PIERCING I

Dir. LIU Jian, 2010
China, 75 min.
Chinese with English subtitles

Q&A with film director Liu Jian will take place immediately after the screening.

PIERCING I marks the first independently produced, feature-length animation film to come out of China. In the heart of a Chinese factory town filled with darkness and corruption, two young, unemployed men struggle to make better lives for themselves and are willing to risk everything. Through an absurd chain of events that brings together an unlikely cast of characters–the wealthiest businessman in town and his competitor, along with a corrupt, thuggish Police Bureau and two irreverent young anti-heroes–the film presents the social realities of urban China in a strikingly raw, sardonic vision. The film was hand-drawn, frame-by-frame, over a three-year period by filmmaker Liu Jian. With a deft style that reveals humor and poignancy in the context of everyday life in contemporary China, Liu Jian’s PIERCING I is lucid, compelling, and provocatively original.

Liu Jian studied Chinese landscape painting and graduated from the Nanjing University of the Arts in 1993. Over the past two decades, his work has drawn on a range of media and aesthetic approaches and has been presented at major exhibitions both in China and abroad. In 1995, he began making works of animation, and in 2007 he independently established the Le-joy Animation Studio. His first feature-length animation work, PIERCING I (2010), has received numerous prestigious awards at film festivals across Asia and Europe.

Free and open to the public.