The National Film and Television School (NFTS) Film Studies, Programming, and Curation MA presents an online programme dedicated to the city of Hangzhou for 15-18th December 2020, and will stream on the NFTS Screening Room platform.
Located near Shanghai, Hangzhou acts as the modern capital of the Zhejiang Province, its serene vistas along West Lake having inspired poetry and folklore for generations. Hangzhou is also home to China's top high-tech industries with a huge population, which has led to rapid urban renewal and several economic changes. These combined qualities of natural beauty and modernity converge to form a city which has fostered the development of new directors who have created, with modest budgets, strikingly fresh films ranging from documentaries to fiction narratives, from confessional video diaries to experimental flashes of ingenuity.
The journey begins with the mysterious adventure of a 14-year-old girl during one humid summer in “Vanishing Days” (Zhu Xin, 2018) before charting a course through the entrancingly enigmatic coming-of-age tale “Suburban Birds” (Qui Sheng, 2018). “Frank Fang, A Hangzhou Observer” regards the city streets and buildings with a cinephile's giddy excitement. By journey's end, the Hangzhou New Talents shorts programme guides us through the private emotions of life nearly overlooked in Hangzhou, leaving us in quiet awe of a city whose secrets have only begun to be revealed.
The full programme and related tickets can be found here.
