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We are pleased to present this conversation between Wang Bing and Jung Sung-il in English for the first time, translated and introduced by Jawni Han.Night and Fog in Zona.After the fall of the military dictatorship in South Korea in 1988, the country entered a period of wholesale political, social, and cultural transformation. At the heart of its newly blooming cinephile culture was Jung Sung-il, who remains one of Korea’s most prominent film critics. Jung founded the generation-defining film journal Kino in 1995, known for erudite film criticism that drew influence from Lacanian psychoanalysis, critical theory, French philosophy, and the writings of Shiguéhiko Hasumi. On the occasion of the journal’s seventh anniversary, Bong Joon-ho, one of its most avid readers, contributed a Se7en-inspired comic strip.Jung’s first encounter with Wang Bing was at the 2003 International Film Festival Rotterdam, where the nine-hour cut of Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks premiered.

China’s Pingyao International Film Festival has confirmed Lin Xudong as its new artistic director and revealed seasoned film programmers Kamiya Naoki and Fukatsu Junko as its programmers for foreign-language films.

The festival, founded by leading independent filmmaker Jia Zhangke, already counts Wu Jueren as its programmer for Chinese language films and Song Jia, as programmer for short films.

The announcements were made in Berlin on Sunday. At the same event the executive committee of Wings International was introduced as Jia, Tang Yan (chairman and CEO of Chinese social media firm Hello Group), Japanese film producer Ichiyama Shozo, Hong Kong film programmer Jacob Wong, and Casper Liang, CEO of Pingyao International Film Festival. The fund aims to support five foreign film projects of finished script each year.

Lin is a chronicler of the New Chinese Documentary Film movement and has hosted documentary film events in Beijing in 1997 and 2004, as well...

Programme includes ‘top 10’ films selected by director Wang Bing and selection of Peter Greenaway films.

The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) has revealed the first 50 titles for this year’s edition, running Nov 8 to Nov 19.

As part of a previously announced Wang Bing retrospective, the director has been invited to programme his “top 10”. The films he has selected are all Chinese and all date from 1999 or later.

They are: Before the Flood (2005) directed by Yifan Li, Yu YanBing’ai (2007) by Yan Feng; Born in Beijing (2011) by Li Ma; Last Train Home (2009) by Lixin Fan; The Next Life (2011) by Jian Fan...

Acclaimed director Wang Bing, this year’s guest of honor at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, will be using his IDFA platform to highlight nonfiction cinema of his native China.

The festival, which runs from Nov. 8-19, announced the 10 films Bing has selected to be screened at IDFA – one of the perquisites of being named guest of honor. Among the documentaries he’s choosing to highlight are Old Men (1999), directed by Lina Yang; Wheat Harvest (2008), directed by Tong Xu, and IDFA Bertha Fund-supported Last Train Home (2009) by Lixin Fan, “documenting the millions of migrant factory workers that travel home for Spring Festival each year.” (Scroll to see Bing’s full top 10 list).

Director Wang Bing attends the Cannes Film Festival May 19, 2023.

The documentaries chosen by Bing “and their politics are subtle in their film language,” IDFA noted in a release, “representing a wave of filmmaking rarely shown internationally.

by Cláudio Alves

Over a decade ago, Wang Bing’s first film explored the decline of an industrial district, state factories dying away as privately-owned businesses took over the Chinese economy. Since Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks, the director has applied the same ‘fly on the wall’ technique to various other projects, each growing in size until his filmography resembles a collection of non-fiction epics. The 2002 picture clocked at over nine hours, edited down from 200 hours of footage. For his most recent endeavor, Wang recorded 2,600 hours of material, deciding to present it as a trilogy named after one of the most exploited demographic in the nation’s industry – Youth. The three-and-a-half-hour Youth (Spring) represents the first chapter in the director’s new opus, introducing new tonalities to his work…...

Wang Bing made his directorial debut with an astonishing odyssey through the dilapidated structures of the danwei, or state-owned factory, that were the norm for work in China until opening and reform gradually gave rise to more private enterprise. The 551-minute 2002 film, Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks, telegraphed its intentionality both through its politics, starkly depicting the lives of factory workers and the strain put on Shenyang’s industrial Tiexi district, as joblessness loomed. The film’s intuitive, necessarily lo-fi aesthetic allowed the artifacting visuals of its Dv shooting format to become a conduit through which to further imagine the fate of the eroding spaces of the danwei.

The monumental achievement of West of the Tracks galvanized the field of Chinese independent documentary in the early 2000s to such a degree that a new generation of filmmakers seemed to form almost instantly and take specific cues from Wang’s DIY ethos.

Chinese documentarian Wang Bing and UK filmmaker and artist Peter Greenaway will be honored at the 36th International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), running from November 8 to 19.

Wang has been invited as the edition’s Guest of Honor, while Greenaway will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award.

