exciting chinese word of the week!

And much, much more!

Well, to begin, this week’s word is: 电影节

DIAN YING JIE

Film Festival!

This is KaoKao, the mascot of the Beijing Film Festival. I don’t know what happened to his eye. He won’t tell us.

Apart from being my major reason for coming to Beijing, my work, my social circle, and one of the most fun organizations this side of a honkey tonk, the Beijing Film Fest is also a great community of people with a common goal: to bring great films to Beijing and to introduce the world to contemporary Chinese cinema. Translation of our film festival is actually 北京电影交流网 （Beijing Film Exchange Network), which says a lot about how the fest is viewed totally as a collaborative project, a great reason for people to come together and share ideas. In short, the Beijing Film Festival is totally my BFF (get it?! get it?!).

Perhaps one of the most exciting things about working at a film festival, however, is that you get to go to other film festivals. And film festivals are rarely held in crappy places. They are often held in awesome places LIKE HAWAII WHERE I AM GOING TO THE HAWAII INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL NEXT WEEK.

So, I’m excited. The HIFF is the premiere film festival for Asian cinema in the US and…um…I like Asian cinema. A lot. I am completely psyched to see, among other films: MADE IN CHINA, MOTHER, and many other that have been burning up the festival circuit and/or just haven’t made it to bootleg DVD yet. I am also just a teeny tiny bit excited to see VISAGE, which I may actually just die after seeing especially if any of the following members of the cast and crew are in attendance: My boyfriend Tsai Ming-Liang. My other Boyfriend for the ages, Jean-Pierre Léaud. Everyone’s favorite cougar: Fanny Ardant. Jeanne Fuckin’ Moreau! Am I the only person totally geeking out right now…?

Anyhow, I’ll be in Hawaii for about a week seeing movies and taking names (well, probably business cards…) and this blog will temporarily be transformed into something like “Aloha! This is a taxi*.” In any case, I am not going to the festival merely to loll about and stalk famous directors, but actually to represent and promote a Chinese film called INVISIBLE KILLER （无形杀) which I’ve been working on the promotion and international distribution of for several months now. I promise a much longer post about ‘Invisible Killer’ and many subsequent postings on the goings-on in Hawaii, but for now…please excuse my gloating and glee and geekery.

*On that note, it seems worth mentioning that I don’t really taxis that often in Beijing. I have a glorious bike named Master And Commander (MAC) and I have an inexplicable fondness for the Beijing subway and its daily bouquet of unbelievable body odors. Oh well.

This entry was written by maya, posted on October 10, 2009 at 11:34 am, filed under Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.