A Yangtze Landscape
A Yangtze Landscape
A Yangtze Landscape
A Yangtze Landscape
A Yangtze Landscape
A Yangtze Landscape

A Yangtze Landscape

Regular price $345.00

Cinema du Reel International Documentary Film Festival

Vancouver International Film Festival

Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival

Olhar de Cinema - Curitiba International Film Festival

Perugia Social Film Festival

Lima Independent Film Festival

"Rich black-and-white widescreen photography and an equally rich soundscape work together to traverse seemingly the whole of China within the span of a few hours.  An incredible survey of human faces and bodies is cataloged along the way, giving a universal sense of humanity." -- Olhar de Cinema

This awe-inspiring, epic documentary reflects on the grandeur and melancholy of the Yangtze River, from the port of Shanghai to its source in Tibet, as a poignant metaphor for the violence and chaos of contemporary China. 

'Filmmaker Xu Xin (徐辛), born close to the Yangtze, transforms the river into an immense tracking rail stretching several thousand kilometres.  This gentle journey and the contemplative tone of the black-and-white are immediately undermined by the neon sign on a Shanghai skyscraper insisting: “You can and must obey the law.”  The Yangtze, dubbed a Mother River under Mao, is revealed as a synecdoche of the country as intertitles pointing up recent events appear along the river’s course.  The stops are opportunities to draw the portraits of isolated locals scavenging in dustbins after the New Year festivities. In the old village of Datong, a destitute carpenter struggles to saw a plank, a remnant of the industrial gestures of this local capital formerly known as Little Shanghai.  Here it is the landscape that reveals the ravages of History; Even the fisherman named Cai Liesheng, who had his nets shredded by a dredging crane and was maimed because he attempted to protest, scans the distant horizon silently.  This silence lends unsuspected breadth to the human cost of industrialization, patent in the region of the Three Gorges Dam, where whole villages have been wiped off the map.  The litany of tragedies makes us aware of the massive number of sacrificed lives and, politically speaking, it is no accident that the journey terminates at the river’s source – in Tibet.' (Charlotte Garson)

156 minutes, in Mandarin with English subtitles. 2017

 

NON-THEATRICAL/INSTITUTIONAL TERMS AND CONDITIONS

Each Institutional sale includes a license of Institutional and Public Performance Rights, accounted for in the Institutional Price of the title. Institutional and Public Performance Rights permit screenings of DVDs or Blu-ray discs in a classroom or library or to a public group of fewer than 50 people when no admission is charged.

If admission will be charged or if a group will be more than 50 people, please call or write Torch Films (info@torchfilms.com) to arrange for your showing, and for the proper open showing license.    

DIGITAL SITE LICENSE TERMS AND CONDITIONS

A Digital Site License permits an institution to encode their own files from a Institutional Use DVD or Blu-ray, provided the encoded files are limited to a secure server with a password protected connection, and to transmit the files via a closed circuit system that is not accessible to the public and is accessible only on a single campus or to those enrolled in courses at that campus.  A Digital Site License is valid for the life of the digital file.

By ordering this item, you acknowledge your understanding of Torch Films’ terms and conditions