Rolling with the Chinese New Wave

When renowned filmmaker Chen Kaige (Yellow Earth, Farewell My Concubine) takes the stage at the TIFF Bell Lightbox Thursday evening to kick off the flagship summer program "A Century of Chinese Cinema", he'll probably prefer not to think of the weight bearing down on the event.

A century is a big enough idea to carry, China arguably even heftier, and cinema itself a concept that's never been more precariously packed.

Nevertheless, when Kaige introduces screenings of 1993's Concubine Thursday and 1984's Yellow Earth on Friday – the latter being widely credited as the film that launched what came to be called the Chinese New Wave – his will be the burden of representation, for the 80-film program is making the case that the past century of Chinese cinema (broken thematically, temporally and geographically into separate programs spanning martial arts movies to art installations) is merely a prologue for the century to come.

In other words, if you thought the political and economic fate of the world rested with China, you ain't seen nothing yet.