The Chinese Shoes Director: Tamara Wyss Running Time: 104 minutes Germany, China 2004 Post Screening Discussion With Director       A personal journey of discovery through China’s past and present. Starting from a historical narrative – the author’s grandparents’ stay in China – we experience the China of today. We travel up the Yangtze, through the Three Gorges, on to the large cities of Sichuan. Everywhere the author encounters signs of great change. In the Three Gorges area, for example, the world’s largest dam is almost finished and in a few weeks the valleys will be flooded. Over a million people have been forced to move. Old towns are being demolished and new ones built; new forms of economy are forcing people in a different direction. Nothing will stay as it is, soon even the landscapes we encounter in the film and can match with the grandparents’ photographs, will be nothing but history. The film takes time for encounters on the way. We get to know very different people and their moving stories. The grandparents, Hedwig and Fritz Weiss, travelled in the early 20th Century to China. He is an Imperial German Consul, and she is a woman with a lust for adventure. Newly married, they are making their way to his post in the western part of China. They carry one of the earliest Edison phonographs to record on wax-reels the songs of the Yangtze boat towers. They experience a time of major political upheaval - the end of the Chinese Empire and the first years of the Republic. In the filmmakers luggage are her grandparents photos, sound recordings, notes and letters. The film weaves seamlessly between past and present.       Screening: 26 October at 6.30 p.m. Old Fire Station