We are proud to announce a retrospective tribute on Xiaolu Guo. An acclaimed Chinese-British Novelist, Filmmaker and Feminist, whose books have been translated into over 28 languages, and whose film She, a Chinese (2009, a homage to Jean-Luc Godard’s La chinoise) won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival in 2009. Xialou Guo is one of the most successful Chinese writers currently publishing in Britain.
Born in 1973, Xiaolu Guo grew up in a fish-farmers village with her illit- erate grandparents in the coastal province of Zhejiang; at the age of twenty she left to study at the Beijing Film Academy (2000) and then the prestigious National Film and Television School (NFTS, 2003) in London – where she is currently based.
Her film career began in 2006 with her second feature How Is Your Fish Today? (2006) docu-drama set in modern China, inspired by Alain Rob- be-Grillet’s Trans-Europ-Express (1966), that examines the intertwined stories of a frustrated writer and the subject of his latest screenplay. It was an Official Selection of both the Sundance and Rotterdam Film Festival’s in 2007.
Immediately after that, her literary career gained notice in 2007 with her first novel writ- ten in English A Concise Chinese – English Dictionary for Lovers, which was nominated for many awards, and led to her work previously written in Chinese being translated into English. It tells the story of “Z,” a Chinese student’s encounters in London, and her inner journey of self-discovery.
Her latest film Five Men and A Caravaggio will be having its European Premiere at the 9th Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival. It’s a film which traces unexpected encounters among five men, between London and Dafen (China), unravel nomadic itineraries, and narrate life stories while examining crucial issues of philosophy and art.
The following films will be screened in our retrospective tribute: How Is Your Fish Today? (2006), We Went to Wonderland (2008), She, a Chinese (2009), Once Upon a Time a Proletarian (2009), and Five Men and a Caravaggio (2018).