2006 Film Index Back to Main Site		Back SUZHOU RIVER / SUZHOU HE Ye Lou (China, 2000, 83 min) Feature, Drama, World Sunday, Oct 8, 8:15pm, Grand Meridian Cinema At the forefront of China’s “Sixth Generation,” director Lou Ye blends the influences of American and European directors to create a highly original visual and narrative style. Suzhou River, often compared to Hitchcock’s Vertigo, is told from the viewpoint of a lonely videographer who studies the human traffic that passes below his apartment balcony. He falls in love with Meimei, a mysterious nightclub performer with a mermaid act. And in a parallel narrative, Marda, a motorcycle courier, recounts the story of his lost love, a free spirit who disappeared into the Suzhou River but whom he now believes to have survived in the form of Meimei. Filled with arresting imagery and uncanny shifts of emotion, Suzhou River is as much a journey through a paradoxical and harsh Shanghai as through the complexities of modern relationships. EFF audiences get their first introduction to the work of the director whose latest sexually and politically charged film, Summer Palace, netted him a five-year ban from filmmaking. Festivals: Pusan Int’l Film Festival, Singapore Int’l Film Festival, Karlovy Vary Film Festival (Czech Republic), Rotterdam Int’l Film Festival (Tiger Award), Seattle Int’l Film Festival.