Pingyao film festival sharpens its focus

This year, the annual event in Shanxi province highlights movies by female directors and on women's issues.

Women were the focus of the recently concluded Pingyao Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon International Film Festival.

The second of the annual festival, which was held in the ancient city of Pingyao, Shanxi province, showcased films by female directors or those addressing women's social conditions.

The theme of this year's festival, which ran from Oct 11 to Saturday, was "boutique festival for the people".

Speaking about the event, Jia Zhangke, a film director and founder of PYIFF, said: "We intended to put the films into a secular market scenario, so as to create a spontaneous, objective and inclusive setting for discussion and exchange."

The festival, which was founded by Jia and Italian festival director Marco Muller in 2017, has Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon in its title as a nod to Ang Lee's Oscar-winning film of the same name. And, Crouching Tigers and Hidden Dragons are the two major sections of the festival events.

The films featured at this year's PYIFF presented an emphasis on the works of female directors and women's social conditions.

Both the opening film, Half the Sky, and the premiere on the Pingyao Night gala, Red Flowers and Green Leaves, were directed by female directors.

Half the Sky showcases cooperation among the BRICS countries - China, Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa - as a response to President Xi Jinping's proposal of BRICS film cooperation at the 8th BRICS summit in the western Indian state of Goa.

The film is a compilation of five short films, all made by female directors on the topic of "contemporary female emotions and society".

The title of the film is an allusion to Mao Zedong's advocacy - "women hold up half the sky". The film conveys women's desires, observations and emotions, and also demonstrates the talent of female filmmakers, according to Jia, who spoke as the executive producer of the film.

Among the short films, the one from India, Taken for Granted, was produced by Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari and the team of the film Dangal, with director Nitesh Tiwari as the screenwriter.

The film, while retaining the traditional Indian family structure in Dangal, deals with a housewife's inner struggle in finding her own identity.

The inspiration for this film, according to its producer Sanjay Shetty, is the tendency of people taking women's contributions for granted.