On the occasion of the streaming release of two landmark Chinese independent films – Wen Hai and Zeng Jinyan’s Outcry and Whisper and Hu Bo‘s An Elephant Sitting Still – the good folks at Ovid asked me to share some thoughts. If you watch only two Chinese films this year, watch these two. I stand in awe of both films. Taken together, they form as deep, complex and varied a portrait as possible of contemporary China. Neither film should exist. Yet, they do. Beautifully. Miraculously. Brazenly. The producer and writer of Outcry and Whisper survived years of house arrest. The director o

As we enter the new year, it seems appropriate that I report on aspects of how OVID is doing. I also want to point you in the direction of two interesting articles which I think contextualize what OVID is all about. First, we’ve updated our searchable Master List of Films on OVID. We added about 30 titles over the past two months—we took a break over the holidays—so as of December 31, 2020, we are now at 982 titles. Of course we do continue to add more films every week. We have 18 titles lined up for January, and will be sharing each coming month’s schedule here on metafilm.

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