Who's Afraid of China?

Two-day screening featuring two films by Chris Marker

“Who’s Afraid of China?” is a two-day screening program featuring two films by French filmmaker Chris Marker: Sunday in Peking (1956) and Sans Soleil (1982).

Moving between documentary observation and reflective montage, Marker’s films assemble fragments of everyday life, travel, and memory into reflections on how places are remembered, narrated, and imagined. Sunday in Peking offers a lyrical portrait of Beijing in the 1950s, observing the city’s streets, architecture, and daily rhythms during a moment of profound social transformation. Decades later, Sans Soleil expands these questions into a wandering cinematic essay that moves across continents, reflecting on the fragile persistence of images and the ways memory reshapes historical experience.

Presented alongside reflections on photographic archives such as Thomas Sauvin’s Beijing Silvermine, the program considers how visual culture produces narratives of “China” that oscillate between documentation and projection. Together, the two films invite viewers to reflect on the subtle fictions through which images organize memory, history, and cultural imagination.

Sunday in Peking, Chris Marker, 1956, France, 22 min
Filmed during Marker’s brief visit to Beijing in the mid-1950s, Sunday in Peking offers a contemplative portrait of the city through observations of streets, architecture, labor, and everyday life.

Sans Soleil, Chris Marker, 1982, France, 100 min
Widely regarded as one of the most influential essay films ever made, Sans Soleil moves between Japan, Guinea-Bissau, Iceland, and San Francisco through a series of letters read by a female narrator, exploring the relationships between memory, travel, and the circulation of images.

Post-screening conversation on March 29 with writer and curator Hindley Wang

Curated by Chirui Cheng

Films courtesy of Janus Films