In Search of Reality I: 2008 Columbia University Contemporary Chinese Independent Documentary Film Festival
REEL CHINA 4th Documentary Biennial
Co-sponsors: Columbia University Arts Initiative, Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures; NYU's Center for Religion and Media, Cinema Studies Department at Tisch School of the Arts

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FILMMAKER BIOS

CUI ZI'EN is a director, film scholar, novelist, critic, screenwriter, and producer. He graduated from the Chinese Academy of Social Science with an MA in literature and is now associate researcher at the Film Research Institute of the Beijing Film Academy. In 2002, he received the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission's Felipa Award for bringing issues of same-sex love into Chinese culture and public awareness, with a prolific crop of critically acclaimed articles, lectures, books, and films, including the first gay novel in modern China.

Released in 1999, Men and Women (directed by Liu Bingjian), was the first Chinese film that depicted the daily life of gay people in China. Cui Zi'en wrote the script. "I wanted to show how we live day by day and to suggest that everyone can have a homosexual side," he says. He has made over 15 short and feature length documentary and feature films, that have been shown in festivals around the world, including Locarno, Hong Kong, London, Vancouver, Pusan.

• "The Sacred, the Profane, and the Domestic in Cui Zi'en's Cinema" by Chris Berry
• Interview with Cui
• An article by Cui on the Chinese gay community

FENG YAN was born 1962 in Tianjin. She went to Japan in 1988 to study economics, where she was instead deeply inspired by the writings of renowned Japanese documentarian Ogawa Shinsuke. After translating his Harvesting Films into Chinese she joined the freelance journalist cooperative Asia Press International in 1994. Feng began making documentaries about rural China that same year. Her early work includes I Want to Go to School, Runaway People, Village Submerged by Dam, and Spring of Xiao Xiao, all broadcast on Japanese public television.

GU YAPING, an independent film director based in Beijing, received her BA from Wuhan University in Economic Management. She worked at the Shaanxi Television Station as a program director after graduation, from 1997 to 2003. She received her MA from the Directing Department at the Beijing Film Academy in 2006. Since then, she has made several documentaries for China Central Television on religion, arts and culture, as well as two independent shorts. My Dear is her first feature length doc, and was screened at Oxdox International Doc Film Festival in the United Kingdom and at China's Yunnan Multi-cultural Visual Festival. In My Dear, Gu uses the medium of film as a means for observing, experiencing and reflecting upon her own life and womanhood.

HU JIE was born in 1958 and graduated from the Art College for the People's Liberation Army, where he majored in oil painting. In 1995, he began to make documentaries. His films include Yuanmingyuan Artist Village (1995), Remote Mountains (1995), The Female Matchmaker (1996), On the Seaside (1999-2003), Mountain Songs in The Plain (2001-2003), Looking for Lin Zhao's Soul (1999-2004), Bask in Sunshine (2002) and The Elected Village Chief (2000-2004). He has also made a series of short films about migrant workers, including The Trash Collector (1998), The Janitors (1998), The Construction Workers (1998) and The Factory Set up by the Peasants (1998).

Hu Jie is committed to using documentary film as a means to challenge official Chinese historical narratives while providing visual details in order to, in his own words, "remember history."

• Interview with Hu

YANG YISHU, a native of Hai'an county in Jiangsu province, received her Ph.D in Film Studies at China Academy of Arts. She won the best new novelist prize from Shanghai Literature magazine, and has frequently had her articles, essays, and other scholarly works published in Chinese periodicals. Who is Hao Ran is her first documentary film. She currently teaches in the Theater and Television Department at Nanjing University.

PANELIST BIOS

LYDIA H. LIU is W. T. Tam Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. She teaches in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Her work has focused on translation theory, the movement of words, images, and artifacts across cultures, and the evolution of writing, textuality, and technology. Her current research is on writing and digital media. Professor Liu has published numerous books and articles in English and Chinese, including Translingual Practice (1995), The Clash of Empires (2004), and an edited volume called Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations (1999).

