Last week, UB announced that a virtual lecture series focusing on Chinese-language speaking films will kick off on Oct. 21 at 4 p.m.
The series is sponsored by the Center for Global Film in the UB Department of English and the Confucius Institute, and was organized by assistant professor of global film studies Tanya Shilina-Conte.
Following in the footsteps of the annual Riverrun Global Film Series held at Buffalo’s Burchfield Penney Art Center, the virtual lecture series will feature films that Shilina-Conte selected from China’s cinematic history, in an attempt to educate attendees on the country’s rich history.
“The selected talks and films chart the chronological development of Chinese-language cinema, beginning in the late 1930s and ending with contemporary films from the 2000s,” Shilina-Conte said. “In addition to Mainland China, the series focuses on Taiwan and Hong Kong features films by women and queer directors, broaches the topic of film censorship as social practice and revisits one of the earlier films in the context of the current COVID-19 pandemic.”
This is yet another addition to a variety of seminar series hosted by the Global Film Series over the years.
English professor and interim department chair William Solomon says this program has far-reaching popularity.
“While introducing UB students and faculty to international cinema, our annual Global Film Series continues to be one of the most vital ways the English department reaches out to the Western New York community,” Solomon said.
This film series will be one of the final projects involving the Confucius Institute, which will close its doors at the end of this year after 11 years of promoting and strengthening Chinese culture on campus.
The series’ first lecture, held over Zoom, will be hosted by Christopher Rea, a professor of modern Chinese literature at the University of British Columbia. The lecture is titled “What Disney (and the Rest of Us) Can Learn from the Earliest Surviving Mulan Film,” and Rea encourages attendees to view the 1939 and 2020 portrayals of the Chinese folk heroine, “Hua Mu Lan” and “Mulan.”
Future seminars will include, “Socialist New Wave: Zhang Nuanxin and 1980s Chinese Women’s Cinema” and “Pandemic Premonitions: Revisiting Tsai Ming-liang’s “The Hole.”
The series is free to attend and open to the public. Attendees can register by emailing ubci@buffalo.edu.
Alex Falter is the assistant arts editor and can be reached at alex.falter@ubspectrum.com
Alex Falter is a senior arts editor at The Spectrum.
