FRANCE
/ 1994 / Chinese, French / Color/ 16mm /26 min
Director, Script: Hervé Cohen, Renaud Cohen
Photography: Nurith Aviv
Editing: Paul Stein, Charlotte Boigeol
Sound: Olivier Schwob
Producer: Marie - Claude Reverdin
Production Company, Source: Les Flims Grain de Sable
206, rue de Charenton, 75012 Paris FRANCE
Phone: 33-1-4344-1672
Fax: 33-1-4019-0756
E-mail:ncohen@films-graindesable.com
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Hervé
Cohen
Born 1963. Studied law and audiovisual communication. Worked on
documentary projects as a camera operator. His first directorial
effort, Sikambano, les fils du bois sacré ("Sons of
the Sacred Woods," 1991) has been screened at Festival Dei
Popli in Florence, at the Ethnographic film biennial in Paris, and
at the Margaret Mead Film Festival in New York.
Renaud
Cohen
Born 1964. Spent some time in China and in Taiwan where he started
shooting documentary footage on Super 8 and on Video. Received an
MA in Chinese and Cinema, then studied directing at FEMIS (French
national film school). His second fictional short Réflexions
d'un garçon received the Young Audiences Prize in the Côté
Courts program at the Pantin Festival. |
This film documents
the dedication of an itinerant team of two male and one female projectionists
as they run a traveling movie theater in a remote section of Sichuan,
China. Besieged by the constant threat of television, and bereft of
state support for such mobile projection teams in the wake of the
economic reforms of the 1980s, these three public servants sling their
reels and projector on carrying poles, and like traveling salesmen,
they scale mountains and ford rivers in their efforts to "peddle"
their "electric shadows" from village to village. This documentary's
highlight comes when a popular movie from forty years ago is screened
at a wedding reception and the guests begin to belt out the theme
song in perfect unison. The scene is the film's greatest spectacle,
but it is also an homage to the popular form of entertainment that
is film itself, and a testimony to the traveling projectionists who
support cinema at its most basic level.[Fukushima
Yukio]
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