Following the screening the audience is invited to attend a party celebrating the Festival at Chalkers Billiards Club, 59th Street at Hollis, Emeryville. Joris Ivens' latest and final film was made when the renowned director was already 90 years old. It is a brilliant conclusion to a career spanning the better part of European film history. Ivens'great contribution to the documentary cinema began in the early '20s and continued with undiminished dedication. His life-long preoccupation with issues of social and political evolution were matched by adventurous aesthetic explorations. A Tale of the Wind is an original, innovative, and very youthful film. Its story, largely autobiographical, recounts an old filmmaker's trip to China at the end of his life in search of a wind he intends to film. Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan had filmed several documentaries in China during the '70s. However, A Tale of the Wind is a departure from their usual work as it leads us into a world of myths, legends, and metaphors. In the film, which features Ivens himself, a filmmaker who has been touched by the winds of history for almost all of the 20th century aims his camera in an attempt to record the universal wisdom derived from unaffected observation. At 90, another wind is blowing him. Is this a pursuit of the impossible? An ultimate challenge to himself? Or simply the path leading us to a deeply beautiful swan song at the end of a life spent in exposing the plight and suffering of the common man? --Dimitri Eipides, Festival of Festivals, Toronto