Synopsis

Desperate to save her marriage, a woman in China hires a “mistress dispeller” — a growing profession in China’s larger cities — to break up her husband’s affair. The expert, Wang Zhenxi, or “Teacher Wang”, conspires with the woman and her adult children to insinuate herself into their family. She surreptitiously becomes a close confidante of the cheating spouse and his mistress, all part of her intricate master plan to restore the relationship between husband and wife.

With Mistress Dispeller, award-winning filmmaker Elizabeth Lo (Stray) has crafted an enormously fascinating and multi-faceted psychological portrait. From its carefully observed perspective, the film captures both the love triangle’s most private and intimate moments as well as Wang’s skill in slowly drawing out the characters and subtly manipulating their feelings. Mixing extreme closeups with images of China’s urban landscapes, Mistress Dispeller is an absorbing docudrama that lifts the curtain on a rarely seen segment of Chinese bourgeois society.

Synopsis

1917. Edward, a skittish civil servant working for the British Empire, has been posted in Rangoon, Burma for years. When his fiancée Molly sends a letter announcing her imminent arrival, he experiences a sudden and debilitating case of cold feet, boards the first ship in sight, and flees the country. Learning of his escape, Molly is determined to track him down. So she embarks on an Asian grand tour, going from Bangkok to Shanghai in search of her reluctant lover. Equal parts 1930s Hollywood throwback and meditative travelog, director Miguel Gomes (The Tsugua Diaries, Chicago IFF 2020) imbues this globe-trotting love story with searching melancholy. The studio-set “colonial romance” is shot in black and white, and intercut with sumptuous color footage shot in the modern day. The result is an intoxicating mixture of fiction and documentary that ponders the past as it ruminates on our present.

Synopsis

Traversing all of his past films, master director and Festival mainstay Jia Zhang-Ke delivers an epic look at the romantic destiny of his perennial heroine, Qiaoqiao (played by his wife, Zhao Tao). Utilizing scenes from his past work as well as documentary footage collected over the decades, Jia invents bold new scenarios that track his muse over 21 years. In the process, he offers a survey of contemporary China that examines the emotional tumult of living through turbulent social change. An invigorating assemblage of material old and new, Caught By the Tides is a one-of-a-kind odyssey through a nation’s history and a legendary auteur’s work.

Past works shown by Jia Zhang-Ke at the Chicago International Film Festival include Unknown Pleasures (2002), Platform (2005), 24 City (2008), Mountains May Depart (2015), and Ash Is Purest White (2018).