<
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/feb/20/chinese-independent-film-archive-newcastle>
"On the wall of an unassuming second- floor room in Newcastle University sits a
map, Blu-Tacked, unframed. At first glance it looks like any other map of
China. But on closer inspection, the cities labelled on the map are not just
the major urban centres. They are the places that have hosted important film
festivals over the years, the details of which are annotated in colour-coded
text.
Covering the final years of the so-called golden era of the scene, the map
shows dozens of film festivals that used to be active across China. There was
the China Independent Film Festival (Ciff) in Nanjing, the Beijing Independent
Film Festival (Biff), and the Yunnan Multiculture Visual Festival (Yunfest),
among others. In 2024, China’s film community is a shadow of its former self.
All these festivals – and more than a dozen others – have been forced to close
in the years after Xi Jinping, China’s ultra-repressive leader, took office in
2012.
And so it is that an archive containing nearly 800 indie films and oral
interviews with more than 100 film-makers came to be preserved around 5,000
miles away from Beijing. Newcastle’s Chinese Independent Film Archive (Cifa),
which opened in September 2023, is the world’s largest publicly accessible
archive of independent Chinese films. It is also “the first of its kind outside
China that is housed at a university and is accessible”, says Karin Chien, a
film producer and the co-founder of dGenerate Films, a distributor of Chinese
indie cinema."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
