Starts:
06:15pm, Wednesday, 30 November 2022
Until:
12:00am, Wednesday, 30 November 2022
Venue
Cinema 2
Barbican, Beech Street, London EC2Y 8AE
Tickets
Standard:
£12
AF Members:
£10 (Please contact AF for promotional discount code)
Concessions:
£11
Under 18:
£6
Young Barbican:
£5
Tel (9am-8pm):
+44 (0)20 7638 8891
We are delighted that director Mladen Kovačević will join us at the screening for a Q&A, chaired by Architecture on Film curator Justin Jaeckle, following the UK premiere of Merry Christmas, Yiwu.
Merry Christmas, Yiwu
With 600 dedicated festive factories, Yiwu, China, fabricates Christmas for the world. Following the daily lives of several workers, a delicate, human film looks beyond the tinsel and glitter, into the ‘Chinese Dream’. With beautiful images and cinematographic flair, the film weaves its non-fiction content into the form and feel of subtle, naturalistic fiction, intimately following its protagonists as they pursue their labour, lives and aspirations – at the factory, at leisure and at home – within a city that produces two thirds of the world’s Christmas decorations.
As baubles are bagged, reindeer stuffed and pom-poms placed on Santa hats, the film intimately observes the dance of the global and the local, capitalism and Communism, tradition and modernity in today’s China.
A portrait of transforming socio-economic realities, and the export and import of both goods and ideas, with the city of Yiwu offering a subject, symbol and setting within which individual lives unfold.
Mladen Kovačević, Sweden, Serbia, France, Germany, Belgium, Qatar, 2020, 94 mins