Acting
A rich man's son believes himself to be the best kung fu fighter in Canton. Unfortunately, his father, anxious for his son's safety, bribes all his opponents to lose. After a humiliating defeat at the hands of an actor in a traveling theatre company, the son resolves to find a better teacher.
During a period of upheaval, an itinerant performer has a troupe of four children, one of whom is his daughter Mu-Lin. Jump ahead 15 years, he's ready to retire and has arranged Mu-Lin's marriage. Someone he recognizes enters his house and murders him. Mu-Lin is brought to a fancy bordello where the most beautiful prostitute, Yeh Hong, takes a special interest in her. One of Yeh Hong's lovers, Kim, who is an assassin, also develops a relationship with Mu-Lin. He and Yeh Hong may be working with the emperor's eunuch; all are power hungry. Things seem more than coincidental: does Mu-Lin have a history with this trio? If so, what is it?
A 15 part film featuring scenes from Xianghe, running from the mundane to the surreal: people parade in opera costumes, slaughter pigs in public and dine on the fields; they bury the dead and get married, tickling the bride and groom, everything done without speech. Sitting somewhere between intimate personal reels and detached ethnographic records, the work creates a simultaneous sense of immersion and distance – of the type you might associate with end-of-life flashbacks. Yang gives nostalgia a fantastic, mystical bent, as if to suggest that to revel in memory is a creative act.
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Based on Naomi Klein's book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, a look at how people in various communities around the world play a role in the ongoing climate change debate and how they're affecting change in trying to prevent the environmental destruction of our planet.
