Co-presented with the Utah Humanities Council
Introduction and Post Film Discussion led by Chinese Cinema Scholar, Greg Lewis
In celebration of the annual Great Salt Lake Book festival which opens today through this weekend at the City Library, and BOOKS THAT HAVE BEEN BANNED MONTH the SLC FILM CENTER is honored to co-present an advance screening of BALZAC AND THE LITTLE CHINESE SEAMSTRESS.
Dai Sijie's novel/memoir "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress," an instant NYT's best seller, an Oprah pick, and perennial book club favorite was published in English in 2001. I saw this movie at the Miami Film Festival in 2002 and have been trying to get it to be part of our Novel Film Series ever since. The film, like the book is breathtakingly beautiful — and an extraordinary accomplishment by first time novelist and director Dan Sijie, the author who adapted and then directed the film. Ironically, the film and book and author remains banned in China, but China allowed the film to be filmed there. (It was the first time Dai Sijie was allowed back to his country since fleeing to France after the cultural revolution)
It's taken several years for 2002 film version to get a run in U.S. theaters, but it is worth the wait. The book is timeless and notably different from most movies concerning the social monstrousness of China's Cultural Revolution during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Dai's story is a tender, bemused memoir — and as much about surviving a sentimental education as an ideological one. It will open at the Broadway Centre Cinemas on October 14th.
Greg Lewis, Weber State Professor of Linguistics and scholar of Chinese Cinema who has translated over 50 Chinese films into English will introduce the film and lead a discussion afterwards. Greg is a recipient of a Utah Humanities Council Grant and has curated a marvelous series 50 GREAT CHINESE FILMS.
STORY SYNOPSIS
Two young, well-schooled men, Luo (Chen Kun) and Ma (Liu Ye), both children of professionals recently "branded reactionary enemies of the people", are sent to a remote mountain village for a program of hard labor. There, the two work in a mine and haul heavy buckets of sewage that slop on their shoulders. But they also endear themselves to once-suspicious peasants by telling stories and re-titling the music Ma plays on violin. ("Mozart Is Thinking of Chairman Mao" is a favorite sonata.)
In 1971 China, in the lingering grip of the cultural revolution, these two university students, are sent to a mountain mining village as part of their "reeducation duty to purge them of their classical western oriented education." Amid the backbreaking work and stifling ignorance of the community, the two boys find that music, and the presence of the beautiful local young women are the only pleasant things in their miserable lives. However, none compare to the young seamstress granddaughter of the local tailor. Stealing a departing student's secret cache of forbidden books of classic western literature such as the works of Honore de Balzac, they set about to woo her and teach her things she had never imagined. In doing so, they start a journey that will profoundly change her perspective on her world and teach the boys about the power of literature and their own ability to change their world in truly revolutionary ways.
In the tradition of READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN, and paying tribute to a book and a film that has been banned but not silenced.
