CINEMONDO is Link TV's regular series of outstanding world cinema, hosted by Peter Scarlet. Watch clips and interviews from featured CINEMONDO directors.
On Li Yang and Blind Shaft
Li Yang was born in 1959 in Xi'an, China to a family of actors. He was a member of the China Youth Arts Theatre and studied directing at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute, graduating in 1987. Most of Li's classmates went on to form what is commonly referred to as the "Fifth Generation" of filmmakers in China, breaking with filmmaking conventions in Chinese cinema.
Li went to Germany, made documentary films, became a television actor and worked as a camera operator. He then enrolled and graduated from the Academy of Media Arts in 1995. He returned to China in 2000 with the intention of finding a subject for a fiction film. He began to read novels in search of the right story, and when a friend suggested Blind Shaft, he found the source for his first fiction film.
In Blind Shaft, Li achieves an intimacy between the viewer and the main actors primarily via his exclusive use of handheld camera movements. Not once was a tripod used during the filming. The haunting, intimate performances in the film are testament to Li's expertise with actors.
For various reasons, Li Yang does not associate himself with the Fifth or the Sixth Generation of filmmakers in China. The directors of the Fifth generation are his contemporaries but he has only just begun making his mark in Chinese cinema. The Sixth Generation, he claims, is only designated as such because of the common age of the directors, not because of a common film concept, and so he does not identify with this group either. He also has made Germany his home.
Despite this seeming lack of a fixed sense of place, Li Yang is rooted in the tradition of making socially engaged films. He is concerned with the human and spiritual cost of development in China. For as he says, "when the economy develops up to a point, human beings need to return to developing themselves. This is a process that cannot be avoided."
Li's new film Blind Mountain is currently available from Kino.
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