As previously mentioned, Shanghai's 11th annual International Film Festival kicked off this weekend (albeit not too smoothly) with an eclectic mix of movies showing all day and night at its 23 theaters. In a place like China that receives so small a selection of international features, this is an incredible opportunity to see works you otherwise wouldn't have a chance to catch in a theater. We only made it to two screenings, but both......

Tonight is the first public screening in Shanghai for Boomtown Beijing, a documentary by Singaporean filmmaker Tan Siok Siok which debuted in April at the 21st Singapore International Film Festival. The production is a very commendable effort by Tan and her students at the Beijing Film Academy which she got to know as a visiting lecturer there. In the film, she follows the Olympic dreams of three ordinary Beijingers. A 11 year old boy wants......

From Panthea Lee and Dan Shemie, two very tired organizers of Shanghai's Pangea Day movie marathon that wrapped up not too long ago: So after weeks of plotting, scheming and ceaseless fretting, our Friends of Pangea Day event in Shanghai has gone off without a hitch. For those unfamiliar with the situation, a brief explanation: the Chinese government has launched a serious crackdown on cultural events in the lead-up to the Beijing Olympics. Case in......

Think Rocky V, but during the Olympics. Jackie Chan, 54, will engage in some kind of fighting? boxing? kung fu? exhibition against Tszyu, 38, a welterweight boxer from Russia and former Olympian. However, as this is China's Olympics, we suspect that, like in the movies, Chan will triumph over the white man in the final, climactic scene. If he's in top form, he might be able to rescue some Ming vases and other priceless artifacts......

Shanghaiist spotted John Cusack at Bar Rouge on Friday. Ensconced in the bathroom-sized VIP room on the club's terrace and guarded by a bevy of beefy bodyguards, Cusack was playing with his phone and appeared both tired and bored (who recommended BR anyway?). Doing the rounds of Shanghai nightspots, he was spotted at MAO the night before until the wee hours. The American actor of High Fidelity fame, is presently in town shooting Shanghai, a......

Fans of French film might be interested to know that Jean-Pierre Melville's 1970 classic Le Cercle Rouge (starring Alain Delon, Andre Bourvil, Gian Maria Volonte and Yves Montand) is being remade in Hollywood by none other than Hong Kong action auteur Johnnie To. What's even more weird is that Chow Yun-fat and Orlando Bloom are attached to the project. Malaysia's The Star reports that in Chen Shi-Zheng's Dark Matter the film about the Chinese physics......

An interesting take on some of the problems caused by the one child policy. Wang Xiaoshuai's latest garnered him a best director award at the Berlin film festival.The story centers around a divorced couple, both now remarried, who have a child that suffers from childhood leukemia and is in desperate need of a transplant -- but with no siblings, there are no suitable donors. Thus, the parents are faced with the possibility of having to......

Shanghai filmmaker Shu Haolun (舒浩仑） made a name for himself a few years back with his personal documentary Nostalgia 《乡愁》, an exploration of the nong tangs where he grew up and which are slated for destruction. He's just come out with a new film, a 20 minute fiction film called Young Blood 《少年血》, that also explores 1980s Shanghai life, telling the story of young teenage love. There was a screening last month (sorry to be......

Wong Kar-wai is celebrating the opening of his shit movie My Blueberry Nights in the US this Friday by selling some merchandise — most notably, $95 t-shirts, $50 posters, and $25 postcards. And if you want to thank him for ripping you off in person, you'll get your chance in New York at a fashion boutique store called Opening Ceremony, where Wong is going to be on Wednesday afternoon. We hope that someone tells him......

Do films with titles like "Feathers of Dongtan" and "Sounds. Breaths" give you a tingle in your special area? If not, fret not, there's still some time to develop that acquired taste which is promotional films for really-big-Chinese-events. "Vision Shanghai", like "Vision Beijing," is going to feature documentary films by famous directors, thought the names of those directors have yet to be released. However, Shanghai Film Group has announced its next Expo film, a full-length......

So you might have heard that Jackie Chan (成龙) recently went to Australia to bury his father, who died of cancer at the age of 93.Well, what you might not have known is that Jackie Chan's father Charlie, aka Fang Daolong, had a whole other family (Jackie's mother was his second wife) that he lost touch with and then had to leave behind in 1949. There was an article called "Enter the Parents" written a......

Most Shanghaiist readers are familiar with legendary dive bar C’s and with the music pub Logo too. Darkness, taxi rides and alcohol make the rest of the area a bit of a blur but we have the benefit of living there. The area, called The Xinhua Community, is centered around Xinhua Lu’s heritage architecture and greenery. We covered this a bit by introducing J. G. Ballard’s old home in a previous post. It also has......

It’s shaping up to be a bad week for the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (the catchily acronymed SARFT) – and it's still only Wednesday. Recent events surrounding bans of video sharing site Tudou and then actress Tang Wei (汤唯) seem to suggest that SARFT is slipping into farce. First off, there were attempts to mash Tudou due to alleged pornographic content on the site – as we reported a few days ago.......

The idea is simple: get five internationally reknowned directors to make short, impressionistic films about Beijing, showing the people of Beijing in their everyday lives and as they prepare for the Olympics—and in the kindest light possible. The five filmmakers were: Patrice Leconte (France), Andrew Lau (Hong Kong/China), Majid Majidi (Iran), Giuseppe Tornatore (Italy), and Daryl Goodrich (UK). You can find a rundown of each film's style and content as well as a link to......

