Event announcement:
The Foreign Correspondents Club of Beijing will host a screening of the film My Beijing Birthday at Paddy O’Shea’s bar in Beijing on Friday the 29th of May at 7pm followed by a Q & A with director Howie Snyder and the cast.
My Beijing Birthday is a 52-minute documentary about long time China resident Howie Snyder, a New Yorker, and his classmates — a group of Chinese kids who were 8 years old when he studied cross-talking (Chinese stand-up comedy) with them in 1996.
James Fallows called the film “wonderful”:
The set-up and plot-line sound bizarre when described. Howie Snyder, a New Yorker and skillful Mandarin-speaker now in his 40s, was in Beijing twelve years ago attending a school for traditional Chinese “cross-talk” stand-up comics. All the other students in the class were Chinese eight-year-olds. They specialize young here. Part of the film is footage of Snyder and his classmates back then; the other part is a revisit to the school this year, showing very dramatically what the passage of time has meant for Snyder, for the city of Beijing, for the tough-but-heart-of-gold director of the school, and for the kids, now age 20.
The film is funny and poignant in its own right; it made me fonder of Beijing than I would otherwise be; and it is one of the most powerful demonstrations of a theme I’ve tried to get across in most articles for the Atlantic: that this is a great big country not of a billion-person mass but of a billion-plus highly individualistic people.
My Beijing Birthday was co-produced by Danwei’s partners China in a Box, a company that offers Asian stock footage and production services in China.