ROSALIND MORRIS is an anthropologist and cultural critic at Columbia University, where she is Professor and Associate Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature. Her most recent books include Photographies East: The Camera and its Histories in East and Southeast Asia (forthcoming, Duke) and In the Place of Origins: Modernity and its Mediums in Northern Thailand.

RICHARD PEÑA has been the Program Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Director of the New York Film Festival since 1988. At the Film Society, Richard Peña has organized retrospectives of Michelangelo Antonioni, Sacha Guitry, Abbas Kiarostami, Robert Aldrich, Gabriel Figueroa, Kira Muratova, Youssef Chahine, Yasujiro Ozu, Kim Ki-young and Amitabh Bachchan, as well as major film series devoted to African, Chinese, Cuban, Polish, Hungarian, Arab, Korean, Soviet and Argentine cinema. Since 1996, he has organized together with Unifrance Film the annual "Rendez-Vous with French Cinema Today" program. He is an Associate Professor of Film at Columbia University, where he specializes in film theory and international cinema, and since 2006 has been a Visiting Professor in Spanish at Princeton University. He is also currently the co-host of Channel 13's weekly Reel 13.

ZHU RIKUN founded the Beijing-based independent production and distribution company Fanhall Films in 2001, which he still heads today. In 2006, he became the Chief Executive Officer of the Li Xianting Film Foundation. Zhu has supervised the production or publication of some of the most important books ands films on independent cinema in China. He has also organized the China Documentary Film Festival and the Beijing Independent Film Festival.

ORGANIZER BIOS

WEIHONG BAO, assistant professor of Chinese film and media culture, received her Ph.D. from University of Chicago (2006). Trained in both film studies and East Asian literature and culture, she focuses on early Chinese cinema, with broad interests in Chinese cinema, drama, and visual culture from late Qing to the contemporary period as well as international silent cinema, film theory, and film history. Her Ph.D. dissertation deals with questions of spectatorship and aesthetic affect across Shanghai (1896-1937) and Chongqing (1938-1945) cinema and their impact on New China cinema. Her teaching interests cover late Qing visual and performance culture, Chinese language cinema of all periods and regions, Asian American cinema, and contemporary new media and experimental art. Her research interests center on film and intermedial aesthetics, spectatorship and the history of perception, visual and acoustic modernity, and genre connections across modern Chinese literature, drama, and cinema. Her recent publications include "Fish, Water, Stone: From City Symphony to Urban Ecology, Towards an Ecoaesthetics of new Chinese Cinema" (forthcoming in Ecocinema), "Biomechanics of Love: Reinventing the Avant-Garde in Tsai Ming-liang's Wayward 'Pornographic Musical,'" Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 1:2 (2007); "From Pearl White to White Rose Woo, Tracing the Vernacular Body of Nüxia in Chinese Silent Cinema, 1927-1931," Camera Obscura 60 (2005); "A Panoramic Worldview: Probing the Visuality of Dianshizhai huabao," Journal of Modern Chinese Literature 32 (March 2005).

GREGORY MOSHER served as Director of Lincoln Center Theatre (1985-91) and Artistic Director of the Goodman Theatre (1977-84) before coming to Columbia in 2004, and was a producer and director on Broadway, the West End, and in film and television. Many of his nearly 200 stage productions were premieres of work by emerging and established writers, among them Samuel Beckett, Leonard Bernstein, Spalding Gray, David Mamet, Arthur Miller, Richard Nelson, Wole Soyinka, Julie Taymor and Tennessee Williams. He is the director of the films The Prime Gig (Ed Harris, Vince Vaughn), A Life in the Theatre (Jack Lemmon, Matthew Broderick), and produced the film of American Buffalo (Dustin Hoffman). He has received every major American theatre award, including two Tony's for his work on Broadway.

Click here for film synopses.