Special Guest: Xiaolu Guo

Screening, Reading, Talk

Xiaolu Guo is a wanderer between worlds: Growing up in a small coastal village in the South of China, she became a shooting star of arthouse cinema after completing her film studies in Peking and finally discovered her passion for literature and wiriting in London. Transcending the boundaries of genres and art fields, Guo's works explore the limits of national identity in the age of global capitalism.

Guo has already honoured the silent green with her visit on the occasion of the launch of Freeman's #3. Now the Locarno winner is back for more: She will bring along her documentary film essay Late at Night. Voices of Ordinary Madness (2013) and give insights into her body of work. She will complete the evening with a reading of her latest book Once Upon a Time in the East. A Story of Growing Up (2017).

Late at Night. Voices of Ordinary Madness
A documentary essay about Britain’s underclass world by Xiaolu Guo, inspired by George Orwell, 70mins, HD, 2013

George Orwell wrote : “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.” Introduced by a Warhol-esque newsreader, Late at Night presents the voices of a number of Londoners – street gangsters, beggars, working class heroes, bankers and preachers – most of them excluded from the society and the area they live in. Their anguished words build a network of responses to the hyper capitalist world we live in.

This film also includes an interview with the radical left British cultural theorist Mark Fisher (the author of Capitalist Realism, who took his own life this year, four years after the making of the film). Fisher points out ‘privatized depression’ is a notable product of capitalist infiltration. The filmmaker uses quotes, archives and media materials to construct an image of today’s Britain and leads us to question our future under the institutional madness of global capitalism.

This film is the second part of Xiaolu Guo’s Tomorrow trilogy, continued after her documentary Once Upon A Time Proletarian on Post-Mao era China (Venice & Toronto official selection 2009). This time her camera turns from East to West, and examines further our collective anxiety in the post-industrial age.

7pm: Introduction and Screening
8.30pm: Break
9pm: Artist Talk with excerpts of cinematic and literary works
Admission: 8 €, concession: 5 €