Since we announced the formal launch of the Chinese Film Festival Studies Research Network site recently, many of you have signed up to receive updates. Welcome! If you are participating in Chinese film festivals (in or outside Chinese-language contexts) we hope you will send us your reports, photos, and news. We also hope that you will forward links and other information you would like us to consider publishing on the site. At the moment, the site is very focused on UK. You can help us to change that. If you yourself are actively researching and writing on Chinese film festivals, please email us (chinesefilmfestivals@gmail.com) and tell us more.
Those who fear flooding of the inbox will be relieved to know that, because this is not supposed to be a news site, we will not be sending out updates every time new material is added to the site. Instead, we will send a round-up of updates about once a month. This is the mid-September round-up.
NEWS. The closure (or not) of BIFF made the headlines. We include links to Time Out Beijing articles, a report at dGenerate films, and a post-event interview with artistic director Dong Bingfeng at Beijing Cream. Download them while you can! Mark Nornes has kindly allows us to publish his response to the event and his photos at our site. Later in the year, a Taiwan Film Festival will be running in Edinburgh.
GALLERIES. We have added galleries on the First Beijing Independent Film Festival UK Tour of 2012; Tsai Ming-Liang’s visit to the Leeds International Film Festival in 2010; the Taiwanese Documentary Festivals in Leeds in 2009 and 2010; and the Tour of Taiwanese Short Films in 2009 and 2010.
ARCHIVES. Viv Marsh has kindly supplied a link to her BBC report on the Chinese Visual Festival 2011.
COMING SOON. A detailed report on the Chinese Twitter (Weibo) debates about the Shanghai International Film Festival earlier this year. We also aim to produce a bibliography of our core Network members’ publications relevant to Chinese Film Festival Studies in the next few days. We would then like to expand this into a general bibliography on Chinese Film Festivals Studies. If you have items to contribute, please use the “Contact Us” link at the site.
Thank you
Chris Berry and Luke Robinson