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This is the third year of our Chinese film showcase. It will be held April 4 through 17 on the campus of Metropolitan State University in St. Paul. We expect a record number of audience viewers this year because of the topic and the intensive promotional campaign we have planned.
This year our Showcase will focus on the emerging issues of gender and sexuality, particularly gay and lesbian sexuality, in contemporary Chinese film. The themes of homosexuality and gender have become more visible and pronounced in recent Chinese cinema: gay and lesbian images have proliferated; sexuality and gender appears insistently as fluid, un-fixed. Stanley Kwan suggests that Chinese cinema has dealt with questions of gender and sexuality more frankly and more provocatively than any other national cinema. Our Showcase intends to investigate this.
There are an overwhelming number of films which spotlight the issue directly or indirectly. We are working to assemble a package of these films that will serve to educate and entertain the audience. The goal of this Film Showcase is to break pre-existing stereotypes and demarcations of sexuality in a non-Western format. By packaging and showcasing these films we hope to share with the community a sense of tolerence and understanding of diverse ethnicities, genders, and sexualities. A series of films from three different countries will allow the American viewer to see different representations of the same issues. It is precisely this diversity in the treatment of the same subject we wish to share with the audience.
We hope to present Zhang Yuan's East Palace West Palace, Wong Kar -Wai's Happy Together, Stanley Kwan's Yang + Yin: 100 Years of Chinese Cinema, and Tsai Ming-Liang's The River. We will also show a group of HK costume/cross-dressing action pictures like Swordsman II. We will feature contemporary comedies of gender confusion. We will also include supplemental screenings of Asian American work. AMA will amend these features with documentaries and panel discussions. The list below will give us a sense of the structure of the program that we are proposing.
The Showcase will be unique and provocative. As they did at our earlier Showcases, our audiences will gain a greater sense of the diversity of Chinese film, Chinese cultures, and Chinese peoples.
The Showcase includes: