A festival of Chinese cinema opens at the Filmhouse on Saturday 5 April as part of a tour that is visiting 17 cinemas across the UK.
The film festival, part of a cultural push in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics in August, comes at a time when the Chinese government is making headlines with its brutal crackdown on Tibetan nationalists, worsening human rights violations (according to a new report from Amnesty International), and an appalling environmental record (for which consumers in the West must also carry some responsibility).
You wont hear much about these subjects though in the six films chosen from "China Now" to appear in Edinburgh, unless reading deeply between the lines. Politics are broached in the films, for example, in Delamu Angel of Peace a picturesque documentary following the perilous Tea-Horse Road through the Himalayas and Sunflower, a father-son drama spanning 25 years, where the Cultural Revolution comes in for criticisms, but the burning issues of modern China are kept at a distance.
Unfortunately, Zhang Ke Jia's Still Life, which is set on the Three Gorges Dam as villagers are being forced out of their homes, isn't programmed for Edinburgh (although even here the contemporary political critique is distinctly muted).
Likely to be a popular choice is critical favourite Luxury Car, which won Un Certain Regard for Best Film at the Cannes Film Festival
in 2006, and was a Chinese box office hit. The engaging story of a
kindly country schoolteacher who comes to the city in search of his
missing son it is a mixture of relationship drama and gangster movie.
The Filmhouse dates for the China Now Festival in April are:
6th A Battle of Wits (12A)
9th Luxury Car (15)
10th Crazy Stone (12A)
12th Sunflower (PG)
16th The Birthday (15)
18th Delamu (Angel of Peace) (PG)