Chinese filmmaker banks on older movie-goers, and it pays
Feng Xiaogang’s Sino-Vietnamese war drama proves a box-office smash by attracting the over-45 demographic
Compared with other themed programmes at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam (such as “House on Fire”, showcasing works from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, or the “PACT” section, dedicated to pan-African filmmakers), “A History of Shadows” is intriguingly expansive in its scope.
Dedicated to how cinema “revisits the past and re-evaluates the position of history’s losers”, the programme comprises 29 titles, from several countries, incorporating different aesthetic approaches. Some films are narrative-driven or character-based: a Cambodian man recalls his painful ordeal at the hands of the Khmer Rouge in Angkar (2015); in Oblivion Verses (2017), a lowly Iranian mortuary worker attempts to give a murdered protester a proper burial; while Zama (2017) concerns a colonial official stranded in 18th-century Paraguay.
Others are more experimental: a filmmaker investigates the murder committed by his white supremacist grandfather in Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? (2017); La Película Infinita (2018) is a collage of fragments from unfinished Argentinian films spanning decades; and members of a Spanish family struggle to survive their deceased Franco-supporting patriarch in The Disenchantment (1976).
And then there’s Youth.
