aemi & East Asia Film Festival Ireland are delighted to partner once again to bring Irish artist film directly into conversation with East Asian cinema. This year we are excited to collaborate with EAFFI to present the Irish premiere of Wang Bing’s Man in Black (2023), an extraordinary hour-long documentary portrait of 86-year-old Chinese composer Wang Xilin which has screened to wide acclaim at major international festivals including Cannes, NYFF and IDFA. Wang Bing’s film will be preceded by the Dublin premiere of Adrian Duncan’s sublime new short film Für Bettina (2023).
Film Information:
Adrian Duncan, Für Bettina, 2023, IRE, DCP, 20 minutes
Wang Bing, Man in Black, 2023, CHN, DCP, Subtitled, 60 minutes
Man in Black
86-year-old Wang Xilin, one of China’s leading modern classical composers and conductors, lives in exile in Germany having suffered persecution during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Renowned French cinematographer Caroline Champetier captures the empty, dimly lit Bouffes du Nord theatre in Paris, showing Wang Xilin walking naked between stage and auditorium, the camera circling around him, mapping his body movements, stretches, and bends, capturing his bruised and scarred body in shadow and light. In his monologue, Wang Xilin speaks of his painful past, his words sometimes drowned out by the musical excerpts from his symphonies playing furiously in the background.
Chinese director Wang Bing’s hour-long performance-painting-portrait of Wang Xilin is an extraordinary powerful and immersive film focusing on the body as an act of witnessing. Wang Bing is often referred to as one of the foremost figures in documentary film-making.
Für Bettina
A silent-film love story told through a public sculpture in Berlin of the 19th-Century Romantic-era poets Bettina and Achim von Arnim.
Adrian Duncan is an Irish writer and filmmaker. His latest novel The Geometer Lobachevsky was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize, 2023. His films have screened at IFFR, Karlovy Vary IFF, HotDocs and IDFA, among others. He was awarded a Reel Art film award from the Arts Council in 2023.
IMAGES BELOW: Adrian Duncan, Für Bettina, 2023, courtesy of the artist
