Film: Black Snow

Director: Xie Fei

Label: Second Run DVD

Winding his way through the streets of Beijing, former prisoner Quanzi (Jiang Wen) settles back into his old shack and looks to reconstruct his life that has changed drastically since his departure. His only family members left are a few aunts who only want to meddle, the only job available is one selling clothes in the market, and the only friends he has left are doing everything in their power to drag him back into the life that put him in prison in the first place.

Enter a female singer. This woman captivates him. He wants to be with her, but has no idea how to get her let alone retain her. He feels alien to this strange land that was home and nothing seems to go right in any way. A classic tale of former criminal who yearns to be free from the riches and indulgences of crime, but has not learned to cope with the realities of normal life.

The new year has dawned and Quanzi works hard at forgetting his past even while being reminded of them on a daily basis. He likes to eat in his favorite restaurants, but he ends up helping an old friend commit murder. He wants to pursue love, but he cannot get over his fiancé and pursue a dream relationship with his singer. He wants to forge ahead, but his past drags him back and back again.

Xie Fie, a master of Chinese cinema not known outside of his home country, broods Quanzi with his chain smoking and long lasting glances at what could have been a dream life. Jiang Wen’s performance is on par with any classic actor and the never ending supporting cast gives Black Snow just about every type of character one would expect to run into in a Chinese back alley.

Awards for Black Snow:

1990 Silver Bear/Berlin International Film Festival (Germany)

1990 Best Film/Hundred Flowers Awards (China)

Black Snow will be released on March 8, 2010 by Second Run DVD with an interview with director Xie Fei and an excellent essay on the films of Xie Fei by Shaoyi Sun who is a Professor of Film and Media Studies at Shanghai University’s School of Film and TV Art and Technology.

For more information on this film click here.

Kim Longinotto has been making documentaries since 1976. Saying that she just makes documentaries would do a disservice to her thirty-five year career. Longinotto specializes in showing the plight of females from around the world who are marginalized, oppressed, and discriminated upon. Choosing this line of work is definitely a labor of love as her works have mostly went unnoticed until the late nineties when she started to win awards at film festivals with her latest being the prestigious Prix Art es Essai at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008. Following up on their release of the two excellent Longinotto documentaries Divorce Iranian Style/Runaway, Second Run DVD brings us a no holds barred wrestling match in Gaea Girls and then the somewhat strange story of women who pose as men to work in Japanese nightclubs in Shinjuku Boys.

Gaea Girls focuses around the story of the GAEA which is the Japanese women’s version of the WWE. In Japan, tradition dictates that women be more demure and introvert. Even in our modern day with more and more Japanese women branching out into business and doing other things that would have been unthinkable a few decades ago, professional wrestling is still an outsider sport.

Focused on the training camp led by wrestling veteran and legend Nagayo, the documentary studies the efforts of newcomer Takeuchi as she seeks to prove her toughness and pass the extremely hard tests administered by mentor Nagayo herself. The insults and abuse end up being way more than Takeuchi had bargained for as she is continually berated and shown up even by newcomers. As a film, Gaea Girls is an odd look into the world over women who may never marry and bear children, but they simply want to prove to themselves that they can physically compete on a stage that may only be for show, but allows them to be the spotlight every night.

Shinjuku Boys revolves around the lives of three women as they transform themselves as men who serve drinks in the women only nightclub New Marilyn.  The fact that these women have chosen to forgo their lives as women and pretend they are men is an interesting study. What may even be the more interesting study is the women who frequent the clubs and who sometimes have relationships with Gaish, Tatsu, and Kazuki.

When watching these two documentaries back to back, there are similarities that come to the forefront. All of these women are searching for acceptance in a harsh society. All of these women have forgone the journey of love and the pursuit of lasting relationships to hang out on the fringe of society and interact with people who are just customers. All of these women embrace their differences from the norm. All of these women find their champion in the form of Longinotto who shows us the fringe while giving us sympathy for those who just want to be accepted.