As the Sun immersed in the waning Moon

20, 21, 22, 23 June 2022
Garden of Via la Nunziatina, 11. In collaboration with Udine Far East Film Festival and Cinema Arsenale of Pisa

Organised by the Confucius Institute of Pisa, the 2022 edition of the Pisa Chinese Film Festival sees the consolidation of some peculiar aspects of its formula, while presenting itself to the public in a renewed guise. The screenings, in fact, continue to be held outdoors, in the Giardino di via la Nunziatina, in Pisa, once again in the heart of June in Pisa. Confirmed and even more solid are the collaborations: the one with the Udine Far East Film Festival, a veritable institution of Asian cinema in Italy, and the one with the Cinema Arsenale of Pisa, already a partner of the project in past years, but which for the 2022 edition has contributed in a decisive way to enriching the offer on the programme.

The novelty - The 2022 edition inaugurates a line of research summed up in the characters accompanying the headline of 2022, halfway between hope and description: 'Like the Sun immersed in the waning Moon'. The titles proposed by the Pisa Chinese Film Festival 2022, in fact, have in common the subtle mutation taking place in contemporary Chinese cinema. A metamorphosis ignited, on the one hand, by the contamination of styles, genres, and cultural codes, and on the other favoured by an increasingly lively and conscious mingling of Chinese aesthetics and Western tradition. At the dawn of the 'electric shadows', in the Shanghai of the international delegations, Chinese cinema still displayed Western characteristics, but a living path made up of revolutions and, indeed, radical mutations, has given it an identity of its own, irreducible, which today returns to us to observe us closely again, to question us.

All the titles on the playbill will be free admission and in the original language, with Italian subtitles. Spectators are guaranteed admission while places are available.

The composition of the 2022 playbill availed itself of the valuable collaboration of the Udine Far East Film Festival. A renewed approach that has identified in the field some of the titles that have met the taste of the world's largest audiences, with special attention to fashions, characters, but also to the 'signatures' that enrich the panorama of the contemporary Chinese film industry. China represents a privileged observatory on what are today's tastes, avant-gardes, even stories that sometimes bounce back to the European context.

Opening on Monday 20 June at 8 p.m. with the PCFF 2022 Opening Ceremony in the setting of the Garden in via la Nunziatina 11, Pisa. Professor Huang Yunlin (Director of the Confucius Institute of Pisa), Giada Alì and Fabiana De Carlo (Confucius Institute of Pisa) will do the honours. Guests at the ribbon cutting ceremony will be Professor Nicola Bellini (Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna), Antonio Capellupo (Cinema Arsenale), and Thomas Bertacche (Far East Film Festival). At 8.30 p.m. a welcome toast is scheduled to kick off the 2022 season. At 9.30 p.m. the festival will then be opened by Return to Dust (隐入尘烟), by director Li Ruijun, in competition at the Berlinale 2022, on show at the Udine Far East Film Festival 2022, and not yet screened in Italian cinemas. At the centre is an improbable and romantic love story filmed in Gansu among majestic dunes, symbol of a rural China in the extreme, where material survival is precarious but moments of poetry abound. A heralded masterpiece, profoundly Chinese but grounded in a universal language.

On Tuesday 21 June, the day will start at 6pm with the shared experience 'Bashu: beer, hotpot and fun' a tasting by ChinEAT & Postwave Brewing. The Bashu Culture has a history of over 3000 years, and is widely regarded as one of the cradles of modern Chinese civilisation. Marco Bonaglia (PhD student at the University of Chongqing) and Fabiana De Carlo (Program Manager of the Confucius Institute of Pisa) will interview Silvio Festari and his team from Post Wave Brewing, and so will Laura Rizzo and Michele Dilella for ChinEAT, to present their business success stories and cooperation between China and Italy in the field of trade, but also their personal experiences, cultural and linguistic, with China. Particular emphasis will be placed on the topic of cultural mediation and interculturality in the Sino-Italian business world. In the second part, participants will have the opportunity to taste the products, with a winning pairing of beer and hotpot. At 9.00 p.m. there will then be a talk by director Zuxin Hou, whose 9.30 p.m. screening will be The Italian Recipe (遇见你之后), the opening film at the Udine 2022 Far East Festival, where it had its world premiere. Already considered an updated Roman Holiday in Chinese sauce, the film tells the story of the meeting in Rome between Peng, a young and famous pop singer who has arrived in Italy to take part in a reality show, and Mandy, a young girl of the same age (Huang Yao) who helps her aunt and uncle in the family laundry and dreams of becoming a chef. The two, who initially cannot stand each other, really get to know each other when they are forced to spend a night together full of surprises in the Italian capital. This is a clear example of how the contamination of genres and languages today manages to produce works that are complex to catalogue, despite only seemingly recognisable surfaces.

Wednesday 22 June will start at 6.30 p.m. with a Calligraphy Workshop by teachers and volunteers of the Confucius Institute of Pisa (access is free and does not require registration). At 9.30 p.m. it will be the turn of South Wind, a docufilm by director Zhang Zhiqiang, in which the daily struggle of a retired couple stranded in southern China because of COVID-19 is told live. Xu Zhihui and Sun Yanping both have health problems. In an attempt to get better, they decide to take a trip across their huge country. Arriving in Fangpo, southern China, they are stranded because of the COVID-19 pandemic. They therefore decide to settle temporarily on the beach, finding themselves immersed in a completely new and unfamiliar environment. Their new daily routine is based on survival and above all, Xu has to find new techniques to procure food. A small gem that tackles the epoch-making theme of the pandemic from the perspective of two people on the margins, who are nevertheless able to bear witness to timeless truths.

On Thursday 23 June at 8 p.m., the proceedings will be opened by the presentation of the 'Wing Tsun' Sports Association with a live demonstration of Wing Chun (永春拳). Finally, at 9.30 p.m., the Pisa Chinese Film Festival will celebrate the 20th anniversary of a film that literally revolutionised contemporary Chinese (and world) cinema. It was released in 2002 英雄 (Yīngxióng), or Hero, by director Zhang Yimou, which staged the attempted assassination of the mythical emperor Qin Shi Huang in 227 B.C.. Jet Li, Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung under the inspired direction of the Chinese master embodied characters that are still engraved in the collective memory, new masks of an 'original' genre that never really went out of fashion such as wuxia, the swashbuckling Cantonese genre. Zhang Yimou recodes it by crossing classical opera, ballet and western. A jewel that has not lost an ounce of its freshness, re-proposed to the public of the Pisa Chinese Film