Chinese Version

Chicken Poets (China)

Black eggs and poetry

Director: Meng Jinghui

Cast: Chen Jianbin   Qin Hailu   Liao Fan

Footage: 93min

Year: 2002

Ouyang Yunfei, a washed-out poet who is obsessed with the Russian poet Mayakovsky, arrives in a small town near Beijing where one of his former classmates Chen Xiaoyang is now raising black chickens, and falls in love with a young color-blind girl telling how she always wanted to be a flight attendant. "How To Be A Poet" software makes him famous overnight. But soon this trial version is expire.

To translate the muted anxiety of a thirty-something generation facing unprecedented social changes, Meng uses a medley of avant-garde tropes collages of powerful images, constant shifts from realism to the bizarre or surreal, dark humor, a touching obsession with Mayakovsky.