Shelly Kraicer is a writer and curator based in Toronto, Canada. Educated at Yale University, he lived for 12 year in Beijing. He has written film criticism in Cinema Scope, Positions, Cineaste, The Village Voice, and The New York Times, and book chapters on films by Bi Gan and Wang Bing. He has been a programmer for Chinese language films at the Vancouver International Film Festival and the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and served on film festival competition juries in the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, London, and Toronto. Kraicer co-founded Cinema On the Edge in 2015, an organization devoted to promoting and screening independent Chinese films around the world. He has curated thematic retrospectives on the Fourth Generation of Chinese filmmakers, Chinese contemporary independent cinema, and Hong Kong political cinema, and he has curated career retrospectives on Johnnie To, Qiu Jiongjiong, and Pema Tseden.
Last Updated: July 2, 2025
Culture
07.03.25
Balancing What Can Be Said with What Can Only Be Implied
The young Uyghur filmmaker Ikram Nurmehmet is now in a Chinese prison for “actively participating in terrorist activities.” He was likely targeted because he had studied in Turkey between 2010 and 2016. It is always difficult for what China calls “...
Culture
01.17.13
An Alternative Top Ten
Most accounts of the last year in Chinese cinema are dominated by films that were made for the ever-expanding domestic box office, and the local film industry’s struggle for screen time in competition with Hollywood imports.
On the one hand, we...