Supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of China (Taiwan), and Taiwan Academy of Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the United States (TECRO), the Freer and Sackler Galleries will present “A Weekend with Midi Z” to screen three of Z’s acclaimed films, followed by post-screening discussions with the filmmaker in person from June 8th to June 10th at Freer’s newly-renovated Meyer Auditorium. The screenings offer a rare opportunity for the audience from the greater Washington metropolitan area to see the most revealing cinematic portrait of the situation of Myanmar migrants on the big screen. Admission is free, for more information please visit website at https://www.freersackler.si.edu/events/films/#/?i=4.
Midi Z was born in Myanmar in 1982 and moved with his family to Taiwan at age sixteen. His films, which mainly tell stories about people struggling with displacement and poverty on the margins of Myanmar society, have won or been nominated for prizes at the Edinburgh Film Festival, Love and Peace Film Festival, Taipei Film Festival, and Golden Horse Awards. Z was awarded Outstanding Taiwanese Filmmaker in 2016 at the Golden Horse Awards as an acknowledgment of his excellence in both feature and documentary filmmaking, as well as to recognize that his achievements broaden the horizons of both Taiwanese cinema and the Taiwanese film industry.
"The Road to Mandalay" was the winner of the Fedeora Award in the Venice Days section of the 2016 Venice Film Festival. “The Road to Mandalay” was hailed by Variety’s Richard Kuipers as Midi Z’s “best work yet.” The film centers on two Myanmar’s illegal immigrants trying to build lives for themselves on the margins of society in Thailand.
"City of Jade": Z was only five years old when his oldest brother, Zhao, abandoned the family at age sixteen. There were rumors that he’d found riches in the mythical "City of Jade." When he reappeared at his father's funeral in 1997, Zhao was poor and addicted to opium. Years later, Midi Z had moved to Taiwan and become a film director, and Zhao was released from a Mandalay prison. Weak, but still hopeful of finding a big jade gemstone to become rich overnight, he set off once again for the mines, just like countless others in Myanmar's war-torn Kachin state on the border with China.
In the film "14 Apples", Z’s friend, Wang Shin-hong, is suffering from insomnia. A fortuneteller advises the Mandalay businessman, whose car and bulging wallet suggest that business is going pretty well, to spend fourteen days in a monastery, living as a monk and eating an apple a day. Z had made several attempts to record the lives of those living at the bottom of the Myanmar’s society but failed. Now the “therapy” Wang Shin-hong was undergoing provided Z with a chance to go back to the poverty he experienced in his childhood and the religion that deeply influenced his life. (E)