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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Cinema on the Edge announces a partnership with the Tromsø International Film Festival: CHINA NOW: INDEPENDENT VISIONS will be a special section at Tromsø IFF

CHINA NOW: INDEPENDENT VISIONS international tour announces its participation in the Tromsø International Film Festival (18 to 24 January 2016). TIFF is a unique film festival set above the Arctic Circle in Norway, filling Tromsø’s dark polar nights with screenings bringing together the Norwegian and international film industry.

The Tromsø International Film Festival continues its impassioned and pioneering support of Chinese independent cinema over the past few years, with this collaboration with Cinema On The Edge. We are providing 8 films for a special section at the Festival this year: 5 feature length films by Luo Li, Hu Jie, Chai Chunya, Yang Pingdao, and JP Sniadecki & Libbie Cohn, and 3 medium length films by Yang Mingming, Bi Gan, and Geng Jun.

Following the successful and high profile series of 29 new Chinese independent films in New York City this past August and September, Cinema on the Edge is pleased to announce the continuation of its international tour of the film series.

We’re calling the tour China Now: Independent Visions to celebrate the daring spirit and creative innovation of independent filmmakers and festival organizers in mainland China.

The films will be presented around the world continuing through Summer 2016. Several of the films will now be brought to cities around the world for the first time, to be screened in some of the most enterprising museums and cinemas in major cities.

Previous destinations:

San Francisco, USA: San Francisco Cinematheque, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Ninth Street Independent Film Center

London, UK: Royal Academy of Arts

Next stops:

Toronto: TIFF Cinematheque,; Vancouver: The Cinematheque; Montreal: Concordia University, McGill University

Paris: Chinese Shadows

More cities to be announced soon.

The series is organized and curated by Cinema on the Edge, a new collaboration formed by three of Chinese independent cinema’s most committed supporters: producer and distributor Karin Chien, critic and curator Shelly Kraicer, and filmmaker and anthropologist J.P. Sniadecki.

A complete listing of the films in our series, with brief descriptions, can be found here:

https://www.cinemaontheedge.com/films

Background:

CHINA NOW: INDEPENDENT VISIONS tour will be modelled on how independent cinema is exhibited in China today. Savvy programmers, producers, and filmmakers have taken to organizing informal networks of screenings to get their works into distribution. In China, packages of new indie films are circulated to an ad hoc collection of art galleries, campus screening clubs, and enterprising independent art spaces, through China’s first, second, and third tier cities, finding local audiences through a new model of grassroots, artisanal exhibition circuits.

That’s what we propose to do with CHINA NOW: INDEPENDENT VISIONS. We are making available the complete package of 29 Cinema On The Edge curated films to venues around the world, and working with their curators and programmers to tailor a selection suitable to each venue.

The films we are bringing to audiences around the world are a collection of illuminating documentaries, brilliant shorts, and spellbinding fiction features from the last four years of Chinese independent cinema. Independent Chinese filmmakers are inventing new ways of mobilizing, adapting, and innovating film language under pressure of the incredibly rapid and fundamental changes Chinese society is undergoing. Intensely engaged meta-journalism and alternative history-making, genre-defying performance/documentary art hybrid work; visually playful experimentalism: all interrogate how cinema art can and should stand against the real, all stretch cinema art under the pressure of seemingly un-representable new Chinese realities, and all invent images and sounds that try to keep up with a present that is changing before our eyes, one that is shaping our own future at the same time.

COMPLETE LISTING: https://www.cinemaontheedge.com/films

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Press contacts: Shelly Kraicer: email: [email protected] phone +14168410284

Karin Chien: email: [email protected]

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Tromsø, Norway: January 18-24, 2016

Tromsø International Film Festival

http://www.tiff.no/en

EMPEROR VISITS THE HELL

唐皇游地府 / Tang huang you difu

Directed by Li Luo

2012, 67 min, digital. In Mandarin with English subtitles.

FEMALE DIRECTORS

女导演 / Nü daoyan

Directed by Yang Mingming

2012, 43 min, digital. In Mandarin with English subtitles.

PEOPLE’S PARK

人民公园/ Renmin gongyuan

Directed by J.P. Sniadecki & Libbie Cohn

2012, 78 min, digital. In Sichuanese and Mandarin.

SPARK

星火 / XInghuo

Directed by Hu Jie

2014, 101 min, digital. In Mandarin with English subtitles.

THE RIVER OF LIFE

生命的河流 / Shengming de heliu

Directed by Yang Pingdao

2014, 101 min, digital. in Mandarin and Cantonese with English subtitles.

FOUR WAYS TO DIE IN MY HOMETOWN

我故乡的四种死亡方式 / Wo guxiangde si zhong siwang fangshi

Directed by Chai Chunya

2012, 90 min, digital. In Gansu dialect with English subtitles.

THE HAMMER AND SICKLE ARE SLEEPING

锤子镰刀都休息 / Chuizi liandao dou xiuxi

Directed by Geng Jun

2013, 53 minutes, in Mandarin and Dongbei dialect with English subtitles.

Screening with:

THE POET AND THE SINGER

金刚经 / Jingangjing

Directed by Bi Gan

2012, 26 min, digital