US Premiere
SAUNA ON MOON 2011
嫦娥
Director/Screenwriter/Production Designer: Zou Peng. Producer: Chen Zhiheng. Cinematographer: Yu Lik-wai. Editor: Wenders Li. Sound: Zhang Yang. Composer: Wang Lei. Cast: Wu Yuchi, Yang Xiaomin, Lei Ting, Zhan Yi, Meng Yan.
Zou Peng’s dazzling second feature witnesses life at a boisterous sauna/brothel in the Southern Chinese industrial heartland of Guangdong. The sauna workers, older and younger women alike, observe a brisk regimen of rehearsing the art of providing pleasure, in the interest of creating the region’s leading pleasure palace for high-rolling “special guests.” Zou eschews easy moralistic conclusions about the politics of power, preferring instead to portray a social ecology built around the unabashed pursuit and uses of money. The fantastical factory that is the sauna becomes a vortex of ironies, prompting both scopophilic pleasure and an uncanny catalog of the effects of China’s economic divides. – Shannon Kelley
35mm, color, Putonghua with English subtitles, 93 min.
Preceded by
North American Premiere
THE PEOPLE’S SECRETARY 2010
Director/Producer/Editor: Zhang Qing. Cast: Wang Zhixin, Lu Yuzhen, Lu Tinghai, Zhang Weicheng.
Installation artist Zhang Qing employs the ubiquity of closed-circuit television cameras to amplify a cheeky satire, with multiple video feeds bearing witness to the super-human good works of a community leader, recounted in a style that echoes Chinese television of the 1980s.– Paul Malcolm
DVD, color, Mandarin with English subtitles, 18 min.
This program has been made possible with funding support from the UCLA Center for Chinese Studies.
UCLA Film & Television Archive
Billy Wilder Theater
Courtyard Level, Hammer Museum
10899 Wilshire Boulevard (at the intersection of Wilshire and Westwood Boulevards)
Los Angeles, CA 90024
Tickets: $10 online. $9 general admission, $8 for non-UCLA students, seniors and UCLA Alumni Association members (ID required) if purchased at the box office only. Free admission for UCLA students (current ID required); free tickets available on a first-come, first-served basis at the box office until 15 minutes before showtime, or the rush line afterwards. Online tickets available at www.cinema.ucla.edu/calendar; click on the individual program.
Parking: Museum parking lot; enter from Westwood Blvd, just north of Wilshire. $3 flat rate after 6:00 pm on Mondays-Fridays and all day on weekends.
Information: www.cinema.ucla.edu, 310.206.8013
UCLA Billy Wilder Theater, 10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90024