CIFF 10
CIFF 10 was held in Xiamen, Dalian and Nanjing during October to December 2013. This is the first time that main activities were held outside Nanjing. The voting, award ceremony and closing ceremony were held back in Nanjing. CIFF relieved and a new generation of curating team started to take over the CIFF organization.
Jury
Zhou Chuanji
Film scholar and educator, Professor at BFA
Ouyang Jianghe
Poet, Scholar, President of Today magazine
Yang Lina
Independent filmmaker, Actress
Zhang Peili
Contemporary artist, Professor at China Academy of Art
Cao Fei
Contemporary artist, Independent documentary director
Cao Kou
Writer
Zhao Ye
Film Director
Awards and Comments
CIFF10 Highest Award----The Emperor Visits Hell
Classical culture and contemporary realism collide and are both deconstructed and reformed in this novel film. The constant shifts between intimacy and distance create a sense of both the fabulous extravagance and the chaos of classical society. These novel techniques also provide new possibilities for independent cinema to deal with contemporary reality. The film plays with juxtapositions of the absurd and the quotidian, exquisite images and clear expanses, microcosmic angles and a macro-view of Chinese culture. All these facets illustrate a auteur’s extreme talent as well as his great skill.
CIFF10 Award of the Committee----Deformiti Sci-fi
The hot blood of the Chinese youth brings together the cinematic and the real world with a distinct style. The cinematic language of this film is amateur, without regulations or inhibitions, and the characters remains on the precipice of adulthood, between childishness and maturity, safety and danger, and realism and surrealism. At the same time, the director waivers on the edge of opinions and instincts. The way he directed this film and its content express both a strong and self-contained outlook. The death of a farther call for the hot-blooded orphans to take their place in society, it is this sense of bravery that Deformity Sci-fi seeks to imparts.
CIFF10 Best Debut Film----Around That Winter
This is a rare personal work of amateur Chinese film. It combines the poetry of film with the vacuity of life, resulting in an impressive sense of leisureliness. The film also addresses the fact that in a rapidly changing society one cannot avoid the question where one feels ‘at home’.
CIFF Best Prototype----The Last Moose Ao Lu Gu Ya
His alcoholism, struggle, doubts, anger, complaints and compliance all stem from his acceptance of who he is, and despite the disappearing clarity of his identity, he remains unwilling to give up this sense of self.
CIFF10 Best Short Film----Butter Lamp
The unorthodox style of this film offers an emotive vision of life in Tibet, with the narrative completed in a single, fixed shot. It is an exquisite, interesting, and transitive film with the texture of a religious painting.
CIFF10 Best Director----Zune Kwok
Zune Kwok showed great talent in guiding the actors and controlling the varied elements of this film. More important, however, is the depth of feelings invested in the characters and found everywhere in moments of simple expression in this film.
CIFF Grand Jury Prize ----Hammer and Sickle Are Sleeping
This humorous, restrained and merciful film combines dark humour, rhythmic clarity and a strong symbolism. The tragedy depicted in The Hammer and Sickle Are Sleeping does not deploy the cliché of Chinese cruelness. Instead, the director offers a resolute representation of the absurdity, desperation and fierceness that underpin desolation. The film does not climax with the ‘happy ending’ to which the narrative appears to lead, rather, the film becomes an open-ended poem that the audience is invited to conclude. It is clear that it was not the director’s intention to please his audience, but nonetheless we were smiling throughout.
2013 Xiamen Experimental Film Forum: Surface Archeology
Date: 26 October 2013
Location: M. T. Film Salon, Xiamen, Fujian
Host: Cao Kai
Feature Film Director Forum: My Independent Film Journey
Date: 30 November 2013
Location: Arts Museum of Nanjing Arts Institute
Hosts: Shen Xiaoping, Yang Yishu