Night and day

Director

After graduating from university, Wang Chao worked for five years in the steel industry, although he was always interested in films and literature. In 1991, joined the Beijing Film Academy where he graduated in 1994 and began working as a film critic. This is how he met Chen Kaige after filming Tierra Amarilla, and he hired him as assistant director between 1995 and 1998 for the filming of Adiós a mi concubina and El Emperador y el Asesino. During this time, he wrote several short stories, which inspired scripts for a few films. With Orphan of Anyang, a film he shot without authorisation, he made his directorial debut. This film was selected in 2001, to participate in the Directors’ Fortnight Section of the Cannes Film Festival. In 2004, he made his second film Day and Night and with Luxury Car in 2006 he completed the trilogy about China that he had been working on for more than five years. His fourth and fifth films, Memory of Love (2009) and Fantasy (2014), which was presented in the Un Certain Regard selection at the Cannes Film Festival that same year, despite its discretion, shows narrative maturity on its director’s part. Looking for Rohmer (2018), shows the interest of Wang Chao for the critic and filmmaker Eric Rohmer and the Nouvelle Vague, up to the point of making a film about him, although not necessarily biographic. A Woman (2022), until now his latest film was shown in the last edition of the Asian Film Festival Barcelona | AFFBCN with great public success, after its screening in San Sebastian, where it was nominated for the Golden Shell.