Karen Ma film critic, author and lecturer at the Beijing Center of Chinese Studies will speak on cinema in China: From Social Realism to Hollywood Commercialism: A Journey Through China’s 5th Generation Filmmaking.

This talk by film lecturer Karen Ma looks at how China’s so-called fifth-generation filmmakers—the first generation to attract wide international acclaim at a time when Chinese cinema was relatively unknown—came to the industry largely by accident; and how their formative years and shared historical background helped shape their choice of subject matter and aesthetics in their early works.  It will also examine why their later films have lost much of their earlier punch seen between the 1980s and early 1990s, and the factors behind their subsequent road to Hollywood style commercialism. The presentation will include a few short film clips to help illustrate some of the main points.