East Asia Film Festival Ireland is delighted to partner once again with aemi to bring Irish artist film directly into conversation with East Asian cinema. This year, the Irish premiere of Wang Bing’s Man in Black – an extraordinary hour-long documentary portrait of 86-year-old Chinese composer Wang Xilin – screens alongside Adrian Duncan’s sublime new short, Für Bettina.

Man in Black

dir. Wang Bing, 60 mins, France-USA-UK, 2023, Digital, Subtitled

86-year-old Wang Xilin, one of China’s leading modern classical composers and conductors, lives in exile in Germany having suffered persecution during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Renowned French cinematographer Caroline Champetier captures the empty, dimly lit Bouffes du Nord theatre in Paris, showing Wang Xilin walking naked between stage and auditorium, the camera circling around him, mapping his body movements, stretches, and bends, capturing his bruised and scarred body in shadow and light. In his monologue, Wang Xilin speaks of his painful past, his words sometimes drowned out by the musical excerpts from his symphonies playing furiously in the background. Chinese director Wang Bing’s hour-long performance-painting-portrait of Wang Xilin is an extraordinary powerful and immersive film focusing on the body as an act of witnessing.