The Chinese Cinema Project presents a mini-season celebrating Qiu Jiongjiong, showcasing his early non-fiction works and the modern classic A New Old Play.

Qiu Jiongjiong is one of China’s most innovative, critical, and entertaining artists/filmmakers, whose works joyously blur the boundaries between fiction, documentary, and experimental cinema; intimate memory and national history resonate in Qiu’s baroque rhapsodies of music and design. Both films in the screening are part of Qiu’s ‘Chatterbox Trilogy’ along with Madame (2010).

A Portrait of Mr. Huang 黄老老拍案 40’

This short documentary focuses on current storyteller and ex-cop Huang Songnian. Qiu playful montage cuts between Huang’s wildly entertaining, and sometimes very dark stories of intrepid forensic police work (including a queasy tale of maggots and a body, and another of rural cannibalism), and disruptive yet oddly suitable Sichuan opera excerpts, pigeon portraits, and Qiu’s own charming chalk drawings.

My Mother’s Rhapsody 萱堂闲话录 106’

'My mother' of the title is Lin Zhiguang, who is in fact the mother of director Qiu Jiongjiong’s father. This thoroughly entertaining film is Qiu’s expansive family chronicle, a documentary in the form of a folktale. Lin, born to a wealthy family in 1926, lived through the Chinese civil war, the Communist Revolution, the Anti-Rightist Campaign, and more. A formidable seamstress, cook, and manager, she had seven children with her husband, Wang Junhui, the ticket seller for the famous itinerant Sichuan opera troupe, Xinyouxin.

Mother Lin tells her story and that of her children with confidence and a twinkling-eyed charisma while Qiu frames and fragments her tales with amusing disruptions. This is both a key background to Qiu’s A New Old Play, and a delightful portrait of an extraordinary woman.