By Kenneth Tan and David Feng Not good news: Tudou may be in for a squashing by the Chinese mainland authorities, specifically, the State Administration for Radio, Film and Television. A Sohu IT report claims that the presence of porn -- a big no-no on the Chinese Internet -- was all that it took for the potato (which is the Chinese translation of "tudou") to be squashed. The squashing is long-term and has no set......

With a 600-year long history, Kunqu (崑曲) opera is one of the oldest extant forms of the Chinese opera and known as the "mother" of a hundred operas. Although dozens of professional Kunqu troupes used to operate across China, only a handful remain today in Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Chenzhou and Yongjia. Kunqu has been awarded the title of "Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity" by UNESCO, which also recognises that the......

‘Majestic Film Verleih’, the company who will bring the movie to german cinemas released 8 official press pictures who show the stars in action. Also, german broadcasting agency 'Deutsche Welle' released a clip on YouTube with a report about the shooting in Shanghai....

Japanese filmmaker Satoru Mizushima (水島総) was not too happy about Nanking, the American documentary about the Nanking Massacre. So he set out to create his own film The Truth about Nanjing (南京の真実, Nanking no shinjitsu) to set straight what he felt were "fabrications" and "false impressions" propagated by the film and a "setup by China to control intelligence". Several leading politicians, including Tokyo's rightwing governor, Shintaro Ishihara, have come out in support of the......

Of how many movies of late, or any time, can you say that "it took courage to make this film"? Summer Palace (颐和园), can be safely said to be one of those films. We've been seeing copies of it around the stores and snapped one up, but didn't get around to watching it until now. This is the only honest piece of Chinese filmmaking we've seen in a long time. Get a copy of it......

Sufei of Sexy Beijing never fails to crack us up! This Chinese New Year, she takes her tireless search for a Chinese husband all the way from Beijing to Hong Kong, and asks people she meets on the street whether the guys from the north or the south would make better husbands. Some of what those interviewees had to say (in both Beijing and Hong Kong) were just hilarious! Watch it!......

Japanese investigators have found 'no abnormality' at the dumpling factory in Hebei Province at the centre of a food safety scare in Japan after hundreds of people suffered from pesticide poisoning from eating the dumplings. Traces of pesticide were found on the outside of the dumplings and not in the fillings, leading investigators to point to "deliberate poisoning, rather than accidental contamination". This idea, however, has been rejected by Chinese experts.The world's most powerful music......

Worst. Wong Kar-wai movie. Ever. Wong Kar-wai movies used to be mini-events in our lives, so we were probably more disappointed than the average viewer. It's hard to believe that My Blueberry Nights (MBN) was made by the same guy who made a gem of a road movie about ten years ago, Happy Together (HT). Both are road movies about lonely souls and wayward lovers, so it's hard not compare the two, but unfortunately,......

Photo from Why Democracy If you think Chinese children can't get any more obnoxious, go watch Please Vote for Me (via YouTube in five parts - p1, p2, p3, p4 and p5), an award-winning indie documentary and pay special attention to Cheng Cheng, the pudgy kid who is one of the three students running for the position of class monitor. He then gets increasingly irksome as he sabotages fellow elects and manipulates his classmates......

Take a walk down Panyu (Fanyu) Lu from the Film Art Centre and you will soon pass by the SH508 restaurant. It occupies a slaughtered renovated colonial mansion adorned with a huge neon sign. Unknown to the proprietors, reviewers and most of the customers, this is actually the former family home of British writer J.G. Ballard. Ballard is famous in the mainstream for two works. Crash laid out a disturbingly explicit ‘psychoscape’ in which the......

William Feng is the host of ICS Shanghai's travel show Getaway. New shows go out on Thursdays and are repeated across the week. Was the Getaway gig a random Shanghai opportunity or did you come here with a plan to break into this industry? I came to China originally as part of a three year plan to travel the world. The next stop was meant to be Brazil, and finally, Africa. When I first arrived,......

Adding to the flux of design studios and boutique start-ups in the artsy enclave of Taikang Road, we stumble upon yet another new kid on the block. Projection 216 is a design studio/boutique started by fashion designer Jenny Ni who has also rounded up several of her friends including design duo Perk, T-shirt collective The Thing, artist/graphic designer Tyakasha, sneaker designer DK and even a manicurist, Mary to join her in this endeavor. We......

Censorship Sydney Morning Herald: China to tighten Internet control Guardian Unlimited: China cracks down on "vulgar" entertainment NYT: China Censors a Film, Then Bans It Entirely The building frenzy Canada.com: Beijing's new skyline: China set to show off to the world Indo-Asian News Service: Beijing opens world's largest air terminal The great big clean-up IHT: Beijing steel company shuts down blast furnace in cleanup effort before Olympics Environment News Service: China to Begin First......

It was inevitable. A week into the New Year and we are already saying goodbye to one of the city's few venues for underground bands. 4Live limped to a close last night after a year of struggling to make it promoting live music in the city of turntables (and laptops). Opening as a beacon of hope for those interested in the underground music scene the venue was plagued by internal management problems and an identity......

This week on Shanghaiist Sunday Show, we turn on our eye to the refugee issue and bring you not just one but two documentaries. The first documentary is a show on Al Jazeera's 101 East which features Tibetan refugees trying to get out of China and the second one is a show on North Korean refugees trying to come into China. In this report, Al Jazeera's Teymoor Nabili speaks to Tenzin Choephel, a Tibetan journalist......

A new directive by the Chinese censorship board, also known as the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), has banned producers of erotic movies, including their directors and leading actors, from participation in domestic film awards. Violators may be banned up to five years from the movie industry and recalcitrant studios may even have their licenses revoked. Xinhua quotes a report by the Beijing News that details exactly what kind of content SARFT......