Self-Portrait and Dialogue with My Mother (performance)
      and
Self-Portrait With Three Women
(Zhang Mengqi, 2010, 70 min, China, Chinese with English subtitles, Color, DVD)

-- Q&A to follow with filmmaker/performer Zhang Mengqi!

Self-Portrait and Dialogue with My Mother is a thirty-minute performance piece involving dance and video projection:

"I am trying to use this dialogue to stage an intervention, my mother hopes it will allow her to connect with me more intimately. She uses words to recall episodes of my birth, our mother-daughter goodbyes and reunions, and my growing up. She says that I am the continuation of her existence." -- Zhang Mengqi

Zhang Mengqi's Self-Portrait with Three Women represents
"a wholehearted attempt to reconcile personal history, from the corporeal to the abstract. With regard to her mother and maternal grandmother as both generational and emotional touchpoints, Zhang constructs a intimate narrative that blends the boundaries of physical spaces and bodies and dwelling places with the intangible sense of memory, of passed time. Zhang's approach to her indisciplinary autobiography is remarkably frank, incorporating voice-over biographical details and archival photographs and letters to set the record spinning into motion." -- Maya E. Rudolph, dGenerate Films

Cost: Free and Open to the Public!

Sponsors: The Department of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies (AMES), Asian/Pacific Studies Institute (APSI), Program in the Arts of the Moving Image (AMI), Center for Documentary Studies (CDS), Office of Global Strategy and Programs, and the Office of the Vice Provost for the Arts.