This year is the 25th annual Wisconsin Film Festival, and CEAS is delighted to be a presenting sponsor for the three films. The film festival begins on April 13th and ends on April 20th. For full listings and tickets, visit their ticketing website. Tickets are free for students with a UW student ID! We at CEAS are presenting sponsors of the following films:
Chocolate and Butter Sculpture on April 14th at 4 pm in the Marquee at Union South.
Travel across the Tibetan plateau with two run-away twelve-year-old boys! Sangdan leaves his family and small village to run toward his destiny as an artist and butter sculptor in a remote Tibetan monastery. Tang Yu, a city boy devoted to his phone and chocolate, runs away from his parents and their expectations. He has no particular destination, so when he meets Sangdan, he tags along on a journey that takes them through breathtakingly beautiful landscapes and into adventure, reflection, and discovery. Shot in Sichuan and Qinghai provinces, the film introduces us to people and places we rarely see. Director Yingxin Chen ran away from home as well. Her family and friends opposed her enrollment in the Beijing Film Academy, and she struggled to find her place in the film industry. The story came to her while traveling in Tibet and took twelve years to produce. In an interview, Yingxin Chen confides, “Over the years, I have come to feel that this film is also my own story. It’s like my relationship with cinema, going from misunderstanding to understanding.” (TK) Tickets and details are available here.
Next Door on April 14th at 8:30 pm in Shannon Hall at Memorial Union.
Chan-woo has the problems you might expect any young student to have. He has trouble passing exams, his bank account is empty, he sometimes goes overboard on beer, and he puts up with noisy neighbors in his apartment building as he studies. After an all-night bender, however, Chan-woo finds himself facing a new problem that makes all others pale in comparison: he wakes up, bruised and confused, in his neighbor’s apartment. There, he discovers a body lying in a pool of blood on the floor. At this point, Next Door kicks into high gear. Can Chan-woo find clues to help him identify the body? Can he piece together his hazy memories of the previous night? Can he be sure that no one will enter the apartment and misunderstand his presence there? And can he solve his predicament in time to turn in an important application by its evening due date? Taking place almost entirely in one apartment, Next Door is imaginatively packed with moment after moment of surprise and suspense. Director Yeom Ji-ho expertly blends the film’s thrills with a palpable sense of playfulness, lending a funhouse atmosphere to Next Door’s many devilish twists and turns. (JB) Tickets and details are available here.
Love Life on April 15th at 3:15 pm and April 16th at 4 pm in Cinema 6 at Hilldale.
Taeko’s second chance at love is going well. Despite the disapproval of her stern in-laws, she, her six-year-old son, and new husband make a happy young family, ensconced in their cozy apartment in coastal Japan. But a sudden tragedy forces her to reconnect with her ex, a deaf, unpredictable Korean man who has been homeless since their breakup. Writer/director Kōji Fukada (Hospitalite, WFF 2012, A Girl Missing, WFF 2020) has crafted a deeply humane, minor-key melodrama that is as wrenching, curious, and rewarding as life itself. “Terrific… an enormously poignant melodrama told at the volume of a broken whisper. A gentle and effervescent watch in spite of its tragic premise” (Indiewire). “It is a movie whose gentleness and sadness coexist with a strange sense of the absurd, preposterous and tasteless new twists that life can give you: a film to remind you, perhaps, of George Bernard Shaw’s dictum: ‘Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.’ It is a rich, varied meal of a film” (The Guardian). (MK) April 15th tickets & April 16th tickets