This coming Monday, June 22, we’ll be screening one of the most acclaimed Chinese films of recent memory, Liu Jiayin’s mesmerizing Oxhide, which portrays the filmmaker’s working-class family inside a cramped Beijing apartment. It won awards at the 2005 Berlin International Film Festival, the Hong Kong International Film Festival, and the Vancouver International Film Festival.

Shelly Kraicer of Cinema-scope called Oxhide “the most important Chinese film of the past several years – and one of the most astonishing recent films from any country,” while Mubarak Ali, The Lumiere Reader said it was “the most celebrated Chinese debut since Jia Zhang-ke’s Xiao Wu.”

As described by dGenerate Films:

With virtually no budget and boundless ingenuity, Liu Jiayin’s eye-opening debut, shot when she was 23 years old, consists of twenty-three static, one-scene shots within her family’s fifty square meter home. Liu keeps her small DV camera in claustrophobic closeness to her subjects, often showing only parts of their bodies as their voices dominate the soundtrack. OXHIDE takes the microscopic physical and emotional details of a family and magnifies them on a widescreen canvas. “Liu takes the film language of “realism” into an entirely new dimension.” (Tony Rayns,Vancouver International Film Festival).

Monday, June 22, 8 pm
20 RMB