Oxhide
(Liu Jiayin, 2005, 110 min, China, Mandarin w/ subtitles, Color, DVD)

Introduced by Prof. Ralph Litzinger, Dept. of Cultural Anthropology!

Daily life in an impossibly cramped Beijing apartment takes on epic proportions in this, intimate portrait, with unprecedented access, of a working-class Chinese family. Boldly transforming documentary into fiction, Liu Jiayin cast her parents and herself as fictionalized versions of themselves. Her father, Liu Zaiping, sells leather bags but is slowly going bankrupt. He argues with his wife, Jia Huifen, and his daughter over methods to boost business in the shop. A cloud of anxiety follows them into sleepless nights shared in the same bed. But through the thousand daily travails of city life, a genuine and deeply moving picture of Chinese familial solidarity emerges from the screen. With virtually no budget and boundless ingenuity, Liu Jiayin's eye-opening debut, shot when she was 23 years old, consists of twenty-three static, one-scene shots within her family's fifty square meter home. Liu keeps her small DV camera in claustrophobic closeness to her subjects, often showing only parts of their bodies as their voices dominate the soundtrack.
-- Part of Cine-East: East Asian Cinema.

-- Winner of the Caligari Film Award and the FIPRESCI Prize at the 2005 Berlin International Film Festival, and recipient of the Golden DV Award at the 2005 Hong Kong International Film Festival!

Cost: Free and Open to the Public

Sponsors: Program in Arts of the Moving Image (AMI), Asian Pacific Studies Institute and Asian & Middle Eastern Studies