checkout this Chinese movie review

chinese filmmakers Yu Haibo and Kiki Tianqi Yu probe the angst of a peasant-became-painter who produces replicas of Van Gogh masterpieces.
one of the most affecting moments in China's Van Goghs unfolds in a small artwork gallery, in which the documentary's protagonists and their buddies eagerly acquire to look at the 1956 Vincent van Gogh biopic Lust for existence. Their pleasure soon turns to dismay once they take inside the Dutch painter's struggles; and by the time director Vincente Minnelli and famous person Kirk Douglas reach Van Gogh's suicide inside the final scenes, there are shaking heads and moist eyes all around.

The poignant component is that the audience is not composed of your common cosmopolitan art movie buffs: these are working-elegance men who earn a living producing copies of Van Gogh's paintings in workshops inside the southern chinese town of Shenzhen. A superbly shot, nicely-established and moving tale about artwork, paintings and the human spirit, the movie must have an awesome shot at niche launch, with ancillary motion to comply with.

After bowing at IDFA in Amsterdam � where the administrators first pitched their venture in 2014 and acquired distribution subsidies closing yr � Yu Haibo and Kiki Tianqi Yu have ultimately toured european and North American festivals earlier than returning domestic with indicates at Beijing after which ultimate week's appearance at Xining's First global movie festival.

China's Van Goghs doesn't certainly stay at the differences between those twenty first-century chinese workers and the 19th-century Dutch maestro; its perception is that they're kindred spirits separated simply via time, geography and social elegance. Veering sharply away from the stereotype of chinese worker's as a faceless mass searching for a higher first-rate of life, China's Van Goghs explores their desire for spiritual fulfillment, too.

actual, the start of the film ought to pass for a honest account of how those self-discovered painters run pretty small own family operations which have produced masses of thousands of cheap Van Gogh replicas over the last three many years. however slowly, the filmmakers show their protagonists as bona fide artists, struggling like Van Gogh to discover their creative voices and understand their imaginative and prescient past their very yu economic and social circumstances.

The motion takes area in Dafen, the us of a's biggest "oil painting village." set up in 1989 through a Hong Kong businessman, the commune has grown from humble roots (2 hundred workers) to a hub website hosting round 10,000 human beings answerable for a every year turnover of $65 million. This commercial enterprise affords branch shops and memento stores round the world with replicas, and satirically the Dutch are a chief part of that purchasers.


Zhao Xiaoyong is a peasant farmer who arrived in Shenzhen  a long time in the past and has considering overseen the production, by using himself and his circle of relatives group, of more than one hundred,000 copies of Van Gogh's iconic works. he's a canny businessman, however he is also correct at what he does: He may be very knowledgeable about Van Gogh's brushwork and is capable of spot flaws in his fellow painters' paintings that only a expert could notice.

different wannabe Van Goghs also figure, such as Zhou Yongjiu, another farmer-turned-painter who claims to have produced a whopping three hundred,000 replicas for the duration of his time in Shenzhen. but Zhao stays the movie's beating heart, as he talks about how Van Gogh's emphasis on rural beauty and poverty mirrors his very own upbringing.

The administrators carry the painters' hyperlink to the land vividly alive after they accompany Zhao as he visits his ancestral village, wherein farmers nonetheless labor like the ones in Van Gogh's The Harvest and Zhao's crinkled grandmother looks as if someone immediately out of Portrait of a Peasant. In moments like this, China's Van Goghs sincerely does justice to its situation.

whilst shot on HD, there's nothing tv-like about the snap shots of cramped downtown workshops or rugged rustic landscapes. Nor do the filmmakers ever droop to cheap sentimentality or melodrama, even during a finale wherein Zhao sooner or later realizes his dream and travels to Amsterdam and Arles to have a look at Van Gogh's works and milieu first-hand.

he is awed by the actual artwork at the Van Gogh Museum and quietly breaks down after the go to. Zhao is dismayed by using how his copies are offered as non-descript souvenirs at cheesy stalls, and realizes he's paid a pittance compared to how a lot they cost in Amsterdam. however he's delighted approximately the reward he gets whilst he finishes a copy of the Caf� Terrace at night time in half-hour at the precise place wherein the Dutch artist painted the unique in 1888.

Zhao subsequently finds his calling, as he eventually starts to apply his inventive capabilities to demonstrate the locales he is aware of and the life he has lived. This chronicle of an artist's epiphany is what sets the film apart.

manufacturing enterprise: Century picture Media, TrueWorks
directors: Yu Haibo, Kiki Tianqi Yu
Director of photography: Yu Haibo
producer: Kiki Tianqi Yu
executive manufacturers: Yu Haibo, Zhao Lijun
Editors: Soren Ebbe, Tom Hsinming Lin, Axel Skovdal Roelofs
song: Lukas Julian Lentz
Sound fashion designer: Paul Gies, Ranko Paukovic
sales: Cat and docs

In Mandarin, Hunannese, Cantonese and English
83 minutes

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