Chungking Dream + Bingai (with Q&A)
Venue: Showroom 1
Wednesday 05 November 2008 16:20
Chungking Dreams
In a Pandoras box of space, culture and time, different world’s collide. Diversely populated and belonging to everyone and no one, dreams still live in Chungking Mansions, grimy apartments in the heart of Hong Kong. Immigrant life, squashed and squeezed into a common existence in the most foreign of contexts, is the embodiment of multiculturalism and globalisation.
Bingai
Feng Yans’ candid documentary takes is about the charismatic wife, mother and sole provider of the film’s title: Bingai. Detailing her plight from 1996, when she and her family are relocated from their home to make way for the Three Gorges Dam project. Ten years in the making, the film follows her battle with local bureaucracy to secure land on which to build a new home for her family and eke out a subsistence existence upon. Scenes of Bingai locking horns with local agents of the State for a relocation permit are interwoven with candid interviews where the earthy farmer discusses her unsatisfactory arranged marriage to a debilitated husband unable to work due to a crippled leg, her hopes for the future, her attitudes to city living and frank revelations about her series of miscarriages and abortions to fit in with the governments One-Child Policy.