Fengming, a Chinese Memoir
Grasshopper Film • 3h 4m
Directed by Wang Bing • Documentary • 2017 • 184 minutes
Often cited as one of the great documentary achievements, Wang Bing’s dazzling tour-de-force — a gripping monologue recounting five decades in the life of a once-ardent socialist in the new China — is a testament to the power of oral history and the strength of one extraordinary woman.
"A heartbreaking, scathing documentary... The film has a moral authority similar to that of Shoah, to which it ingeniously alludes." —The New Yorker
"Gripping. A sweeping saga. Fengming stands alongside first-person precedents like Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason and Errol Morris’s The Fog of War in its ability to wrest powerful effects from the deceptively simple setup of a lone raconteur." —Artforum
"In his masterful, West of the Tracks, Wang Bing used a rural freight railway as a conduit into China's uneasy transition from a planned to a market economy. In this equally remarkable follow-up, he finds in a single room, and in He Fengming's harrowed eyes, another uncanny metaphor for individual lives undone by the dreams of nations." —Village Voice
Up Next in Grasshopper Film
-
From What Is Before
Directed by Lav Diaz • Drama • With Perry Dizon, Roeder Camanag, Hazel Orencio • 2014 • 338 minutes
Winner of five prizes at the Locarno Film Festival, including the Golden Leopard for Best Film, Lav Diaz’s follow up to his acclaimed Norte, The End of History is an extraordinary five-and-a-half-...
-
Light Years: Lucrecia Martel and the ...
Directed by Manuel Abramovich • Documentary • With Lucrecia Martel • 2017 • 75 minutes
An illustration of filmmaking’s many stages — mysterious, delirious, playful, frustrated — and complex artistic collaboration with its subject, Manuel Abramovich’s new film concerns Lucrecia Martel during the ...
-
Mimosas
Directed by Oliver Laxe • Drama • With Ahmed Hammoud, Shakib Ben Omar, Said Aagli • 2016 • 93 minutes
Winner of the Critics’ Week Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Oliver Laxe’s stunning new film, Mimosas, is a breathtakingly shot Western that follows a mysterious caravan carrying a dying...
