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Presented by Bread Garden Market, Little Village, and FilmScene
DIALOGUE: Filmmaker Violet Du Feng in person!
Vino Vérité returns in October with a remarkable portrait of two women in contemporary China drawn together by a secret language handed down through generations.
The Vino Vérité series features talented new voices and established filmmakers influenced by the vérité tradition in person to present their thought-provoking, chance-taking, and visually-arresting films. Each selection is paired with hand-selected wines from Bread Garden Market.
Tickets: $20 public / $15 members / $10 students. Includes wine tasting & hors d'oeuvres, film, Q&A and filmmaker reception with dessert.
6:30 - Hors d'oeuvres & wine tasting
7:00 - Screening
8:30 - Q&A + Reception with filmmakers, wine and dessert
"An extraordinary film: masterfully conceived, strategically designed and highly crafted."—Documentary Magazine
"A contemplative journey between two powerful and conflicted women. An understated, extraordinary voyage." —FilmThreat
"The past, present and future of women in China’s oppressively patriarchal society is a big topic to address in under 90 minutes, but Violet Du Feng’s unassuming but very moving documentary covers a lot of ground." —Deadline
ABOUT HIDDEN LETTERS
For thousands of years, women in China, often forced into oppressive marriages and forbidden to read or write, shared a secret language among themselves called Nushu. Written in poems or songs with bamboo pens on paper-folded fans and handkerchiefs, these hidden letters bonded generations of Chinese women in a clandestine support system of sisterhood, hope and survival.
Spanning past and present, from sunken rice fields and rural villages to bustling metropolitan cities, Hidden Letters follows two millennial Chinese women who are connected by their fascination with Nushu and their desire to protect its legacy. Influenced by Nushu’s legacy of female solidarity, the two women struggle to find balance as they forge their own paths in a patriarchal culture steeped in female subservience to men.
ABOUT THE FILMMAKER
Violet Du Feng is the director and producer of Hidden Letters. She was a 2018 Sundance Non-fiction Producing Fellow. Feng previously produced Confucian Dream, which world premiered at 2019 Hot Docs; Our Time Machine, world premiere at 2019 Tribeca Film Festival and Maine-land, which received a Special Jury Award of SXSW. Born in Shanghai and based in New York. Violet holds a bachelor’s degree journalism and received her MFA in journalism from University of California at Berkeley. Her work has received support from funders such as Sundance, ITVS, IDA, Ford Foundation, Chicken & Egg and Doc Society. Feng is a trainer for CNEX, the Chinese Documentary Foundation, and a consulting programmer for Shanghai International Film Festival.
Tribeca Film Festival (2022) — World Premiere
DocEdge (2022) — Official Selection
Sydney Film Festival (2022) — Official Selection