January 10–25, 2013
The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street New York, NY 10019
You-zhong (Beijing Flickers)
2012. China. Directed by Zhang Yuan. With Duan Bowen, Lu Yulai, Shi Shi. “Every day people disappear in this city. If I disappeared, would anyone come looking for me?” So muses San Bao, a young man left behind by Beijing’s new prosperity. He has lost his job, his apartment, and the woman he loves, and even his dog, Happiness, has run away. Heavenly losers are the only heroes in Zhang’s gorgeously gritty, droll, and angst-ridden portrait of youthful disaffection and perseverance in the face of heartbreak and ruthless inequality. In Mandarin; English subtitles. 96 min.
MoMA and the Global Film Initiative (GFI) present Global Lens, an annual touring exhibition conceived by GFI to encourage filmmaking in countries with developing film communities. This selection of 10 films from as far afield as Iran, Serbia, Chile, Kazakhstan, and Iraq includes projects developed with seed money from GFI, and represents a concise survey of contemporary filmmaking from areas where local political restrictions and/or economic realities make such expensive and technology-driven endeavors a challenge. Accomplished, entertaining, and thought-provoking, these films are all deeply rooted in the social and political realities of the countries where their talented and resourceful makers live and set their stories.
We celebrate the 10th anniversary of Global Lens with weeklong runs of Zhang Yuan’s Beijing Flickers and Eduardo Nunes’s Southwest; an overlooked earlier film, Life Kills Me (2007), from Chilean director Sebastián Silva (whose 2009 film The Maid was much admired); Cairo 678, a big hit at MoMA’s 2011 New Directors/New Films festival, and much more.