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The Monkey Kid is the story of a nine year-old girl's daily life in Beijing,1970, during the mid-stage of the Cultural Revolution. Her parents, deemed "intellectuals" by the state, have been sent for "Re-education" in the countryside to "Learn from the Peasants." The child is left to learn life on her own. She parachutes from the top of clothes cupboards, she shows up late for school, she tumbles down mountains of gravel, she balances on railings five stories high. . . .
In the mid-1980s, thousands came from China to the United States to study. San Francisco is aglow with chance for a young artist from China, and Shi-Wei recasts her life in the new openness she finds in the West. She surrenders herself to sensual curiosity with a white acquaintance. But what about her longing for her boyfriend in China, who impulsively decides to join her in America "to be with you, to struggle next to you side-by-side"? As she embraces one intimate tie and resumes another, Shi-Wei is entwined in the clutter of love and need. The film's director notes, "I'm Seducible is a story of self-seduction, a woman's haunted search for herself in others: life moving one way, mind floating another."
In the Palace began with a daydream to enter inside two inaccessible places, to penetrate the tinyness of Giacometti’s surrealist sculpture The Palace at 4am (1932) and to move beyond the flatness of various photographs of early Modern stage and dance productions. In this film, Giacometti’s sculpture (which in a sense already resembles a theatrical model) is streamlined and scaled up to become a stage set proper; the posed theatrical stills are restaged as tableaux vivants.
