Mulan International Film Festival: Mr. Zhang Believes (Director's Cut)

Mr. Zhang Believes (Director's Cut)

痴（导演剪辑版）
QIU Jiongjiong
331 min
2015
Docu-Fiction
Sichuanese Dialect, Mandarin
English and Chinese Subtitles

Content Advisory: This film contains scenes of coarse language, mature themes, disturbing content

The film recounts a 30-year chapter of China’s mid-20th-century history through the story of Mr. ZHANG Xianchi and the interacting forms of theatrical fiction and documentary autobiography. Born into a Nationalist (KMT) family in the 1930s, ZHANG was a progressive young "leftist" and Communist Party supporter, then, after the founding of the New China in 1949, was dubbed a counter-revolutionary "rightist"––a public enemy–and jailed in 1957 for 23 years.

Director

QIU Jiongjiong (b. 1977, Leshan, Sichuan Province) is a Chinese contemporary artist and filmmaker. Since 2006, he has developed a distinctive cinematic language marked by vivid dialect dialogue, theatrical mise-en-scène, and stylized characterizations. The local history of Leshan and the history of his family, which has deep roots in traditional Sichuan opera, recur throughout his work.