The 61st edition of the Sydney Film Festival, which ran from June 4 to 15, had a selection of films from 47 countries. And China (and Chinese-language films) figured significantly.
One of the festival's jury members, Canadian critic Shelly Kraicer, was also responsible for programming the "China: Rebels, Ghosts and Romantics" section.
A resident of Beijing since 2003, Kraicer has been writing about Chinese-language cinema since the mid-1980s. "I was at the Toronto International Film Festival and saw these great Hong Kong movies by the likes of Wong Kar-wai, a Taiwanese film by Tsai Ming-liang and new mainland films, and they provoked me to wonder why there was such an explosion of contemporary filmmaking," he says.
"As China changes and modernises, it inserts itself into cultural exchange through film. I like to watch this process."
Kraicer selected films from both "inside" and "outside the system" for Sydney.
"There were a series of independent film festivals in China which until recently were a low-key way for audiences to see 'outside the system' films, but there's been a crackdown on those festivals recently," he says.
"After the [2008 Beijing] Olympics, it looked like the Chinese state security apparatus gained the upper hand so that independent cultural spaces have really shrunk down again and are not even as prevalent as when I arrived there."
