The Lychee Film Festival is set to bring the best Chinese cinema to Barcelona

Barcelona's first Chinese film festival, the Lychee Film Festival, is set to begin on Friday 15 September. During the eight days of the festival, a number of the city's cinemas will host screenings of films, most recent productions, divided into three sections: Soft Kung Fu - New Wu Xia (which includes a retrosepctive on the director), contemporary cinema and animated short films. Lin Yu is the director of the festival.

Festival organisers decided to kick off this project because they believe that Chinese cinema, “is flourishing but it's still difficult for spectators to see high quality Chinese producitons”. Their aim is to showcase films that differ from, “the King Fu or mysterious oriental cliches,” and they opt instead for quality films that, “are gaining more and more fans”.

The retrospective section in this first edition of the festival is devoted to the director Xu Haofeng, who was born in 1973 and debuted with the feature film The Sword Identity (2011), which was very well received at the Venice and Toronto festivals. The opening film in the festival will be his 2015 film The Master, on a martial arts master who finds himself involved in an elaborate game played by the city council when he attempts to open a school. The film will be screened at 10pm on 15 September at Phenomena. That is one of the cinemas taking part in the Lychee Film Festival, together with Filmoteca de Catalunya, Texas Cinema, Casa Batlló and the Centre Cívic Cotxeres in Sants. The festival will end with King Hu's A Touch of Zen, a martial arts classic dating from 1970. Between those two films there is an extensive programme including films like Bling Massage, Kaili Blues, The Coffin in the Mountain, The Summer is Gone, Tharlo, and Still Tomorrow, many of which have never been seen in Spain.

Additional information is available at the following link.