 Hello, welcome to St. Laveau's World Cinema. I'm your hostess, Betty St. Laveau. On this show, we look at international movies. I try not to do too many statistics because I think that sometimes people are a little bit intimidated by subtitles at any rate. So what I'd like to do is just give you some basic information and then check out the movies. Today, I am going in a little bit in depth, though, because as I promised in my last episode, we're going to talk about the Nigerian film industry and Hong Kong filmmaking. And not so much Hong Kong filmmaking, but one movie in particular. Okay, so first, let's get my notes together here. You've got everything right. Okay, so, unbeknownst to American public. The Nigerian film industry is the second largest in the world in volume after Bollywood. And I found this out about 10 years ago. I was watching a great documentary on Nigerian filmmaking and I was just so blown away by the fact that they don't have a lot of money to work with, but they produce zillions and zillions a year, like literally. So let's mention, firstly, living in bondage. It was made with $12,000. I believe it was made in 2007. Kenneth Nunbuy shot the movie and it went straight to video in one month. Pardon me, 1992 in Nigeria. It was directed by Chris Opie Rappu. And I believe that this article was written by Jake Bright, June 24th, 2015. So you ought to check out the article. Now, piracy is a problem in Nigeria. And from what I remember, and I wish I'd watched the documentary before doing the show, but we might talk about it a little bit more next week. From what I remember, there were certain civil wars happening in the country. And people didn't want to go out at night and theaters started to become shut down, abandoned. And so people would stay in a lot and watch movies. And I think that that's how the film industry started booming and why video is such a big thing there. It's a $3.3 billion a year industry in Nigeria, which that might look like small potatoes. I mean, that great superhero movie, it pretty much made a billion dollars. But this is an excellent number when it comes to any type of film industry in any country. Now, as I was trying to flesh out exactly how I wanted to talk about the Nigerian film industry, was it going to be history? Was it going to be through cinematography? Or was it going to be through money? I came across a lady named Nadia Denton. She went to Oxford and she's a member of BAFTA. She studied modern history at St. Hilda's College. And she wrote the Nigerian Filmmaker's Guide to Success. It predicts the future of the industry, pardon me, and it looks beyond Hollywood. So this lady, Nadia, is a curator. And she curated the third edition of Beyond Nollywood for the 47th International Film Festival of Rotterdam. She also wrote the Black British Filmmaker's Guide to Success, Finance, Market, and Distribution, Distributing Your Own Film, back in 2011. Okay, so from just reading the description of Nadia's book, I was able to call up some names in Nigerian filmmaking. The father of Nollywood is Chris Opirapu, who directed Living in Bondage. The most expensive picture is called Half a Yellow Sun, and that was produced by B. Bended. The veteran Yoruba language filmmaker Tondi Kalani, documentary filmmaker Tom Fio-Fore, cinema favorite Kunli Alphalion, and directors Chiki Chidi, Chikei, and Obie Emlione are written about in this fantastic book, and I can't wait to read it. So from what I have gleaned when it comes to international movies, I basically just watch a bunch of Europeans movies, most of me adolescents in my 20s. So as I try to explore other countries, and pardon for the pronunciation of these names, I'll try to make a little bit better. As I look at the way other countries make their movies, there are different types of genres to each country. For instance, I don't know if I'm correct, but in Korean filmmaking, there's always ghosts. They're supernatural, all right? Maybe it's because I know that Ringu is Japanese, but there seems to be that the mysticism and devil trio on that side of the world when it comes to film plots, which is not a hard and a fast rule, but someone did mention to me, Korean filmmaking, you're always going to see some ghosts. You're always going to see some demons. In Australian filmmaking, what I find is there's always a mystery to be solved. There's always something going down. Picnic at Hanging Rock, and this other movie I saw as a kid, Last Wave. These movies are imbued with the otherworldly and the mysterious. And I'm sure that, I mean, Crocodile Dundee is a great example of a movie that doesn't have the mysterious whatever, but this is my impressions growing up. So I have never seen a movie made in Nigeria, but I think that they're thrillers and that they're romances. But I'm going to check it out. This lady in Naughty at Denton is an archivist, and if you check out her website, there are all these clips of these movies. So now I'm going to get an education. It's good for me to study stuff that goes coming from the motherland. Okay. So the next movie that we're going to talk about is one that I think that we've talked about on the other show, and it's called Raise the Red Lantern, and the other translation for it is Raise High the Lantern. It stars Gong Li, Jin Shunyan, Kyle Cuffine, He Saffayai, Kong Lin, and Zui Zengeng. Again, I don't know any Chinese, and I only took Japanese for three months