Su Qing
The University of San Carlos will host for the first time a Chinese Film Festival in the College of Architecture and Fine Arts Theater starting tomorrow, Monday, through Thursday morning next week.
The daily screenings will run from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. (except Thursday) and will be open to the public free of charge.
This is made possible through the sponsorship of the Cebu Dynamic Youth, an organization of young, civic-minded Filipino-Chinese professionals and entrepreneurs, which is actively promoting awareness of Chinese culture and heritage among today’s generation of Chinoys who are fast forgetting its roots.
In fact, the film festival is just the culmination of a weeklong celebration of Chinese culture dubbed Su Qing Festival. According to the group President, Devin Go, Su means “youth” and Qing is a rough Chinese translation of Cebu. Su Qing thus means Cebu Youth and the yearly festival aims to uphold the city’s claim of being the country’s biggest Chinatown.
The highlight of the festival was yesterday’s talent competition which included a singing contest, storytelling contest (in Chinese) and an on-the-spot painting contest on a Chinese theme. The different Chinese elementary and high schools in the city and those offering Chinese subjects were invited to join. But the schools were allowed to send any representative, Chinese or not.
Last September, the same group sponsored a Chinese painting workshop and an exhibit in a local mall gallery of works by Chinese painters from Manila. A huge number of the participants filled the convention hall, which was the venue, so that they had to move those who came late to a nearby café and held the workshop there.
This year, organizers add a film festival that they hope will be part of the usual offerings of activities in the future. The selection features a mix of recent Chinese blockbusters like “1911 Revolution,” which features Jackie Chan in a dramatic role, the award-winning kung-fu film, “Ip Man,” and classics like “Drunken Master” and “The Joy Luck Club”.
But the listing also includes films on China by Filipino filmmakers, which will be featured on the first day of the festival. Cebuana filmmaker Joanna Arong’s “The Old Fool Who Moved Mountains”, a documentary filmed in Beijing about the struggles of an owner of a music bar to keep his place from impending demolition, will be shown after the “1911 Revolution” in the morning.
This will be followed in the afternoon by “Pinoy Sunday,” a film shot in Taipei about the plights of the Filipino migrant workers in Taiwan, and Peter Chua’s “The Last Parian,” an award-winning documentary which traced the journeys through colonialism, the Second World War, and the events of recent history of the Chinese community in the Philippines.
Cebuanos concerned with the recent indifference and threats to our own heritage may be able to relate with Arong’s film, which shows how local identity expressed in age-old structures and the arts may be displaced in the homogenizing look of modern cities.
Local advocates of heritage preservation may find inspiration in the indestructible spirit of the Chinese revolutionaries and artists who found in an ancient tale the wisdom of making consistent small steps against the pragmatism of the status quo.
A short forum with the director follows the screening of “The Old Fool” so the audience may have a chance to learn from this Cebuana filmmaker who spent some eight years in Beijing.
She’s recently back to Cebu to start writing her next documentary film, which is still about China. As in the people behind the Dynamic Youth, this only goes to show that our old connection with China is still very much alive.
