Lee Chang-dong: The Art of Irony

Anne Laugel, a young divorced woman, mother of a ten-year-old girl, Sophie, travels to China to adopt a baby. She is convinced, as a good Westerner, to carry out this adventure for the happiness of the new born, her daughter and hers.

In 1977, one year after Mao died, a French man ( played by Alain Bashung) comes back to China to work as a school teacher with his daughter. He quickly ignores the interdiction of getting in touch with Chinese people and finds himself drawn into mysterious meetings at the Red Pavilion. MY CHINESE SISTER is a movie about pretense and the mystification of reality.

The narrator looks for Khema, a missing shaman singer in Laos. His investigation progressively becomes an initiatic travel among outcasts, renowned for their magical powers, accused to be "phipop", supernatural creatures behaving like vampires, still terrifying laotian villagers. This traveller's diary in search of ghosts through the forests, is a true story which looks like a chamanic tale. For most Laotian people, the invisible world of spirits is more real than what we call reality in modern western life. This film shows this "other laotian reality", mixing rational and objective facts with events born from collective unconsciousness. Is it a documentary or fiction ? This question is the main theme of the film.

In 1967, in the middle of the Chinese cultural revolution, an opera singer is sent to the other side of the country to be "re-educated". He leaves behind his young pregnant wife. Seven years later, rehabilitated, he is allowed to return to his native village. He will not find his wife, who has since died. And one thought obsesses him: How to recognize his child, whom he has never seen, how to go to meet him?

Chinese opera, whether of the Peking variety or not, is a very demanding art-form, requiring decades of study to be even partly mastered. In this film, Yan Yuejun was a Soochow Opera performer who fell afoul of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, and who has served his time undergoing compulsory "re-education." Now he is living in Inner Mongolia, driving a truck for a living, which is surely proletarian enough to suit his earlier tormentors.

A study of Holy Week (Semana Santa) in Seville, Spain.

"Shot in Madrid, in a carnival. The subject of the film is suggested by the spanish title. From "roda", I kept 2 connected meanings : the circular motion and movie shooting. As for "Morfosis", it is linked to the idea of metamorphosis. With the whole word, I wanted to suggest a metamorphosis of reality (places and characters) in a motion where everything is going round circles : what is on camera, camera itself and film inside."

Here the codes are both amplified and distanced by an expressionist plastic that for the first time perhaps in Expressionism, takes humor into account. Some very close-ups of flowers, insects, are reminiscent of the prose of a Caillois that I did not know until this film equivalent cinema. There is a double movement in this film. At the same time, a sort of restraint of the plans and a bulimia, a frenzy to film, perhaps this is what mainly troubles us and takes us into a way of seeing that was unknown to us.

The action takes place in Burma. Thiri, who dreams of becoming a writer, falls in love with a European traveller. Momo thinks he can read the mind of a mysterious Western hermit who looks like Christ. Ada, because she is in love with a monk, is ready to become a nun. Through the intertwined paths of those three female characters, this movie depicts the reality of Burma now, an Asian country undergoing major changes and facing the Western world.

A girl uses spiritualism to escape her loneliness and neurasthenia. Inspired by practices more or less close to magic, she tries to create two characters that will be part of herself. She will be able to live without being alone, while fleeing the external reality. But little by little, the two beings that she created appear to be detached from her, as if the figure three could not agree to the harmony of the group. Her fantasies seem to turn against her, increasing her sense of isolation.

It is an experimental film where the filmmaker questions the desire of a film viewer to narrate. This film revives the spirit of research that began with silent cinema, with musical compositions as essential as the dialogue in a feature-length talking film. The ruins of the title visually represent an aspiration to rebuild another world from the old. Finally, the film questions the possibility of a child proceeding to this reconstruction from a narrative where the elusive meaning of everything around him is to be reinvented

Special Jury Mention at Hyères International Film Festival in 1983. "When my eyes, closed for an icy terror, opened again, at my side, scented on the canvas, these faces were shaking confusingly."

Two parallel narratives. The first follows a present-day investigation by a group of Burmese through Mandalay, Maymo, Myaungmya, Twante, Syriam, Insein, Moulmein and Katha, where from 1922 to 1927 the most celebrated Western writer in Myanmar, George Orwell, worked as a policeman for the British Empire. The second narrative mirrors the first in the here and now : a journey into the land of fear, where the protagonists are the Burmese, Orwell and today's Western world. Having just taken a step toward escaping the hold of dictatorship, the characters of this film begin to give new meaning to their own lives, as if the reading of the English author's major work "1984" has had a revelatory effect on them. It is in this Burma, which we know to be governed by magic and spirits, that Orwell's ghost and the incarnation of the characters from his beacon novel are conjured in this film.

A young aristocrat is seduced by a young man who appeared to her in a dream one spring afternoon. Captive of this impossible love, the young girl is dying of melancholy. But the constancy of her love is stronger than death; she wins the pity of the judge of the underworld, manages to find her lover and come back to life. The opera "The Peony Pavilion" was composed in 1598 by the poet Tang Xianzu (1550-1617), one of the greatest playwrights of the Ming period. Of all the forms of Chinese opera that have followed one another since the 12th century, the kunqu is the one that best preserves the image of a classical art highly appreciated in educated circles for its musical, literary and gestural refinement.

Experimental diary shot in 1978-1979 when Alain Mazars was a volunteer teacher in China, 2 years after Mao's death. We see a few pictures, by candlelight, and they flash before our eyes quicker and quicker, before becoming mental images, an entanglement of memories coming from a mind that was asleep until then.

First part of the film: The Garden of Ages. In the mountains of Sichuan, China, it is said that there once existed a stone that bore children. After eighty-seven years, it had grown into a boulder and given birth to a thousand smaller stones resembling itself, in the hope that they too would produce offspring. Other stones found in China, whose shapes resemble an ear, are known for turning girls into boys. Regardless of their differences in age or the distance separating them, those who dream of the same stone remain in constant contact. Fascinated by the same stone, their thoughts, gestures, and desires gradually merge. One day, they will be brought together in a garden called the Garden of Ages.