early spring 2007 series

The REEL CHINA Documentary Biennial is an independent documentary film festival founded by the REC Foundation in 2001 with the goal of helping launch the best Chinese documentaries into the world and enhance overseas understanding and research of these films. The third REEL CHINA Documentary Biennial took place simultaneously in October and November 2006, in Shanghai, New York, and a few other places in the US; now the films are traveling to universities and venues around the globe. According to the organizers of REEL CHINA, to understand a changing China one must understand the people who are living those changes. Documentaries selected by REEL CHINA follow and document individuals, situations, communities, environments, and networks in every social stratum in contemporary China. These films are slices of social life and samples of humanity in various existential conditions. In some cases they also work to disclose a forgotten or neglected past. Zhen Zhang is an assistant professor of Cinema Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU and editor of the forthcoming The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the 21st Century from Duke University Press. She will introduce and answer questions about Floating Life, screening on March 9 at 7:15pm in Willard Straight Theatre. REEL CHINA is cosponsored with the East Asia Program.

Images (left to right): Nostalgia; poster for 3rd Biennial