matsubayashi, 2011 (Run time: 109 minutes, BluRay)In this film, the young director (Yojyu Matsubayashi) begins living with an evacuated family from Minami Soma to produce a very personal portrait of their joys and sorrows.Following Fukushima: Three Works Documenting Disaster and Its AftermathThe world was stunned by images of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident in the Tohoku region of Japan on March 11, 2011. But news cameras rarely ventured into the forbidden zones or relayed the lives of the countless people affected by the disasters....
Nuclear NationDirected by Atsushi Funahashi, 2012 (96 minutes, BluRay)Nuclear Nation is a documentary about the exile of Futaba’s residents, the region housing the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Since the 1960s, Futaba had been promised prosperity with tax breaks and major subsidies to compensate for the presence of the power plant. The town’s people have now lost their homeland. Through their agonies and frustrations, the film questions the real cost of capitalism and nuclear energy.Following Fukushima: Three Works Documenting Disaster and Its AftermathThe world was stunned...
High And Low (Tengoku to Jigoku)Director: Akira Kurosawa, 1963 (143 min) Toshiro Mifune is unforgettable as Kingo Gondo, a wealthy industrialist whose family becomes the target of a cold-blooded kidnapper in High and Low (Tengoku to jigoku), the highly influential domestic drama and police procedural from director Akira Kurosawa. Adapting Ed McBain’s detective novel King’s Ransom, Kurosawa moves effortlessly from compelling race-against-time thriller to exacting social commentary, creating a diabolical treatise on contemporary Japanese society.
The Makioka Sisters (Sasame-yuki/Fine Snow)Directed by Kon Ichikawa, 1983 (140min.)This lyrical adaptation of the beloved novel by Junichiro Tanizaki was a late-career triumph for director Kon Ichikawa. Structured around the changing of the seasons, The Makioka Sisters (Sasame-yuki) follows the lives of four siblings who have taken on their family’s kimono manufacturing business, in the years leading up to the Pacific War. The two oldest have been married for some time, but according to tradition, the rebellious youngest sister cannot wed until the third, conservative and terribly shy, finds...
Oxhide (Niu Pi)Directed by LIU Jiayin, 2005 (110 minutes, Mandarin w/ English Subtitles) This is the breakout film by Director LIU Jiayin, who will be visiting campus on November 1, 2012 in conjunction with a screening of her most recent film, Oxhide II. Daily life in an impossibly cramped Beijing apartment takes on epic proportions in this, intimate portrait, with unprecedented access, of a working-class Chinese family.Boldly transforming documentary into fiction, Liu Jiayin cast her parents and herself as fictionalized versions of themselves. Her father, Liu Zaiping, sells leather bags but...
Bad Boys (Furyō shōnen)1960-1961, Japan (89 min., English subtitles) Directed and scripted by Susumu Hani.Cinematography by Manji Kanau.Music by Tōru Takemitsu.With Sachio Yoshida, Kōichirō Yamazaki. Considered one of the fundamental films of Japanese New Wave, Bad Boys was voted the best Japanese film of 1961 in Kinema Junpo, outvoting Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (Yōjinbō, 1961), Masaki Kobayashi’s The Human Condition (Ningen no jōken, 1959-1961), Nagisa Ōshima’s The Catch (Shiiku, 1961) and other titles by major filmmakers. The film portrays the inner maturation of the juvenile delinquents...
Three Outlaw Samurai (Sanbiki no Samurai)Directed by: Hideo Gosha, 1964 (93 min.)This first feature by the legendary Hideo Gosha is among the most beloved chanbara (sword-fighting) films. An origin-story offshoot of a Japanese television phenomenon of the same name, Three Outlaw Samurai is a classic in its own right. A wandering, seen-it-all ronin (Tetsuro Tamba) becomes entangled in the dangerous business of two other samurai (Isamu Nagato and Mikijiro Hira), hired to execute a band of peasants who have kidnapped the daughter of a corrupt magistrate. With remarkable storytelling economy and...
Oxhide II (Niu Pi Er)Directed by LIU Jiayin, 2009 (132 minutes, Mandarin w/ English Subtitles)Breaking new ground in cinematic art, Liu Jiayin’s follow-up to her masterful debut OXHIDE turns a simple dinner into a profoundly intimate study of family relationships.Building on the stunning vision of OXHIDE (voted one of the best Chinese films of the 2000s), writer-director Liu Jiayin once again casts herself and her parents in scripted versions of their life in a tiny Beijing apartment. Liu takes her uncompromising artistry to the extreme, setting all of the action around the family dinner...
Children in the Classroom (Kyōshitsu no kodomotachi, 1954, Japan, English subtitles, 30 min.) Directed and scripted by Susumu Hani. Cinematography by Shizuo Komura.Hani considers this educational film as his directorial debut. Sponsored by the Ministry of Education, Children in the Classroom was initially designed to be a tutorial film that would demonstrate how to discipline troubled children. However, employing uniquely observational methods to film real children in a real school, the film brought a decisive change in the history of documentary cinema in Japan. Hani’s sensational debut as a...
Special Documentary Screening and Panel311Directed by Mori Tatsuya, Watai Takeharu, Matsubayashi Yojū, and Yasuoka Takaharu (2011, Japan, HD, 94min.)311 is one of the first documentaries completed about the March 2011 disaster in Japan and focuses not just on the destruction and human toll, but also, in a self-reflexive fashion, on the fundamental problems of media attempting to report on such suffering. This will be a North American premiere screening.The award-winning Japanese documentary filmmaker and journalist, Mori Tatsuya, was scheduled to present 311 in person at Yale but has had to...
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