Joan Chen’s ‘Xiu Xiu’ highlights film festival retrospectives
The Sent Down Girl — about a typical girl of the Cultural Revolution in 1975 Shanghai who is “sent down” to the countryside to learn rural ways, a step toward Chairman Mao’s Communist utopia — might be her personal nightmare, the life path the Shanghai-born Chen might have been forced to follow.
Ask her about it yourself — Chen will present a 20th anniversary screening of “Xiu Xiu” at 1 p.m. Saturday, April 8, at the SFMOMA Phyllis Watts Theater (151 Third St., S.F.), part of the 60th San Francisco International Film Festival.
Gradually, Xiu Xiu tries trading sexual favors with passing soldiers and bureaucrats for official permission to return home.
[...] without permission from the Chinese government, which fined and briefly banned her when the film premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 1998.
[...] she has directed two more movies, including the Richard Gere-Winona Ryder film “Autumn in New York,” and has had a renaissance as an actress, recently co-starring in the Netflix series “Marco Polo.”
Willliam Randolph Hearst, bitter enemy of director-star Orson Welles who tried to have all prints of “Citizen Kane” destroyed before its release, might be rolling in his grave.
Film historian David Thomson helps the younger Hearst sort through the family memories after the screening — one of the first times a Hearst family member has commented publicly on the film. 6:30 p.m. Thursday, April 6.
“The Story of a Three-Day Pass”: After this remarkable 1967 film, which gets a 50th anniversary screening, director Melvin Van Peebles made the iconic blaxploitation movie “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” and helped foster the career of his son, Mario Van Peebles.