Events

My Beijing Birthday screening this Friday

beijing_birthday.jpg
"How ya doing? I'm Howie, just your average hyper Jewish guy from New York".

Event announcement:

The Foreign Correspondents Club of Beijing will host a screening of the film My Beijing Birthday at Paddy O'Shea's bar in Beijing on Friday the 29th of May at 7pm followed by a Q & A with director Howie Snyder and the cast.

My Beijing Birthday is a 52-minute documentary about long time China resident Howie Snyder, a New Yorker, and his classmates — a group of Chinese kids who were 8 years old when he studied cross-talking (Chinese stand-up comedy) with them in 1996.

James Fallows called the film "wonderful":

The set-up and plot-line sound bizarre when described. Howie Snyder, a New Yorker and skillful Mandarin-speaker now in his 40s, was in Beijing twelve years ago attending a school for traditional Chinese "cross-talk" stand-up comics. All the other students in the class were Chinese eight-year-olds. They specialize young here. Part of the film is footage of Snyder and his classmates back then; the other part is a revisit to the school this year, showing very dramatically what the passage of time has meant for Snyder, for the city of Beijing, for the tough-but-heart-of-gold director of the school, and for the kids, now age 20.

The film is funny and poignant in its own right; it made me fonder of Beijing than I would otherwise be; and it is one of the most powerful demonstrations of a theme I've tried to get across in most articles for the Atlantic: that this is a great big country not of a billion-person mass but of a billion-plus highly individualistic people.

My Beijing Birthday was co-produced by Danwei's partners China in a Box, a company that offers Asian stock footage and production services in China.

There are currently 1 Comments for My Beijing Birthday screening this Friday.

Comments on My Beijing Birthday screening this Friday

This sounds great.Is the event open to the public? If so, where is the Correspondents Club?

Thanks

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