Hi, Pan

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.

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.

We Sit In Silence At The Memorial Table(en)

A silent film by Vietnamese director Truong Minh Quy in collaboration with Belgian director Nicolas Graux, was shot on the set of a film by Graux. We Sit in Silence at the Memorial Table is inspired by Educational Objectives, a poem written by Aleksey Garipov and translated to English by Nicolas Graux.

WANG HONG WEI: CHINESE INDIE FILM(en)

The player of Jia Zhangke's early film "Xiao Wu" and the famous independent film activist Wang Hongwei talked about Chinese independent films at the IFF Independent Film Forum.

News Feed on My...(ko)

I just watch the news of war in a distant country on my mobile. My fingers go back day by day to the day the war broke out and pose to see comments posted on the Facebook News Feed that I follow. Outside, I have friends who participated in anti-war rallies.

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.

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.

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.

The Shoe Shiner's Journey(zh)

Go Grandriders(zh)

17 riders with avarage age 81 decide to follow the dream of their youth and start their journey to ride around Taiwan island.

Lost 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.

People's Park(zh)

One long tracking shot through a park in Chengdu.

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.

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.

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.

Mapi(zh)

Springtime, Maoshan Town, Taizhou Shi, north Jiangsu Province in China. As the villagers of Maoshan prepare for their annual temple fair to pay their respects to Chairman Mao, tempers are reaching boiling point. Organizing this festival is a not easy matter, as director Jin Shifang will attest. Not only does he have to deal with wayward loudspeakers and corrupt police, but he also has to put up with infighting and subordinates just waiting for him to make a wrong move. This observational film captures the lives of ordinary people in rural China caught in changing times, letting audiences to think it over.

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.

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.

Children at a Village School(zh)

Seedlings Protection Rite(zh)

Seedlings protection rite (also called the parade of big rice dumplings) is a spring agricultural festival of Hakka people in Western Fujian, China. People worship the God of Grains (Shennong) in the rite. People collect thousands of fresh bamboo leaves, sew them together and make a pair of big dumplings filled with 120 kilograms of rice each. They also make tens of thousands of finger-sized rice dumplings for believers to take home. On the 15th day of the 2nd lunar month, villagers carry out the statues of the God of grains and big dumplings. Followed by flowers cars, eight sheds carry children chosen from every clan name in the village who are dressed up as ancient heroes, as people parade around the village. After the rite, villagers believe that farmland is awakened and that disasters are averted. A new agricultural cycle begins.

Meathook Massacre(en)

3 young women encounter car trouble on the way to a Dragonsclaw concert during a rainstorm. They are forced to go seek help, where one by bloody one they are attacked by a masked maniac and hung on meathooks. Who will survive and what will be left of them?

Southeasterlies(en)

Two mismatched friends, students, each in their own way troubled by life, travel one day to a nearby beach, invoking a sort of playful innocence long believed spent along with their childhoods, in the hopes that doing so will restore both of their happiness. Alas, life seldom works out that way.

Traficantes: Sexo, traición y muerte(es)

Mars: Pioneering the Planet(en)

A Girl Fighter(zh)

Ton Chard is a vicious murderer, who terrifies people with his crimes. He is protected by his father, the powerful Shi Fong, ruler of the district. Su Ma offers herself to seek and arrest the criminal. Once done that, she has to take him to the law court where he will be judged. But Shi Fong will do everything to stop her.

Tiempo de silencio y destrucción(es)

January 1964, the author of the novel Tiempo de silencio, Luis Martín-Santos, dies in a tragic car crash. On the 60th anniversary of the accident and the 100th year since his birth, we follow his children on a voyage to reconstruct the writer, the psychiatrist, the man behind the work that turned him into a literary promise. A journey through the figure of Martín-Santos, his peculiar view of post-war Spain and his work hidden for years based on partly unpublished texts.

Luther and His Legacy(en)

A personal essay on the legacy of Martin Luther on the basis of 16th-Century drawings and paintings where the director draws parallels with today's communication explosion/distribution of "news" and the necessity to be digitally literate.

Messina High(en)

A high school romantic dramedy, based on Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing."

Blackboard Jumble(en)

A wolf with a Southern accent walks by just as a teacher is getting fed up with his class and walks out. Unfortunately, the class consists of three junior clones of Droopy, who manage to try his patience.

Madly(en)

Madly explores love in all its permutations in six short films from a vibrant group of filmmakers representing Japan, Argentina, the UK, the US, India, and Australia. All forms of love are on display in this anthology. And all manners of feelings expressed from jubilance to depression are done so strongly.

Thank You Brother!(te)

A story of two contrasting individuals — a wealthy youngster who loves to live life partying and wooing women, without a care in the world for anything else, and a pregnant woman who loses her husband and is struggling in life. The two of them get stuck in a lift for several hours, turning both their lives upside down.

The Young Girl and Hell(fr)

Erotic drama from France featuring beautiful Florence Guerin as a teenager who is switched in by a writer her mom allow us to move around in with them for the summer. The mom would love to get it on because of the writer not comprehending that he's being seduced by her child.

Tigullio minore(it)

In the Tigullio region near Gênes this shortdocumentary shows the funeral of a local fisherman.

The Pink Package Plot(en)

The Pink Panther is forced by a criminal to deliver a package to the Slobvanian Embassy, but must first get past the guard dog.

The Fire(de)

Judith decides to go on her own to the salsa-dancing night, even though her boyfriend, with whom she goes there every week, can’t accompany her. A stranger, with whom she briefly dances, offers to walk her home. Next morning, upon returning home, Judith refuses at first to accept that she’s a rape victim, but in the end decides to go to a doctor and press charges - which prove inadequate to have the rapist convicted. Under the influence of sweeping bodily and mainly psychological oscillations, Judith decides she has to follow an unorthodox path in order to prove the perpetrator’s guilt.

More of This(en)

Two young lovers overcome their biggest obstacle yet as one of them is accepted into a foreign university.

Sorriso Maroto - Eu Gosto Ao Vivo No Maracanãzinho(pt)