On the Way to the Sea(2010)
On May 12, 2008 , the biggest earthquake in Chinese history occurred in the film maker's hometown of Wenchuan. According to official polls, 69,159 were killed, 374,141 were seriously injured and 17,469 are still considered to be missing. The film maker's parents, central character in the film, are survivors. In a surreal hybrid of documentary footage, experimental abstraction and fictional elements, "On the Way to the Sea" studies the human fragility and spiritual homelessness generated by such disasters.
Movie: On the Way to the Sea
Video Trailer On the Way to the Sea
Similar Movies
7.7Twenty Two(zh)
Follow the lives of the elderly survivors who were forced into sex slavery as “Comfort Women” by the Japanese during World War II. At the time of filming, only 22 of these women were still alive to tell their story. Through their own personal histories and perspectives, they tell a tale that should never be forgotten to generations unaware of the brutalization that occurred.
10.0Call If You Need Me(zh)
Gentle, easy-going Or Kia moves from the countryside to Kuala Lumpur to work for his cousin and best friend Ah Soon, a mid-level gangster and enforcer. While Or Kia works hard to put a sister through school, Ah Soon cares for an unstable girlfriend prone to mysterious disappearances. As they both sink deeper into a nocturnal world of debts, drugs, and betrayal, Or Kia's loyalties are strained when Ah Soon falls out of favor with the bosses and tries to escape the business.
6.3Umbrella(zh)
Workers, peasants, soldiers, students and merchants were five groups of Chinese society in the 1950s, after the so-called elimination of the exploited class. Borrowing this concept, the umbrella is taken as the clue to rediscover changes in various social classes after the economic reform, and to analyze the social problems in China. Workers making umbrellas, merchants selling umbrellas, students looking for jobs in the rain. Umbrella is used as a metaphor that can be seen everywhere. As the raindrop, what we see is sometimes clear, sometimes untraceable.
6.6My Milk Cup Cow(zh)
The father tells his daughter Nunu a lie that there is a cow in her milk cup. She believes it and drinks up milk, but there isn't any cow. Her father tells her a variety of lies, which Nunu finds increasingly difficult to believe.
6.6The Iron Ministry(zh)
Filmed over three years on China’s railways, The Iron Ministry traces the vast interiors of a country on the move: flesh and metal, clangs and squeals, light and dark, and language and gesture. Scores of rail journeys come together into one, capturing the thrills and anxieties of social and technological transformation. The Iron Ministry immerses audiences in fleeting relationships and uneasy encounters between humans and machines on what will soon be the world’s largest railway network.
5.0I Have Nothing to Say(zh)
The Chinese police visit head-teacher Chen at home. Her daughter, a dissident filmmaker living in Hong Kong, plans yet another critical film about China's colonization of the small autonomous territory. The authorities demand that Chen travel to her daughter to stop the film project. What they do not take into account is that Chen and her daughter lost contact long ago.
7.0The Yellow Bank(zh)
A short documentary that captures the longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century, The Yellow Bank takes you on a contemplative boat ride across the Huangpu River in Shanghai, China. Filmmaker J.P. Sniadecki, who lived and worked in Shanghai nine years earlier, uses the eclipse as a catalyst to explore the way weather, light, and sound affect the urban architectural environment during this extremely rare phenomenon.
0.0Songhua(zh)
In northeastern China the Songhua River flows west from the border of Russia to the city of Harbin, where four million people depend on it as a source of water. Songhua is a portrait of the varying people that gather where the river meets the city, and an ethnographic study of the intimate ways in which they play and work.
0.0First Vote(en)
A soon-to-be first-time voter, the filmmaker’s thought-provoking journey into the Rust Belt and South captures four Asian American voters’ ardent first time grassroots political participation ignited by the 2016 rise of “Chinese Americans for Trump.” FIRST VOTE is a character driven cinema verité style film chronicling the democratic participation of four Asian American voters from 2016 through the 2018 midterm elections.
6.5Mama Rainbow(zh)
For Chinese parents, finding out that their kid is gay usually presents a major tragedy, with the big majority utterly unable to accept the homosexuality of their son or daughter. However, during recent years a fresh rainbow wind has been blowing over the Chinese mainland: a pioneer generation of Chinese parents has been stepping up and speaking out on their love for their gay kids. This documentary features 6 mothers from all over China, who talk openly and freely about their experiences with their homosexual children. With their love, they are giving a whole new definition to Chinese-style family bonds.
0.0Full of Death(zh)
A desperate man, who is down and out, says that a group of people following him is trying to give the sleepy city a shot in the arm by planting a flower of idealism out of the ruins. And with the purpose of "if there's no enough vitality, use desperate strength to gather together", they begin to look for service/preaching targets. At the same time, there's an elder sister who has locked her younger brother in the home for a long time, the younger brother got the chance to the outside world accidentally however.
0.0A Clockwork Bunny(zh)
An orphan mutters his personal history in The Good Place. He is getting louder and louder because he doesn’t want his history to be locked in the small dark room forever just as his body has suffered. Little Bunny is who he says the most intimate person in his life. It turns out he and Little Bunny share the same history.
9.0Demolition(zh)
"If the old doesn't go, the new never comes" recites a teenager hanging out near a demolition site in the center of Chengdu, the Sichuan capital in western China. In Demolition, filmmaker J.P. Sniadecki deconstructs the transforming cityscape by befriending the migrant laborers on the site and documenting the honest, often unobserved, human interactions, yielding a wonderfully patient and revealing portrait of work and life in the shadow of progress and economic development.
0.0Snake in Home(zh)
The C-list TV actor Jonnie Zhang decides to change career as an estate agent. While preparing for the interview, he hires a cleaner to tidy up his long non-visited mansion. A cleaner receives a task to a vacant house, and she decides to stay over night realizing that the bus service has been suspended. Out of every clue hidden in the house, she fantasizes its whole family and secrets, along with her own previous life she comes across.
5.0When Night Falls(zh)
The mother of a murderer awaits and prepares to meet her son. The true story of a man who killed six Shanghai policemen after suffering police beatings as a punishment for riding an unlicensed bicycle. This film was produced as a part of the Jeonju Digital Project.
4.6Rainclouds Over Wushan(zh)
A policeman investigates an introverted signal-station manager suspected of raping a hotel clerk.
4.0Lost in the Mountain(zh)
The film is director Gao Zipeng’s first fiction film which takes three years to complete. It premieres on March 27, 2001 in UCCA and stars the poet A Jian, Xiao Zhao and the writer Gou Zi. The film is based on a true crime of disappearance. It creates an atmosphere of what Ma Zhiyuan, a celebrated poet and playwright of Yuan Dynasty, portrays in his famous poem “Autumn Thoughts”: Over old trees wreathed with rotten vines fly evening crows/ Under a small bridge near a cottage a stream flows/ On ancient road in the west wind a lean horse goes/ Westward declines the sun/ Far, far from home is the heartbroken one.
5.8A Dog Barking at the Moon(zh)
Coming back to her broken family, pregnant writer Huang Xiaoyu and her French husband, Benjamin, finds herself trapped between her cult brainwashed mother, Li Jiumei, and her secretly homosexual father, Huang Tao.



