STREET LIFE (南京路)
Dir. Zhao Dayong, 2006
98 mins. China.
In Mandarin with English subtitles.

MONDAY, JULY 1 - 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, JULY 7 - 5 PM
THURSDAY, JULY 18 - 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, JULY 21 - 7:30 PM

“I just wanna cry. So what!”

Zhao Dayong’s first nonfiction film is a colorful and honest portrait of a group of migrants who live and work on Nanjing Road, an upscale shopping district in Shanghai, collecting and selling recyclables. There’s “Big Fatty,” the wise fool who sings poems and rhymes referencing Chinese literature and politics; Ah Qiao, the dishonest entrepreneur who purchases cans off the other migrants; and “Black Skin”- the anti-hero of the story, whose innocence and hard-working nature leaves him susceptible to attack. After Ah Qiao betrays him, Black Skin spirals into apathy and insanity.

“These beggars and litter-collectors exist as invisible and forgotten shadows of Shanghai, moving in a sort of parallel reality but strictly linked to the same boom that excites the city. It is just the other side of the capitalist coin, the extreme poverty of the periphery juxtaposed with the growing wealth of the center, adopting the same capitalist strategies for surviving in a dramatic, grotesque fashion.” - Sara Beretta, “A Mad Dance on Shanghai Streets: Zhao Dayong’s Street Life”

After graduating from China’s Lu Xun Art Academy in 1992, Zhao Dayong worked for a number of years as a professional artist and advertising director, first in Beijing and later in Guangzhou. In 1997, he founded Guangzhou Dake, a design company. He was also founding editor of Culture & Morals, a now deceased journal for the contemporary arts in China. Zhao began exploring the medium of digital video in 2002. His first documentary film, STREET LIFE, premiered at Austria’s Viennale in October 2006. Zhao’s second documentary film, GHOST TOWN, a collage of stories that take place in the former government seat of Zhiziluo in remote northwestern Yunnan province, premiered at the New York Film Festival in 2009. His first fiction feature, THE HIGH LIFE, premiered at the Hong Kong International Film Festival in 2010, winning both the FIPRESCI Award and the Silver Digital Award. THE HIGH LIFE made its European premiere in the main competition at the Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival in November 2010, where it won both the Werner Fassbinder Prize and the FIPRESCI Jury Prize.