Written and directed by A+D Thursdays series co-curator Stan Lai, The Peach Blossom Land (1992) is the award winning film adaption of his groundbreaking 1986 play Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land. The film radically challenged the principles of filmed theater, featuring remarkable innovations in staging, the use of song and dialogue, and the convention of the "fourth wall." Two theater companies unwillingly share the same theater on the same night, one rehearsing an epic melodrama of star-crossed love set against the turmoil of 1949 Shanghai, the other a madcap comedy. The stories of the two plays soon begin to overlap, revealing a shared concern with how the Taiwanese, traumatized by war and political terror, might retain a respect for the past without succumbing to its nightmares. The film won awards at the Tokyo, Berlin and Singapore International Film Festivals. Movie will be screened in original Mandarin Chinese, with English subtitles. Course Description: Co-taught by Peter Glazer and Stan Lai, this series will explore the specific and metaphoric connections amongst Creative action—adapting Stan Lai’s concepts and training—and the possibility of personal, cultural, and social transformation. How do we understand movement, migration, and change both metaphorically and literally? How do artists working in literature, visual art, film, performance, and design explore and enact transformation? Aside from featuring insight into the works and creative methods of Asia’s Stan Lai, the series will also delve into current trends in Latino-American/Latino arts, as well as European and African art and performance.

Arts + Design Thursdays is made possible thanks to support from the Big Ideas Courses Program in the College of Letters & Science at UC Berkeley and from generous supporters of Berkeley Arts + Design. For more information, visit artsdesign.berkeley.edu/thursdays.