Close Up

28 February 2019: The Liberated Film Club II with Xiaolu Guo

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"Because you're sick of knowing exactly what you're going to get and you're sick when you get it."

The Liberated Film Club began as a pirate DVD company, issuing irregular mail-order catalogues of lost, suppressed and impossible films otherwise unobtainable. It held its first event in 2014 with Thurston Moore & Eva Prinz's Ecstatic Peace Library, and in 2016 curated a month-long season at Close-Up, with guests including John Akomfrah, Andrea Zimmerman, William Fowler, Tony Grisoni, Shama Khanna, Adam Roberts, Gideon Koppel, Chris Petit, Shezad Dawood, John Rogers and Ben Rivers (a documenting book was later published by purge.xxx). Neither the guests introducing, nor the audience, knew which film was screening. This format is adopted and adapted now as a monthly fixture at Close-Up: special guest; short and feature film.

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We're thrilled to welcome Xiaolu Guo as our special guest for this second instalment.


Xiaolu Guo is a Chinese-British novelist, memoirist and film-maker, who explores alienation, memory, personal and physical journeys, feminism, translation and transnational identities. Her books have been translated into 28 languages. Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China won the National Book Critics Circle Award 2017. In 2013, she was named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, a list drawn up once a decade. She is one of the inaugural fellows of the Columbia Institute of Ideas and Imagination in Paris, 2018 and a jury member for the Man Booker Prize 2019.

The Liberated Film Club is curated by Stanley Schtinter. Schtinter is an artist, writer and liberated filmmaker whose most recent work, Hotel Bardo, was dubbed by Iain Sinclair "the last avant-garde anti-project at the end of time". His 2018 recreation of Princess Diana's funeral (with a Mexican mariachi band in Salford) was widely celebrated as "the people's vote Turner Prize winner", and hailed by London Review of BooksThe GuardianThe Daily Star and more. He also runs the anti-record label (anti-everything), purge.xxx.

More info: purge.xxx