About FILMeX
2023(24th Edition)
Programs
Man in Black
Special Screenings
Introduction
France, United States, United Kingdom / 2023 / 60 min
Director：WANG Bing
A naked old man wanders through the corridors of an empty, dimly lit theater and steps onto the stage. The camera approaches him, swivels, and takes a good look at his body. He stands still, then makes a bowing motion and begins a strange dance.... This naked man is the modern classical music composer WANG Xilin. He sings his own compositions a cappella, plays the piano, and then speaks in his own words about his experiences in Communist China and how torture destroys people forever. WANG Bing has already dealt with similar themes in films such as "The Ditch," about a forced-labor camp in the desert in the early 1960s, but it is the extraordinary stylistic beauty of this film that sets it apart from his previous works. Caroline CHAMPETIER's meticulous and astonishing images capturing the aging body and the theater, the music accompanied by intense pain, and the songs and choreography - all these elements combine to make a truly remarkable biopic. The film was screened as a Special Screening at the Cannes Film Festival.
Director：WANG Bing
WANG Bing was born in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, China in 1967. He studied photography at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts in Shenyang, and then cinematography at the Beijing Film Academy. Between 1999 and 2003, he filmed “West of the Tracks,” a nine-hour documentary about the decline of a vast industrial zone in North-East China. The film's first five-hour version was screened at the Berlinale in 2003. The final version, in three parts, premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival and was distributed in France in 2004. Since then, he has continued to work in the same mode, outside the system and always on highly challenging topics, such as the Anti-Rightist Campaign of the late 1950s in “Fengming, a Chinese Memoir and The Ditch," extreme poverty in "Man with No Name and Three Sisters," and life in a psychiatric hospital in "Til Death Do Us Part." In 2017 he was awarded the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival for “Mrs. Fang," and in 2018, "Dead Soul” was selected for the Out of Competition segment of the Cannes Film Festival. In 2021, Le BAL in Paris mounted an exhibition entitled The Walking Eye, and the French Cinémathèque presented a retrospective of his films. The 2023 Cannes Film Festival presented "Man in Black" as a Special Screening, and “Youth" in the Official Competition.
Schedule
11/24（Fri）10:35 -
Yurakucho Asahi Hall
11/25（Sat）19:10 -
Yurakucho Asahi Hall