China in Britain #2. Film – 31/5/12 – Soursweet, Yellow Peril and Filmmaking
Posted: May 15th, 2012 | No Comments »The second of the University of Westminster’s China in Britain conferences is being held at the Uni on 31/5/12 – details as below with some interesting screenings:
China in Britain #2. Film
May 31st 2012 – Time: 09:45 AM – 16:45PM
Room 451, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW
Programme: RSVP – Entrance is free but strictly limited so it is essential to book your place by emailing
anne@translatingchina.info
9:45AM Coffee/welcome Anne Witchard and Diana Yeh, Research Fellow
10:00AM Screening of Soursweet (1988)
11:50AM coffee
12:15PM Presentations of their work by filmmakers Rosa Fong and Lab Ky Mo
Lab Ky Mo is an award winning screenwriter and director of innumerable short films, commercials, teen soaps, Hollyoaks and The Cut, and the controversial feature film Nine Dead Gay Guys (2002), reviewed by the Sunday Express as “the most outrageous and original British film of the yearâ€. My Dad the Communist (2009) and recent projects, The Bruce Lee Bus and My Triad Summer Holiday, are stories of British-Chinese boyhood in the 1980s.
Rosa Fong is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television at Edge Hill University. She is an industry professional with more than 15 years’ experience working on feature films and documentaries, and, as a director/producer, in independent film and television. Rosa has worked in Hong Kong as a commercials director and in the UK directing music videos for MTV and Partizan. Her short films have won awards from the BFI and Arts Council of England. More recently she was Associate Producer on the award-winning Cut Sleeve Boys (2006), dubbed the first British-Chinese gay feature film. She is currently writing several feature film scripts for the UK market.
1:30PM – 2:30PM lunch
2:30PM Director Mike Newell will talk about Soursweet followed by a roundtable with Lab, Rosa,
and actress Lucy Sheen
Lucy Sheen has over thirty years of experience working in film, television, theatre and radio. She was born in Hong Kong, orphaned and then adopted by an English family. One of the first British-Chinese actresses to be accepted into a UK drama school, she graduated with a BA in Theatre Arts in 1984. Her first role was the female lead in the ground-breaking British film Ping Pong (dir. Po Chi’h Leong), the first feature film to explore the complex issues of the British-Chinese community. Though not in competition Ping Pong received critical acclaim at the Venice Film festival. Lucy is now in production with her independent documentary looking into the issues of trans-racial adoption and what it felt like growing up in the late sixties/early seventies as a British-Chinese.
Mike Newell has been directing and producing films for screen and television, both in the UK and Hollywood, since 1977. After the release of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in 2005, he was confirmed third most commercially successful British director in recent years by the UK Film Council. He won the BAFTA Award for Best Direction in 1994 for Four Weddings and a Funeral, and the BAFTA Britannia Award for Artistic Excellence in Directing in 2005. His film adaptation of Great Expectations will be released later this year.
3:30PM tea
3:45PM Jeffrey Richards, Professor of Cultural History at Lancaster University, will present his paper ‘Dr Fu-Manchu and the Yellow Peril’
Jeffrey Richards is a leading cultural critic and nationally renowned expert on theatre and cinema history. He is the author of seminal books too numerous to list here – among the most recent are Films and British National Identity (1997), Imperialism and Music (2001), Sir Henry Irving: A Victorian Actor and His World (2005), Hollywood’s Ancient Worlds (2008), John Ruskin and the Victorian Theatre (with Kate Newey, 2010), and Cinema and Radio in Britain and America 1920-60 (Manchester University Press, 2010). He is currently the recipient of a large AHRC grant for a project on Victorian pantomime and popular entertainments.
http://www.translatingchina.info
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