Mitchell van Vuren

Leiden University | LEI · Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society

Revisiting the period when international film festivals gradually started selecting the first Chinese independent films, this paper provides a historical overview of the scarcely documented interactions between the Chinese independent cinema and the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR). As one of the first places where these films were show...

The short film Echo shows, through multiple filmic aspects, how violence can resonate from past to present without an instance of glorification. I analyse how the film engages with the indirect representation of violence and how it redirects past violent atrocities back to its perpetrators.

In the current arthouse film scene, viewers often find themselves in cinematic encounters between their own and culturally different conceptual frameworks when watching foreign films. In the immersive case of Bi Gan’s film Long Day’s Journey into Night (2018), the technology of 3D film reinforces the enthralling representation of a Chinese dreamsca...