“Adolescent screen turns tend to be praised for their precocious hyper-expressivity or youthful dynamism, but Wang Yuwen does something different in An Elephant Sitting Still. In the late Hu Bo’s mammoth undertaking, a darkly poetic and nearly four-hour drama about discontented residents of contemporary China, Wang’s performance is defined by a deadpan, glassy-eyed grimace that covers the actress’ face throughout the majority of her scenes. Wang’s bracing simplicity as Huang Ling, a willfully disobedient schoolgirl, helps ground some of the more sensational elements of Hu’s conception of the character—her binge-drinking mother, her illicit affair with a married high school dean—within the realm of lived experience, as felt but not always as communicated by this recessive personality. An air of forbidding detachment clings to the actress, even when Huang is voraciously gobbling up pastries or a pitifully squashed birthday cake. By refusing to react, Wang cannily plays against the expectations of her character’s arc while providing a running commentary on a particular kind of teenage experience. Maybe one day, Huang will look back on the events portrayed herein with different, more palpable feelings, but for now she can only drift through the motions of an abysmal life she loathes. Blankness is often deemed a demerit in acting, a presumed indication of a performer’s vacuity, yet Wang’s blankness reveals not the absence of thought, but its painful concealment: in a world of so much sadness, what more can the young and isolated do but suppress and subsist? When Huang eventually lashes out at those who have failed to protect her after hours of grim impassivity, it begets a moment of volcanic release that the actress has earned by closely adhering to the state of silent despair that can so easily oppress those unready to fight it.” — Matthew Eng

The 12 Best Female Film Performances of Early 2019

(Source: TribecaFilm.com)

“In the films of her husband and ongoing collaborator Jia Zhangke, Zhao Tao has burrowed into each of her central roles with the prowess of a performer willing to discard any and all traces of herself in the name of her characters. She is that phenomenal being: an actor entirely without vanity. Her performances exist where Jia’s work exists—at the intersection of life and art, a place where the differences between reality and fiction cease to matter. In Ash Is Purest White, Zhao applies her extraordinary, unselfish talent to the transmogrifying arc of Qiao, a gangster’s moll forced to build her life anew after making the ultimate sacrifice for her inamorato. As she did in her previous film with Jia, Mountains May Depart, the actress ages decades across this personal epic, relying not so much on conspicuous cosmetic transformation or surface-bound tics to signal maturation but her unadorned face, which can express anything and everything; here, it manages to contain and communicate a lifetime of anguish and lasting passion. By stripping her style down to the wordless, elemental basics of screen acting, Zhao makes certain that the clarity of Qiao’s emotions and her durable connection to the audience are never diminished. In doing so, she continues to occupy her rightful place as the heart—and breath—of Jia’s lifelike cinema.” — Matthew Eng

The 12 Best Female Film Performances of Early 2019

(Source: TribecaFilm.com)

With Chinese New Year this Saturday, we’re continuing to spotlight some of the amazing films from Chinese directors that have played Tribeca​ throughout the years.

Next up is Jia Zhangke​’s Still Life, in which the lives of a miner and a nurse are interlaced in this sad and splendid drama from the modern Chinese master behind A Touch of Sin​ and Mountains May Depart​.

Li Yang’s Blind Shaft won the 2003 Tribeca Film Festival prize for Best Narrative Feature and was banned in China for its truthful depiction of crippling poverty and inhumane (and illegal) conditions faced by the country’s coal miners everyday.

Farewell My Concubine (1993. Dir. Chen Kaige. Cin. Gu Changwei.)

On this day, Bernardo Bertolucci’s Best Picture winner The Last Emperor was released into theaters in Italy after a mammoth production.

The film required 19,000 extras over the course of the shoot.

Queen Elizabeth II was visiting Beijing on a state visit during filming of the famously immense coronation scene in the Forbidden City. In a rare instance, the Chinese authorities granted priority to the production over the Queen, who was therefore unable to visit the Forbidden City.

No private automobiles were permitted during filming, which meant that even Peter O’Toole, the film’s lone recognizable actor, were forced to rely on bicycles as a means of personal transportation.

Stephen Maing’s fascinating documentary about the rise of digital censorship in China, High Tech, Low Life, inspired audiences at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival. Now playing at the IFC Center until January 15th!