Film Screening:

Mountains May Depart

(Jia Zhangke, 2015, 131 min, China, in Cantonese, Mandarin & English w/ English Subtitles, Color, Digital) 

-- Introduced by Prof. Ralph Litzinger (Cultural Anthropology)!

Mainland master Jia Zhangke scales new heights with Mountains May Depart. At once an intimate drama and a decades-spanning epic that leaps from the recent past to the present to the speculative near-future, Jia's new film is an intensely moving study of how China's economic boom and the culture of materialism it has spawned has affected the bonds of family, tradition, and love.

-- Winner for Best Original Screenplay in Golden Horse Film Festival (2015)!

-- "Few filmmakers working today look as deeply at the changing world as Mr. Jia does, or make the human stakes as vivid." -- New York Times

 -- "The cumulative impact is still enormously touching, highlighted by Jia's rapturous image-making and a luminous central performance by the director's regular muse (and wife), Zhao Tao." -- Variety

-- “Jia films these interlocking stories and their diverse tributaries with a bare and restrained simplicity that contains his many levels of rueful outrage.” -- New Yorker

Cost: Free and open to the public

Sponsors: The Department of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies (AMES), the Asian Pacific Studies Institute (APSI), and the Arts of the Moving Image (AMI).