Past Events

Location: Brower Commons A

Yang Lina is among the pioneering independent filmmakers who took up DV to document the rapidly changing urban landscape and social fabric in Beijing around the turn of the 21st century. Her award-winning documentary Old Men (1999) is a path-breaking work that initiated the DV turn in the New Documentary Movement. While Old Men retains indelible traces of a by now largely vanished postsocialist capital city, Yang's two following interlocking documentaries, Let's Dance Together (2007) and The Loves of Lao An (2007) capture the rhythms and dynamism of social dance as conduit of self-expression, desire and mutual aid staged on the city's public parks in the neoliberal era. These more dramatized documentaries navigating the labyrinth of desire of ordinary Beijing citizens intimated the arrival of Yang's first narrative feature Longing for the Rain (2012), about the spiritual loss and "paranormal" erotic longing of a middle class woman. This talk tracks Yang's creative trajectory alongside the transformations of Beijing and Chinese society in the past two decades.