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Abstract
This is a Deep Focus roundtable discussing Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s film Loveless (2017), originally published on 1 July 2018, and facilitated by then editor, Zhao Jin. While two of the guests expressed relatively positive opinions of the film, film scholar Kai Yin gave Loveless a low score, calling it a dianying jie feihua yishu dianying (literally, ‘nonsense arthouse cinema at film festivals’), which was also referred to as a ‘film festival film on demand’ during the discussion. The panelists also discussed the global trend of making zhongxin sixiang shi dianying or gainian xianxing dianying (‘concept-oriented films’), or wei yishupian (‘pseudo art films’), which feature simplistic, ideological messages and cater to the tastes of major film festivals; they also sharply criticized the commercial, industrial operations of the film festival system.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Kelly Fan
Kelly Fan is a PhD student in the department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at UC Berkeley studying modern Chinese literature and media, Berkeley, CA, United States.
Jianqing Chen
Jianqing Chen is an Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and of Film and Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.