Lao Tou - Old Men Documentary by Yang Tianyi

[roddy]

I just picked this up on DVD in Beijing - looks really interesting, reading the blurb on the back it seems to be a case of a film-maker spotting a bunch of old men sitting around by the road one day, and then spending two years filming them - potentially much more interesting than the usual CCTV9 foreigner fodder.

Does anyone know anything about it, or the China New Documentary series it is a part of?

A quick Google search didn't come up with any useful information.

I'll post more after I've watched it.

Roddy

[Guest vfj1]

Roddy,

Me again. This film also falls within the scope of my research. I've seen it, and it's very worthwhile in the same way a lot of these shoestring Chinese documentaries are--the cinematic skill involved is minimal, but the rapport the filmmaker clearly developed with her subjects is astounding, and some of the material is very powerful.

I don't know anything about the series that the DVD copy is a part of. As for Yang Tianyi, I THINK (though I'm not sure) that she went to the Beijing Film Academy, and a neat piece of trivia is that she plays a lead role in Platform, the second film by the director of Xiao Wu. I've read an essay by her on the making of the film, but it contained fairly little in the way of biographical info: I was able to garner, though, that she made the film with family and personal money (not that much was required to shoot the thing).

[roddy]

I just tried to find some info on Chinese websites, but couldn't get anything as I don't know the characters for her name. I then searched Google for her name in pinyin in case I could find the characters somewhere that way, and the number one result was . . . this page.

Roddy