Unknown Pleasures
This end-of-year cycle invites audiences to discover select 35mm prints from in our collection, creating dynamic contrasts in eras, styles, and cultures from one film to the next.
Stephanie Creaghan's The Dailies is an ingenious series of very short works in which video art and cinema overlap. Nineteen titles from this series are featured in our December program as a dreamy and intimate tribute to the cinephile experience.
Stephanie Creaghan makes work about how violence inserts itself into communication, combining different pathways (like audio and video) to uncover these latent forms of manipulation to bring to light the undiscussed/repressed.
In northern China in 2001, Xiao Ji and Bin Bin are two young adults enjoying life without a thought for tomorrow. Hanging out in the streets, they meet Qiao Qiao, a local singing star. Xiao Ji falls in love with her and tries to win her love despite the presence of her possessive manager, who is also her lover. The situation gets tougher, and the two young men, feeling they have nothing to lose, try something big and risky.
Jia Zhangke
Jia Zhangke is a Chinese film and television director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and writer. He is the founder of Pingyao International Film Festival, the dean of Shanxi Film Academy of Shanxi Media College and the dean of Vancouver Film School at Shanghai University. He graduated from the Literature Department of Beijing Film Academy. He is generally regarded as a leading figure of the "Sixth Generation" movement of Chinese cinema, a group that also includes such figures as Wang Xiaoshuai, Lou Ye, Wang Quan'an and Zhang Yuan. Jia's early films, a loose trilogy based in his home province of Shanxi, were made outside of China's state-run film bureaucracy, and are therefore considered "underground" films. Beginning in 2004, Jia's status in his own country rose when he was allowed to direct his fourth feature film, The World, with state approval. Jia's films have received critical praise and have been recognized internationally, notably winning the Venice Film Festival's Golden Lion for Still Life in 2006. He received the Leopard of Honour at the Locarno Film Festival in 2010, the Carrosse d'or lifetime achievement award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015, and an honorary award at the Visions du Réel in 2024.
Photo: Stream Pictures, Courtesy of Films We Like
