Week 2 Screening: Farewell My Concubine (1993) with free pizza!

Our weekly screening this Friday will be Chen Kaige's 1993 Chinese, queer, historical epic: Farewell My Concubine! 🎭

When: 3:00pm, Friday August 8
Where: Theatre 2, Old Geology (Building 155)
Free: PIZZA and DRINKS before the film! 

Adapted from Lilian Lee's homonymous novel, in the film, two boys meet at an opera training school in Peking in 1924. Their resulting turbulent friendship (performed as adults by the beloved Leslie Cheung and the also great Zhang Fengyi) and intertwined careers will span more than 50 years and endure some of the most troublesome times in China's history, from the Second Sino-Japanese War through to the Chinese Cultural Revolution and its aftermath.

Depicting intersections between the political, the performative and the personal, and questioning what identity lies across them, the film won the Palme d'Or jointly with The Piano at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival, the first and so far only Chinese-language film to do so. That fact did not prevent it from being pulled from its initial release, briefly banned and re-released cut down by state censors (or from also being cut down by Miramax Films for its US-UK theatrical release). But nor did that prevent it from becoming a hit and now classic of world cinema.

As the uncut version we'll be watching is 171 minutes long, we will have a brief intermission in the middle.

Content warning: depictions of physical abuse, including against children, and self-harm are present.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFiHfDBt9lE

After the movie, we'll head to the pub/bar for discussion and drinks.