a long time ago to all respect that. I know I'm mangling the language. This movie was shot in Mandarin, which that language always has intrigued me. And it takes place, well, it's shot at the city of Pingyang, Shanzai province in the Kun family compound, and I believe that it takes place, oh, I don't know, I didn't write it down, but I'm pretty sure it takes place in Shanzai province. It was adapted from Wives and Conquerbinds by Su Tong in 1990, and the ballet was also directed by Zeng Yimu, the director, and performed by the National Ballet of China. It won the Silver Line at the 1991 Venice International Film Festival and came to city film Critics London and LA Critics Awards, and the Hundred Flowers Award for Best Picture and Best Actress for Guang Li in 1993. So over a two-year time span, this movie won a slew of awards, and everyone loved it, and I loved it. I saw it around the time that it first came out, I think, at Hopkins Center years ago in Hanover, New Hampshire. So Sun Li arrives as a third concubine of Master Chen, and she is actually fourth mistress because the master has one wife, but then the other three concubines are first concubine, second concubine, third concubine. So she's fourth mistress, and she is a C Tai Tai, all right? There's immense power struggles in the compound. The compound must, I don't know, the size of, hard to say. I mean, it's smaller than the colosseum, I guess, but it's huge, all right? Oh, much smaller than the colosseum, but it's immense. There must be battlements and all types of, it's a magnificent palace, let's just put it like that. So the first wife is resigned to being ignored by Master. The second wife, she's getting on in years, and she has a girl child, but she seems very nice, very soft and loving and trusting. Third wife was an opera singer, third concubine was an opera singer, and her part of the compound is very lavish and dramatic, and masks and fans all over the place. So what our heroine finds out is that what the master says is done, he says goes, basically. So he can sleep with the underservants. He can deny his body to the other concubines if he wants, the ones that he visits at night gets foot massages and rubs and all. It's just crazy patriarchal stuff beyond all-simple-minded Western Ken, right? A critic of Mr. Zengi Mu here said that he only makes movies that appeal to Western minds. I loved Hero. I don't think because I was a Westerner, that turned me on. And it was an all-store class at Jet Li, Maggie Shung, Tony Leong, I think Tony Leong, Xiu Wei, Zeng Zi, Danyi Yan, and House of Flying Daggers, which I think was a love triangle. I don't know if I made it all through that one, but because movies are intense. And again, they deal with human frailties of love, treachery, betrayal. Whenever you see a movie, especially coming out of Britain, I'm going to say it back in the 2000s, a spellbinding erotic thriller. You knew it wasn't spellbinding, you knew you were going to be bored, and it wasn't erotic and it didn't thrill you. But a movie like this not only thrills you emotionally, it thrills your senses. Not a beautiful piece of artwork. And I'd like to say that it wasn't his first movie, but it was his first movie, it was Gong Li. They went on to make seven movies together in a row. And then Red Sorghum was the first one. They won a Golden Bear, Codename Cougar, which is not the director's favorite movie. Judoor, Red Lantern, The Story of Kizhu, To Love, Shanghai Triad. And then they stopped making films together because they ended up finally having a fair after seven movies. I mean, I think that's pretty good for a muse, but they finally had a fair and then they're artistic. Unfortunately, their artistic relationship ended and then they got back together again for Curse of the Golden Flower in 2006. So I'm trying to find the name of the critic, but I guess that's all right. Our filmmaker, I just want to get his name correct, Zhang Yimu. He is considered one of the fifth generation of Chinese filmmakers. Well, Shen Keying, Tian Zheng, Zhu Zheng, Zhang Zhenzhao are the other filmmakers at the forefront of the artistic re-emergence at the end of the Cultural Revolution in China. So when you look at Razor, a Dragon, and as you study the power struggles, one can only be thankful than these days, you can, especially in Western times, not only can you choose your husband, but there are some things worse than loneliness, okay? So I instantly fell in love with Guangli. What a great actress. I know I've seen her in something else, not in any of these, but please check her out, okay? And also, check out that hero with Maggie Zhong, Jet Li, Tony Leong. What a great movie. I mean, fantastic. And that's what I call Pan Asian cast because you have, well, maybe they're all Chinese. I think they're all Chinese, but I think they all grew up in maybe different parts of Asia. All right. So that's about it for me. Thank you for your patience with my pronunciation of these foreign words. I'm your film conversationalist, Betty St. LeVoe. You've been watching St. LeVoe's world cinema here at Orca. I hope you've enjoyed the show today. I don't know what country we'll go to next episode, but we might check out a little bit more Nigerian filmmaking and at least one more Hong Kong movie, Near and Deer to My Heart, Chunking Express, directed by Wong Kar-Wai. Until then, darlings, have a good week and stay away from those bad movies. Ciao.