Das Institut für Chinastudien lädet alle Interessierten zu der Screening & Talk series im Rahmen unseres MA Seminars “Urban Governance and Social Worlds in China’s Cities” ein!
Am 2. Juni wird die zweite Veranstaltung stattfinden.
Registrierung bitte bis spätestens 25. Mai per Email bei antonie.angerer@fu-berlin.de (bitte angeben für welche Termine die Registrierung gelten soll).
Wir werden vier Dokumentarfilme und ein Literaturprojekt für alle Registrierten eine Woche vor den Gesprächen zugänglich machen.
Hier finden Sie das ausführliche Programmheft.
Weitere Informationen
„We were SMART” , 2019, 125 min, language: Chinese with English and Chinese subtitle
About the film:
We Were SMART opens in the world’s factory, circa 2008. In the industrial zones of China‘s eastern coast, the younger generation of migrant workers created a marginalized subculture with exaggerated hairstyles, called “Sha-ma-te”, a transliteration of the English word, SMART.As a group, SMARTs had been left-behind when their parents migrated from poor rural areas in central and western China to the country’s industrialized coastline. Most dropped out of school as teenagers, following their parents’ footsteps to find jobs across the country. On average, SMART kids were fourteen years old when they took their first factory job.Entirely based on SMART kids’ memories and original footage from their mobile phones, the film tells the harsh story of these young workers‘ lives in the sweatshops and their inner struggles. They yearned to be something other than mechanical extensions of an assembly line, becoming involved in the anti-mainstream culture of SMART in search of a sense of self-existence. The mainstream public discovered SMART via the internet, misreading and distorting the young workers’ fantasies. By 2013, mainstream contempt and suppression forced the SMART kids to give up their illusions. They realized that there was no escape—even imaginary—from becoming part of the machine.
About the filmmaker:
Known as a director and a curator, Li Yifan was born in Wuhan, Hubei Province, in 1966. He graduated from the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing in 1991. He is now living and working in Chongqing. His documentary “Before the Flood”, “CHRONICLE OF LONGWANG: A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF A CHINESE VILLAGE” won several international awards, including the Wolfgang Prize of the Berlin Film Festival Youth Forum, the Joint Award of International Multimedia Authors of the French Real Film Festival, the Robert and Frances Flaherty Prize of the YIDFF of Japan, and the Documentary Humanitarian Award of the HKIFF, as well as the IDFA Jan Vrijman Fund Film Fund Award in the Netherlands and the Swiss Sud est Film Fund Award.
