Madame

  • 120'
  • China
  • 2010

This vibrant portrait of a trans performer who styles themself ‘Bilan de Linphel’ (birth name Fan Qihui) is at the same time personally intimate and exhilaratingly expansive. It was filmed by Qiu Jiongjiong over a couple of days of interviews, plus several weeks recording their stage shows in Beijing. Episodes of confessional autobiography alternate with magnificent queer performances of torch-song standards. A tailor by trade, Fan is no lip-synching ‘impersonator’: kohl-eyed, bearing a magnificent curly wig, they belt out the cynical, idealistic, broken-hearted, proudly defiant lyrics of jazzy numbers with a rawly expressive voice and an authority, a command of the stage that is awe-inspiring.

Interspersed are Fan’s sometimes angry, sometimes tearful, occasionally self-destructive, always bitterly ironic tales of being a queer person in contemporary China. Fan flourished performing their various identities for peril and pleasure. This is life as a knockout performance: resplendent and ultimately tragic.

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Available on Festival Scope Pro from 26 January 9:00 CET to 14 February 9:00 CET



  • 120'
  • China
  • 2010
Director
Qiu Jiongjiong
Country of production
China
Year
2010
Festival Edition
P&I Selection 2022
Length
120'
Medium
Digital
Original title
Gu nai nai
Language
Chinese
Producer
Qiu Jiongjiong
Sales
Qiu Jiongjiong
Cinematography
Qiu Jiongjiong
Editor
Qiu Jiongjiong
Production Design
Qiu Jiongjiong
Sound Design
Qiu Jiongjiong
Cast
Fan Qihui
Director
Qiu Jiongjiong
Country of production
China
Year
2010
Festival Edition
P&I Selection 2022
Length
120'
Medium
Digital
Original title
Gu nai nai
Language
Chinese
Producer
Qiu Jiongjiong
Sales
Qiu Jiongjiong
Cinematography
Qiu Jiongjiong
Editor
Qiu Jiongjiong
Production Design
Qiu Jiongjiong
Sound Design
Qiu Jiongjiong
Cast
Fan Qihui

Programme IFFR 2022

Focus: Qiu Jiongjiong

Qiu Jiongjiong is one of China’s most innovative, critical, and entertaining artists/filmmakers, whose works joyously blur the boundaries between fiction, documentary, and experimental cinema. Intimate memory and national history resonate in Qiu’s baroque rhapsodies of music and design. We present seven of his films including his new masterwork A New Old Play.

Read more about this programme