‘Women Hold Up Half the Sky: Mint on Tour’ will bring a programme of Chinese cinema to six cities in Scotland.
From September 8th to October 26th MINT Chinese Film Festival will be screening a series of Chinese movies, documentaries, and short films at Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, Inverness, Aberfeldy, and St Andrews.
‘Women Hold Up Half the Sky: Mint on Tour’ is a showcase of women-led Chinese filmmaking. The programme is a mix of contemporary and classic Chinese filmmaking. In total, there are seven feature films and two short film programmes. Some of the movies will be accompanied by live music, discussions and introductions.
There will be 17 showings in total.
Films will be screened in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, Inverness, Aberfeldy, and St Andrews.
On September 8th Dundee opened the festival with a screening of Guian (奶奶), a documentary by Nicole Chi. A Costa Rican-Chinese director, the movie explores her relationship with her grandmother who immigrated from China to Costa Rica.
The festival will run until the 26th of October.
MINT Chinese Film Festival was founded by Chinese film curator Yixiang Shirley Lin and Keswick Alhambra Cinema’s co-owner Dr Carol Rennie. They have run two successful film festivals in 2023 and 2024 at Keswick in the Lake District. This brought women-led Chinese films to the UK.
For ‘Women Hold Up Half the Sky: Mint on Tour’, they partnered with Aya Films. They are a UK distribution and media education company founded in 2011 that work with filmmakers, curators, festivals and audiences across the world. Their goal is to connect, collaborate and re-imagine through cinema.
Justine Atkinson of Aya Films said: “We are so happy to be collaborating with the wonderful MINT…From classic gems to contemporary masterpieces the films selected bring together a beautiful mixtape of cinematic treasures by and about Chinese women”.
“We are excited to bring them to Scottish audiences”.
The festival includes the UK premiere of Across the Waters (在水一方) by Viv Li. In addition, their are Scottish premieres of Song Sang Blue (小白船) by Zihan Gen, Fly Me To The Moon (但愿人长久) by Sasha Chuk, and Yangzi’s Confusion (洋子的困惑) by Jue Li.
Amongst the lineup are two rare 35mm screenings of Romance of the Western Chamber (Xi Xiang Ji 西厢记). The screenings will be accompanied by live music.
A silent film released in 1927, it is an adaption of the famous Yuan dynasty story by Wang Shifu.
The film originally had 10 reels, but only five have survived to the present day.
Yixiang Shirley Lin, co-founder of MINT Chinese Film Festival explained that bringing Romance of the Western Chamber to the big screen took some work.
“To use the 35mm film, we had to do a lot of preparation. For example, we had to create new subtitles in both Chinese and English… because the 35mm film only had the French intertitles.”
Despite the challenges, she felt it was something that had to be done.
“I think it really is our duty to bring that archival print to a Scottish audience.” Said Yixiang Lin.
The team chose Scotland because it holds an important place in their hearts.
Co-curator and Marketing Manager Wenqi Zhang explained: “For us, Scotland is an important place. We have friends and relationships there… I studied in Glasgow, and Shirley studied in Edinburgh. Our collaborator, Justin, is based in Glasgow.”
It also provided a change to London-centric Chinese film screenings. “We noticed a lot of people just doing the Chinese film screening in England and especially London, but what about the Chinese audience in Scotland? Or the local Scottish audience?”
“We aim to share the voices of Chinese women with Scottish audiences.”
Yixiang Lin explained this is reflected in the logo created for ‘Women Hold Up Half the Sky: Mint on Tour’. A rabbit, an animal associated with China and also used by MINT as their logo, jumping alongside a cloud in the shape of a unicorn.
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