Songhua(2007)

Karamay(zh)

In 1994, the oil-rich city of Karamay in Northwest China was the site of a horrible fire that killed nearly 300 schoolchildren. The students were performing for state officials and were told to stand by while the officials exited first. After the fire, the story was heavily censored in the Chinese state media. To this day, the families of Karamay have not been allowed to publicly mourn their children.

Weave A Period Of Time(zh)

Han Tao’s latest film is set in a textile factory of the 1970s. Chong Er, a worker there, is in love with newcomer Xiao Lan and pursues her. They get married, but the happy time does not last long. Chong Er was executed, allegedly for breaking the law. More than 30 years later, the textile factory is closed down. The truth behind the case is finally revealed, but time has diluted everything and changed everyone’s visage. The film attempts to reconstruct the mental state of that generation, even though the workers and everything in the factory have been forgotten. Once upon a time, there were so many energetic lives that worked and lived there. The confining space was everything they had – where life began and ended, becoming eternally trapped in memories.

The Rocking Sky(zh)

To commemorate the 70th anniversary of the victory of WWII, this documentary film describes the eight years of dauntless air-force fighting of the republic of China during the Anti-Japanese War, with only 300 combat-capable aircraft from China while Japan had over 2000.

Runaway Mime(zh)

Yao Shangde is a mime artist from Taiwan. He has rich experience in stage performance. In 2011, he suddenly decided to start his personal street mime performance project "Mime Runaway". He thinks that he would be more willing to perform his mime art on the street than performing in a static theater. He believes that performing arts should enter every ordinary person's daily life. He also tried to use this form of performance to teach people how to open up and accept strangers around him. The inexplicable fear of strangers has always been the demon he has been unable to overcome in the past ten years. He is trying to use this form of artistic performance to carry out a self-salvation of his past.

Exile Shanghai(de)

Six life stories of German, Austrian and Russian Jews which intersect in exile in Shanghai. Out of narratives, photographs, documents and new images of the biggest and most contradictory metropolis of the Far East an entity develops in which the historic exile takes and turns on a completely current power and appeal.

The Blind Storytellers(zh)

Li Shouwang is the leader of a blind storytellers team, learned storytelling at the age of 19. His childernare living hard in other cities. Li's money amost goes to his children's pocket every year. But with urbanisation, the storytellers have lost almost all their audience. As the conflict between the storytelling team and the village team intensified, his son, who was far away from home, became the only spiritual sustains... When he was excited that his son would be taking his family home for Chinese New Year, what's await is a sigh.

Outside(zh)

Wang Wo’s experimental documentary takes the direct cinema approach to the realm of avantgardism, immersing the viewer in a non-narrative, highly sensory experience of urban China in its visual and aural splendor.

Mothers(zh)

In rural China, the job of enforcing the Communist Party's one-child policy falls on government bureaucrats tasked with imposing fines, birth control, and forced sterilizations. Xu Huijing documents this process in his native village of Ma, following the tenacious efforts of the local birth control chief during an increased sterilization quota period, revealing the absurd and tragic local consequences of high-level government policy. (Chicago International Film Festival)

Before the Flood(zh)

Before the Flood is a study of the final weeks of a dying city, as thousand-year-old Fengjie on the Yangtze River is reduced to rubble and its inhabitants uprooted to make way for the new Three Gorges Dam that will flood the entire valley.

Along the Railway(zh)

This important, patient documentary follows a year in the life of the sidings dwellers who eke out a living, begging, foraging, stealing and sleeping rough near the Baoji railway station in Shaanxi.

Wheat Passenger(zh)

The story took place in 2008. Henan Guo Hui, who was a harvester, went to the provinces to harvest wheat for him. He and his father then invited a driver and set off. I went to Shanxi, Shaanxi, and also included Henan. They met other mairs to talk about the earthquake in Sichuan and talk about the difficulties of collecting wheat. Bargaining with the farmers, thinking of the law less to give the leader a little commission, sometimes to think of the way to get money, sometimes to think of ways to escape the control of the leader. The driver complained that the car owner was too bad, and the owner complained that the driver had eaten too much. In the middle of the road, I also encountered the need to collect the toll, and finally met the young and confused.

Oh, the San Xia(zh)

The Three Gorges Dam continues to cast a long shadow on Chinese society, Politics and environment. This documentary studies the project's final completion in 2012. Some of the prominent figures past and present - Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemi, are taken to task for rushing the project. The result is long-term ecological destruction, widespread elimination of local economies and forced relocation. Director WANG Li-bo lends his voice to the wave of criticisms of one of China’s most controversial projects.

Chronological Ferry: The He Family(zh)

At the end of the 1990s, about 40-50 million industrial workers were laid off in China, and the family population involved was hundreds of millions. He Guoping was one of them. After he was laid off, his wife opened a rental house. He became the "housekeeper" who cooks and cooks every day. His son He Huan was also raised by a playful child. Twenty years of follow-up shooting of this ordinary family, this continued "presence", the film has a time tentacle of "seeing the growth of grass". Some people say that this is a "civilian epic".

Pathway(zh)

Xu Xin’s film “Dao Lu” (China 2012) offers an exclusive “in camera” encounter with Zheng Yan, an 83 year-old veteran of the Chinese Red Army, who calmly relates how he has navigated his country’s turbulent history over three-quarters of a century.Born to a wealthy family in a foreign concession, Yan joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1941 because he sincerely believed in the socialist project, and in its immediate capacity to free China from the Japanese yoke and eradicate deep-rooted corruption.

Buried(zh)

July 27th, 1976 - a day the people of Tangshan will never forget. When that fateful day ended, tens of thousands had been killed, and the lives of the survivors would be changed forever. No public official, no expert, nor anyone among the seismological personnel - regardless of what they were doing that day - should ever forget. History will always remember the twilight of that day.

All There Will Be(zh)

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.

We Are Here(zh)

What happens when 300 lesbians from around the world attend the largest United Nations conference? How did two busloads of lesbians headed to an underground nightclub help spark the birth of a lala (LBT) movement in China? At the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, the first ever lesbian tent at an UN NGO Forum was created. Emerging from hidden shadows of shame and invisibility, Chinese lalas began a hard-fought path of deliverance from themselves, from family, and from an apprehensive environment. In doing so, they sought empowerment and change as they explored concepts and issues from self-affirmation to rights consciousness. The film powerfully moves forward to the present day and shows the drastic change in today’s young feminist lalas – their challenging of sexism and homophobia with daring public street actions on subways – a parallel action to their forerunners in 1995, with much vigor and defiance 20 years later.

Yumen(zh)

Set in a quasi-ghost town that once thrived with oil in China's arid northwest, Yumen is a haunting, fragmented tale of hungry souls, restless youth, a wandering artist and a lonely woman, all searching for human connection among the town's crumbling landscape. One part "ruin porn", one part "ghost story”, and entirely shot on 16mm, the film brings together performance art, narrative gesture, and social realism not only to play with convention and defy genre, but also to pay homage to a disappearing life-world and a fading medium.

Religion(zh)

Huangyangchuan township, Gulang County, Gansu province. In a village, two members of a family died in accidents in a short period. People took it seriously, they decided to rebuild the old temple in the village, hoping it could bless them with peace. In the ceremony after the rebuilding was finished, the figure of Buddha, the picture of Chairman Mao, the Taoist and the country shamen, gathered together…This film documented the details of this ceremony, hoping to reveal the common status of Chinese people’s religion.