MAGUEY(2016)

China. The Arts – The People(de)

China marks the beginning of the extensive Asian theme in Ottinger’s filmography and is her first travelogue. Her observant eye is interested in anything from Sichuan opera and the Beijing Film Studio to the production of candy and sounds of bicycle bells.

Miners, Groom, Pneumoconiosis(zh)

The location of Hunan's southwestern Hunan, the local economy is not active, the people either go out to work or go up the mountain to mine. Due to the constant mining disasters, despite the government's efforts to rectify and regulate, many people still illegally mine. Miners often do not pay attention to the protection of mines. Many years later, many miners have pneumoconiosis. The film started shooting in 2010 until 2018, with a filming period of nearly ten years, until the death of Zhao Pingfeng, the protagonist of pneumoconiosis, leaving young children and mentally handicapped wife.

Report(zh)

A 480-minute documentary, a historical record of the change of independent music across China, mammoth and complete, involving evolution and conflicts of several generations in Chinese society. In the second decade of the 21 century, it has been ten years since the Beijing Olympics. China has seen the abundance of wealth and civilization. Facing such a diverse lifestyles, people are far more different from each other than ever. Conservative, avant-garde, worried, daring, they not only fail to be understood, but also fail to understand one another. The film is a driving bus of our times, which has already lost its political halo in 30-years glory history, filled with artists, businessmen, workers and all different people who get in and off, however, the innocent younger generation is still queuing up anxiously outside, who might get in one of the buses, or smash all buses.

Children at a Village School(zh)

Twenty 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.

The 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.

Springtime in Wushan(zh)

Zhang Ming went back to his hometown Wushan to record the last images before it being changed forever by the upcoming Three Gorges Dam.

Umbrella(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.

Songhua(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.

The 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.

All's Right With The World(zh)

The film explores the hidden face of poverty in one of the world's most affluent and capitalistic cities. Directed by CHEUNG King Wai (KJ: Music and Life), the film follows five Hong Kong families of different backgrounds that receive government subsidies. How do the poor get by in a glossy city that flaunts conspicuous consumption and hides poverty in cavernous public housing estates? All's Right With The World shares the different stories of these low-income families, their daily living conditions, and their ways of celebrating Chinese New Year.

Demolition(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.

People's Park(zh)

One long tracking shot through a park in Chengdu.

Aunt(zh)

Zhang Ming went back to hometown to visit his aunt.

Church Cinema(zh)

In the summer of 2007, Gan Xiaoer led an independent film projection team, using projectors and self-made screens, to tour villages in Henan province to show his feature film "Raised from dust" for 8 times, and recorded the process. The 81-minute version of Church Cinema records only one stop, the Qiliying Church, where "Raised from dust" was shot.

Factory Boy(zh)

In 1978 Deng Xiaoping set up Shenzhen as a Special Economic Zone in China, and this decision led to the rapid development of Guangdong economy. Numerous factories have been established, millions of people are attracted because of gold rush. Over 30 years later, young people who were away from their home have already stepped in the midlife. Guangdong has become a representative of job hunting and has been drawing a newly young generation who has faith and uncertainty to the future. This video revolves around three working-class boys who are the 90s generation.

Blang Doctor(zh)

Chen came from a family of herbal doctors, who have treated numerous orthopaedics dseases, severe and minor. Chen's house, hardly a big one, have accommodated patients from different ethnic groups and from different villiages near and far. The patients found themselves recovering sooner under the care of Chen than that of doctors from large hospitals, and the charges for their treatment were rather small. Year after year, Dr. Chen dedicated himself to this charitable work... This movie attempts to show the medical conditions in remote rural areas in China as objectively as it can. Dr. Chen, as a thread, links togther the real lives of the locals presented by a group portrait of them. Also, It reveals that the traditional doctor-patient relationship has survived the aggressive modern civilization in this area, so has the culture of helpfulness common to an "aquaintance society".

MR. TANG(zh)

This film records Mr. Tang, a 90-year-old retired English teacher living in Zhuhai, Guangdong. It is divided into four parts: teaching, stories, feelings, and getting older. Through the documentary author’s deep understanding of Mr. Tang, an old man lives in his twilight years Jump above the light and shadow.

The Road(zh)

A highway is waiting to go through a quiet village in Hunan, a province in central China where Mao was from. Due to the high cost of construction, construction companies and migrant workers who live on road work rush to here like the tide. In the following four years, they root in this strange place for interests, paying sweat and blood, even their lives. With their arrival, local village and peasants are forced to change their lives. Many hidden interest lines and hidden rules about road construction of the nation are unveiled, together with the shocking truth and emerging secrets.

Guranay(zh)

This film is a realistic record of a sixty-year-old couple living in a remote village (Gurenay) in the Badain Jaran Desert of Alashan, Inner Mongolia plant thousands of mu of ammodendron and euphratica to fight against expanding deserts.