Taking place during a weekend in October each year, Made in China, co-organised by Comptoir du Doc and the Institute Confucius de Bretagne in Rennes, France, aims to discover and promote Chinese documentaries that are socially engaged and artistically innovative. The festival offers a selection of documentaries from established filmmakers as well as emerging young filmmakers within and outside China, and workshops, roundtables, and exhibitions. The festival seeks to create spaces for encounters, reflection, and exchange, and facilitate a better understanding of Chinese culture and society among the Breton public.
This year’s festival will be an opportunity to strengthen the relationship of CIFA and Comptoir du Doc. We will co-present two films, Outside (2005) and Yumen (2013), with filmmakers Wang Wo and J.P. Sniadecki present for post-screening Q&As, and have also curated an exhibition titled ‘Chinese Independent Cinema through its Posters: A Retrospective of Wang Wo’s Posters’, which will showcase more than sixty posters designed by Wang Wo for Chinese indie films and film festivals over the past two decades.
As part of the programme, CIFA will also hold a roundtable titled ‘Documentary, Ethnography, and Contemporary Art’, as well as an event to launch the fourth issue of CIFA’s journal Chinese Independent Cinema Observer, ‘Anthropology, Contemporary Art and Chinese Independent Documentaries’. Four members on the journal editorial team, Flora Lichaa, J.P. Sniadecki, Wang Wo, and Sabrina Q. Yu, will participate in the roundtable discussion while introducing the journal and its latest issue.