Receive Weekly Email and Text Message Updates:
Sign up for latest info on concerts, dining, promotions and more!
Go!
Best Of NY 2009
Search by...

Movie Keyword

Movie Title

—OR—

Neighborhood

Reader's Picks

Top Recommendations

A short list of New York's most popular hot spots.
user content provided by: LikeMe.net & Village Voice
  • Genre: Documentary
  • Release Date: 12/31/1969
  • Running Time: 184 mins
  • Director: Bing Wang
  • Cast: Fengming He
  • Producer: Francesca Feder
  • Writer: Yang Wang
  • Distributor:
  • Buy Tickets

Box Office

  1. Michael Jackson's This Is It, 23.2 mil, 34.4 mil
  2. Paranormal Activity, 16.4 mil, 84.6 mil
  3. Law Abiding Citizen, 7.4 mil, 51.5 mil
  4. Couples Retreat, 6.5 mil, 87.0 mil
  5. Where the Wild Things Are, 5.9 mil, 62.7 mil
  6. Saw VI, 5.3 mil, 22.5 mil
  7. Astro Boy, 3.5 mil, 11.3 mil
  8. The Stepfather, 3.2 mil, 24.6 mil
  9. Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, 3.1 mil, 10.8 mil
  10. Amelia, 3.0 mil, 8.3 mil
Movie Title, Weekly Earnings, Total Earnings

Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (He Fengming)

The old woman, He Fengming, treks through the snow, enters her apartment, sits down in a leather armchair, and proceeds to tell us her story. As a student in the late 1940s, caught up in the fervor of Mao’s revolution, she abandoned her plans to study English at Lanzhou University and took a job at a provincial daily newspaper. But after Fengming’s journalist husband published several texts critical of Party bureaucracy, the couple was pegged as subversive "rightists," separated from their young children (and each other), and sent off to separate re-education camps, thereby beginning a decades-long journey toward hoped-for "rehabilitation." Speaking in what is essentially one breathless monologue, interrupted only by a phone call, a bathroom break, and a few elegant fades to black, Fengming recounts those years as if they were still unfolding right before her eyes (which they may well be)—a devastating odyssey of false accusations, starvation, and youthful idealism shattered by experience. In his masterful, nine-hour documentary, West of the Tracks, director Wang Bing used a rural freight railway as a conduit into China’s uneasy transition from a planned to a market economy. In this equally remarkable follow-up, he finds in a single room, and in He Fengming’s harrowed eyes, another uncanny metaphor for individual lives undone by the dreams of nations. — Scott Foundas

Site Search «


Advanced Archive Search >>
  • Weekly
  • Music
  • Promotions
  • Offstage Voice
  • Dining
  • NY Movie Club
  • Events

Copyright © 2009 Village Voice LLC • 36 Cooper Square • New York NY 10003

The Village Voice and Voice are registered trademarks of Village Voice Media Holdings, LLC. All rights reserved. View our privacy policy and terms of use.