Platform - Au Sud Du Cinema: Events in Hyderabad

Director Jia tests the limits of style and behavior to a parent-shocking degree.

To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Fonds Sud, a French program that aims at supporting films from the "South", Alliance Francaise of Hyderabad and the Hyderabad Film Club, in collaboration with the French Embassy in India, are presenting a collection of nine films coming from Africa, Asia and Latin America.

The past 20 years of the Fonds Sud have been dedicated to the 260 filmmakers supported by this program. These filmmakers have overcome obstacles with their fighting spirit, and captured their dreams.

Since the implementation of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms in the late 1980s, tremendous socio-economic changes have occurred in China, generated primarily from the urban centres along the coast, but gradually rippling into the rural, inland areas, such as Shanxi. The rural areas are not only geographically but governmentally, economically and even culturally distanced from the sources of change.

The movie follows the 6 young members of a theater and music troupe, from a small villge. During the immediate post-Mao period, they start testing the limits of style and behavior to a parent-shocking degree. Boys wear bell-bottoms. Girls smoke cigarettes. The adventures this troupe encounters, both artistic and sentimental, is given a background of revolutionary disillusion, economic opening and privatization.

Director: Jia Zhangke
Photography: Yu Lik Wai
Cast: Wang Hong wei, Zhao Tao, Liang Jing Dong, Yang Tian-Ti, Wang Bo
Music: Zhang yang
Country: China
Year: 2001
Length: 193 minutes

Please contact Prakash Reddy on 93910-20243 for further details.