Starts:
06:15pm, Wednesday, 30 November 2022
Until:
08:30pm, Wednesday, 30 November 2022
Venue
Cinema 1
Barbican Centre, Level -2
Silk St, London, EC2Y 8DS
Tickets
Standard:
£12.00
AF Members:
£10.00 (Please contact AF for promotional discount code)
Concessions:
£11.00
Under 18:
£6
Tel (9am-8pm):
+44 (0)20 7638 8891
We are delighted that this screening will be followed by a conversation with director Mladen Kovačević.
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)