As part of its celebration of Wang, IDFA will screen his ground-breaking 2002 work Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks as well as his more recent films Man in Black and Youth (Spring), which both premiered to acclaim in Cannes this year. The latter title, which revolves around Chinese garment workers, was recently acquired by Icarus for North America.

The Wang program also includes Alone (2012), ’Til Madness Do Us Part (2013), and Mrs. Fang (2017).

The director will give a masterclass and has also been invited to compile the festival’s annual Top 10, which will...

Netherlands festival sets three focus programmes.

International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) will showcase the careers of Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing, and the UK’s Peter Greenaway at the 2023 edition in November.

Wang Bing is the 2023 IDFA guest of honour and the festival will screen a curated selection of his work, including 2002’s Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks, and this year’s Cannes titles Man In Black and Youth (Spring).

In a masterclass session, Wang Bing will also discuss 10 contemporary films by Chinese filmmakers, as a way of investigating the social and political history of the country, and the language of cinema.

Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing is this year’s Guest of Honor at IDFA, which holds its 36th edition from Nov. 8 to 19 in Amsterdam. IDFA is also honoring filmmaker and artist Peter Greenaway with a Lifetime Achievement Award, a selective retrospective and an extensive on-stage talk.

IDFA will highlight Wang’s “innovative prowess” – in the festival’s words – through a curated selection of his work. His masterpiece “Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks” (2002) heralded a new era for Chinese documentary film, “granting viewers an organic view of contemporary China free from any exotic gaze.”

IDFA is also screening Wang’s “Man in Black” and “Youth (Spring),” two films that premiered earlier this year in Cannes, and which “demonstrate the filmmaker’s vision and capacity for innovation,” IDFA said.

Other film screenings will be “Alone” (2012), “’Til Madness Do Us Part” (2013), and “Mrs. Fang” (2017).

Wang will also give an indepth Master Talk.

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI, and sign up for our weekly email newsletter by clicking here.NEWSStars at Noon.Claire Denis is currently location scouting in Cameroon for her next film, which she completed writing a couple of weeks ago, according to the Guardian.The BlackStar Film Festival, taking place from August 2 through 6 in Philadelphia, has just announced their lineup. The slate includes new films by Ja’Tovia Gary, Kevin Jerome Everson, and Darol Olu Kae.Recommended Viewinga special mini-season of the Mubi Podcast involves conversations with filmmakers at Cannes. The first of these sees host Rico Gagliano talk to legendary director Wim Wenders about one of two films he premiered at the festival: Anselm, a 3D documentary about the work of German fine artist Anselm Kiefer.We’ve partnered with Filmadrid for our annual collaborative series, “The Video Essay.

The first thing anyone ever says about the work of venerated documentary filmmaker Wang Bing is that he makes fascinating but long films. Like, really, really long. His debut West of the Tracks (Tie Xi Qu), about a crumbling industrial district, screened in two different versions, one five and the other nine hours, give or take. Crude Oil — as the name might suggest, a portrait of oil workers — spanned 14 hours.

Two of his films are screening at Cannes this year — main competition entrant Youth (Spring) and special screening Man in Black — so at three and half hours and 60 minutes, respectively, in Wang terms they’re practically shorts. Kvetching about length aside, Youth (the parenthetical subtitle Spring heralds a projected series of films) is consistently engaging, even if it’s not always easy to see what the whole package is trying to say that couldn’t be said with more brevity.

Check the label on that garment hanging in your closet. If it reads “Made in China,” there’s a chance it was stitched together by one of the characters in Wang Bing’s documentary Youth (Spring), or someone like them.

Youth (Spring) – one of two documentaries admitted into main competition at the Cannes Film Festival, which hadn’t welcomed a documentary into that prestige category in almost 20 years – was filmed over a five-year period in China’s Zhili City, known as the country’s capital of clothing manufacture. Every year young people from rural areas in Anhui and other provinces pour into the urban center looking for work. Thousands of privately owned garment “workshops” stand ready to employ them, or perhaps we should say exploit them.

‘Youth (Spring)’

Wang’s hand-held camera goes inside the cluttered, fluorescent-lit workshops where young men and women sew garments at a furious pace, their...

Director and documentarist Wang Bing’s works have been always portrayed with uncompromised realism. Tales of endurance and resistance on the background of a post-socialism crumbling China, from disintegrating families to disintegrated minds, and “Bitter Money” is no exception. Winner of Human Rights Film Network Award and Best Screenplay at Venice Film Festival 2016, this time, his documentary tackles the huge migration from the rural provinces toward Huzhou, capital of the clothing manufacturing Province of Zheijang, in search of better earnings.

The film has a very thin narrative structure, locked between an otherwise logical set of introduction and conclusion. We are immediately presented with Xiao Min, in his house in Yunnan Province in Western China. She is only 15 and is just about leaving the family and heading to Huzhou, “Mecca” of the clothing trade. Xiao and her cousin Chen Yuanshen undergo the necessary long and distressing journey on...