Summer Palace
(Yi He Yuan)
140 minutes, 2006
Tue. Oct 10, 6:00PM, Rafael
SUMM10R<Buy Tickets>
Thu. Oct 12, 9:15PM, Sequoia
SUMM12S<Buy Tickets>
In Mandarin, German and Korean with English subtitles • This poetic, sexually charged story from director Lou Ye (Suzhou River, Purple Butterfly) portrays star-crossed lovers in contemporary China. Hao Lei is 17-year-old Yu Hong, a small-town shopkeeper's daughter who has her first sexual encounter the night before leaving for Beijing University. In Beijing, she begins a mad affair with Zhou Wei (Guo Xiaodong), a fellow student. Against the backdrop of the student-led pro-democracy movement of the 1980s, initially exhilarating but increasingly tense and leading up to the bloody clash with authorities at Tiananmen Square and its crushing aftermath, the lovers' relationship itself escalates from romantic euphoria to dangerous complexity. Lou has given Summer Palace a Western-style pop soundtrack and provided the film with mainland China's first cinematic scene of full-frontal nudity, the latter action leading many to speculate that the very political repression the film depicts may lead to its being censored at home. — G. Cahill
Director: Lou Ye
Producer: Sylvain Bursztejn, Fang Li, Nai An
Screenwriter: Lou Ye, Mei Feng, Yingli Ma
Cinematographer: Hua Qing
Editor: Lou Ye, Zeng Jian
Cast: Guo Xiaodong, Hao Lei, Hu Ling, Chi Le, Zhang Xianmin
Print Source:
Palm Pictures
76 Ninth Avenue, Ste 1110
New York, NY , 10011
Tel: 212.320.3653
Sponsor:
Frank Howard Allen Realtors
