The Hollywood Reporter's Jonathan Landreth introduced the Beijing's Cherry Lane, a unique cinema where the latest Chinese arthouse movies with proper subtitles.
BEIJING -- Chinese films won top awards at the Venice and Berlin film festivals this year, but neither Jia ZhangKe's "Still Life" nor Wang Quanan's "Tuya's Marriage" lit up big screens here for much more than a week.
Jia's movie about the Three Gorges dam and Wang's about hard living in Inner Mongolia are widely available on illegal $1 DVDs with lousy subtitles, making it tough to sell legitimate discs for $3 and harder still to sell the theater tickets that, at $8.50, make going to the movies in China a white-collar date.
Censors here insure that nothing controversial gets released, and most theaters stick to Hollywood blockbusters and Hong Kong hits to make money, throwing in an occasional big-budget Mainland epic made with export in mind.
So where do the growing number of short-term expatriate executives with limited spoken Chinese go to see the cinema of their adoptive home with proper subtitles on a big screen?
One place: the Cherry Lane Theater, a 100-seater in a photography studio on the edge of town that's been a labor of love since the late 1980s.
