Film-Thinking presented Sacrificed Youth, a 1986 film directed by Nuanxing Zhang, followed by a conversation that featured:
- Timothy Bewes (English | Brown)
- Cassandra Guan (Center for Art, Culture, and Technology | MIT)
- Lingzhen Wang (East Asian Studies | Brown)
- Lu Wang (Music | Brown)
ABOUT THE FILM
Sacrificed Youth (Qing chun ji)
China, 1986 (96 mins)
Directed by Nuanxing Zhang
Cast: Fengxu Li, Yuanzheng Feng, Tao Song, and Jianguo Guo | Screenplay: Manling Zhang and Nuanxing Zhang | Cinematography: Deyuan Mu and Wei Teng | Editing: Qihua Zhao | Music: Sola Liu and Xiaosong Qu | Language: Mandarin with English Subtitles
“A lyrical, elegiac tale about the generation of students banished to remote agricultural regions of China during the Cultural Revolution. 17-year-old Li Chun, a shy, even repressed Han girl from Beijing, is sent to work in a small village in the Dai countryside, down near Laos. At first disdainful of the natives’ rural superstitions and poverty, only slowly does she overcome her outsider status and learn the value of the Dais’ appreciation of beauty, nature, and human warmth. An unsentimental celebration of tradition, exotic landscape, and cultural independence, Zhang’s film is both a loving portrait of Dai life and a sensitive, partly autobiographical study of one girl’s hesitant awakening to sensuality. Infused with a discreet, gentle eroticism and a final, touching sense of loss, it charms through its narrative simplicity and visual elegance.” — Time Out magazine
Film-Thinking is a series of conversations hosted by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, asking how cinema can help us to think the many challenges facing our moment. According to the novelist Jonathan Coe, “A movie is something we should only see when somebody else shows it to us.” In the spirit of Coe’s remark, each Film-Thinking event comprises a curated screening of a film and a post-screening conversation. A pre-circulated Film Note offers a point of departure for the screening and the discussion. The aim of Film-Thinking is to enlarge our sense of the politics of cinema and collectively expand our understanding of film’s capacity for thought. This project has been made possible, in part, by the Brown Arts Institute. Read more.