The 2011 Satyajit Ray Award: Li and the Poet

The 2011 Satyajit Ray Award is presented annually to the director, of any nationality, of a first feature film screened at the London Film Festival which best captures the artistry and humanity expressed in the late Satyajit Ray's own vision.

Shun Li is a woman who has in effect sold herself into slavery in Italy in order to pay for her passage from China and the eventual transport of her son to live with her. Transferred from a textile factory in Rome to work in a bar on Chioggia, an island in the Venetian lagoon, she develops a warm but platonic friendship with Bepi, a retired fisherman (played empathetically by the impressive Rade Serbedzija). But both her employers and his circle of fisherman friends regard their relationship with sordid suspicion, and there are potentially dire consequences for Li. An unusual and compelling first feature, this has a terrific central performance by Zhao Tao as Li, which is both restrained and heartfelt. Li and the Poet takes the essence of a real-life situation (the relatively recent influx of Chinese immigrants into the environs of Venice) and gives us a vivid contemporary story that's also a new filmic look at aspects of Venetian life, refreshingly naturalistic and free of picture postcard tourism.

We hope to welcome director Andrea Segre for a Q&A following the screening