City of Jade
Fei cui zhi cheng
SECTION: International Forum 2017
SCREENINGS
Sunday, 01.10., 9.00 p.m., kinoeins
Tuesday, 03.10., 1.30 p.m., kinoeins
SYNOPSIS
Currently, Burma is undergoing some form of democratisation, however, it is not a linear process in terms of time. As the war between the government and the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) is still going, the corporations are forced to halt their operation in the jade mines. Time seems to have frozen in this war zone while waves of poor workers flock to the area. Carrying simple digging tools, they arrive in this paradise, dreaming of getting rich overnight; none of them has ever woken from that dream. Maybe we should rewind the time back to sixteen years ago. Rumour had it that Midi’s brother found a piece of valuable jade in the paradise while his family was down to their last penny. On behalf of their parents, Midi, the youngest child in the family, wrote more than a hundred lettersto his elder brother, asking him to send money home, but
they never heard anything from him. It turned out that hiselder brother not only spent all his money on his way home but got arrested and sent to jail for drug abuse. His hardearned cash was squandered just like that, and Midi never forgave his brother. Later as fortune smiled on Midi, he left his home as well as poverty behind and arrived in Taiwan for his studies, learning to become a man of rational thinking.
MIDI Z
Midi Z was born in 1982 in Burma. He moved to Taiwan when he was 16 and studied Film Directing. In 2009, he was named one of the most prominent directors by the Taipei Golden Horse Film Academy. His debut feature film Return to Burma premiered at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in 2012 where he returned in 2014 with The Palace on the Sea. His Ice Poison represented Taiwan at the Foreign Language Oscars. With Jade Miners he started to explore documentary film making as well and has garnered international praise both for his fiction and documentary work.
FILMOGRAPHY
Return to Burma (2011), Poor Folks (2012), Ice Poison (2014), Jade Miners (2015), The Road to Mandalay (2016), City of Jade (2016)
