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UCLA Film & Television Archive is proud to join a distinguished consortium of American film institutions in Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, DC to present the China Onscreen Biennial (COB), returning for a fourth edition in 2018. This year’s COB selection, curated by a team of film scholars and curators from the COB presenting organizations, presents a China in continued flux. Chinese filmmakers and artists—uniquely positioned by virtue of living in a society that has borne perhaps the most massive transformations of any country in the last 30 years—continue to bear witness and respond to rapidly evolving conditions with imagination, courage, urgency, acuity, and humanity. Stories of struggle and those being left behind in the rush to economic success dominate. Yet like the proverbial silk-winged butterfly that emerges from a plain cocoon, in the magic light of this moment in Chinese cinema, a long day’s journey into night may morph into a transporting fever dream; a woman, hounded by superstition, may reinvent herself; small-town teenagers may be foolish birds but they endure; or an elephant sitting still may compel roving spirits amid other hard-won transformations.
The Dunhuang Projected sidebar which includes non-Chinese films also returns with a selection of three features and a conversation at the Fowler Museum with five artists who have created new video and sound works for this year’s COB. Video works in this section will be projected in the wait time before the feature presentations for the duration of the COB, while the sound works, which the sound artist will create by mixing COB post screening discussions in real time, will be played back as a program coda and to open the next program.
Last but not least, we are proud to have internationally acclaimed director Jia Zhangke as a UCLA distinguished-artist-in-residence for the COB this year. A retrospective program of Jia’s work will culminate in the West Coast Premiere of Jia’s latest opus and Cannes selection Ash is Purest White. Jia will join UCLA Professor Michael Berry for in-depth dialogues after the screening of his films.
The full schedule for artist-in-residence Jia Zhangke and additional COB programs in Los Angeles will be announced. Please check the COB website chinaonscreen.org for updates and information.
The COB at the UCLA Film & Television Archive is presented by the Archive in partnership with Film at REDCAT and the Freer and Sackler Galleries of the Smithsonian Institution.
Founding Sponsor
UCLA Confucius Institute
Program Sponsors
Stephen Lesser, UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture, UCLA College of Letters and Sciences, UCLA Center for Chinese Studies, Fowler Museum at UCLA, Confucius Institute at George Washington University, Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation, Confucius Institute Headquarters
Corporate Sponsors
yU+Co, Daniel Ho Creations
