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After the COVID-19 time, the weather gradually turned cool and the octogenarian couple led a quiet life. The couple realized that there were only three people left in their generation after stumbling upon a photo. So they decided to visit their relative who lived in another city.

Liu Bocheng’s short but impactful time as the first mayor of Nanjing in 1949 where he showcases his dedication to the city's development and his strong bond with the people during a crucial period in history.

A coming-of-age story about a filmmaker and his family as they struggle to adapt to both a changing world and a traditional one. Can the filmmaker's family accept that he is more interested choosing to document a famine that happened 50 years ago than choosing a wife? Will the family continue to farm their land and grow rice as they always have or sell it to developers? How can they adapt to life in modern China when the country itself is in the midst of identity crisis? The film explores these topics and more in a refreshingly original style that bridges the gap between documentary and narrative feature while providing a delightfully intimate portal into family life in modern China.

In deep Hengduan Mountain Range, western Yunnan of China, there hides a special village which is not known by people outside. All the villagers inhabited here are children between 6 and 14. They live in the village all year round to complete their six-year study in a primary school. Quite a few documentaries focus on this area, but "A student Village" is particularly touching because it portrays the optimism of the poor and shows respect toward them. Upon finishing the film, Director Wei Xing brought it back and showed it in the village. Villagers from miles away walked to the screening and shared in the festival-like atmosphere. The documentary received great feedback after it was broadcast on television.

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.

Starting from a photography workshop for "immigrant children", the filmmaker focuses on Qin, in a harsh and unsettling portrait.

Resulting pic blurs the line between documentary and fiction as Yanagimachi explores the lives of a couple of groups of peddlers, and they appear to act out their personal dramas for the camera.

Part Two: SMALL HAPPINESS - Despite the tremendous advances women in China have made, serious problems continue. Long Bow women talk about love, marriage, work, birth control, birth customs and the now outlawed custom of foot binding. Truly moving interviews with Lingqiao and her mother-in-law draw us into their lives.

China, as we know it today, would not exist without the Han Dynasty. About two millenniums ago, its emperors ruled for over 400 years, and yet, few visible remains of this period exist above ground. Underground, however, it's a different story. Join a team of archaeologists as they enter the royal tombs of three emperors spanning the reign of the Han Dynasty. By excavating these sites, they hope to further our knowledge of their wealth, their beliefs, their quest for immortality, and how their culture and philosophy shaped modern China.

SUPER, GIRLS! follows ten female teenagers on their quest to become instant superstars on China's biggest television show. The Chinese equivalent of "American Idol," the "Super Girls Singing Contest" spawned an unprecedented pop culture phenomenon. Drawing over 400 million viewers, the show's runaway popularity spurred the Chinese government to ban it after only two seasons.

The third part in Wu Wenguang's Autobiography film series.

A documentary film produced by the Central Newsreel and Documentary Film Studio of China in May 1971 in support of the just struggle of the Palestinian and Arab peoples against American imperialism and its Zionist running dog.

Class 172 is a key class for their excellent students of an ordinary secondary school in Hunan province, from which the kids’ main goal is to upgrade into one of the best province-level high school – No.1 high school of the county. In the recent few years, the school’s enrollment rate to high school was not quite satisfying, and this year, the newly promoted class in charge teacher – Mr. Xiang, who’s only graduated a few years ago, became their brightest hope to teach the students and raise the enrollment rate for school.

Documentary on the nature scenery of Heilongjiang.

In this talk, Li Hongqi reviewed his transition from fine art to cinema, and his aesthetic and philosophical exploration from his early 'So Much Rice' to recent 'The The'. Dir. Li Hongqi also shared his strong anxiety of his existence(born with melancholia), his thought on cinema art (actually, I don't think there's any movie worth making), his epistemology, his religious view, his consideration on contemporary cinema, and what he learned about living in seclusion.

With the opening up of the economy, grassroots democracy has come. But since the land is owned by the state, the local government actually has absolute control. The so-called democratically elected village chief quickly learns that his role is to cooperate with the government in using land to develop the economy. Power-to-money transactions are open secrets. Due to the uneven economic development in the villages, each has a different story, but the use of land for profit is a constant theme. The filming location is a rural village in the outside Beijing. Less of focus is how villages elect than the mutation after. Faced with huge land assets and overseeing relationships between land, power, economics, social systems, how does a hard-working, upright peasant conduct himself? This film documents the pain: the experience of soul sublimation and degeneration. We see 'birth defects' in this "democracy" — one without checks and balances, grafted onto autocracy.

The world is full of flaws; life is far-from-perfect. It is all the more challenging for people with disabilities. Joanna and King are facing their darkness, as they are losing their eyesight bit by bit. Baobao is hearing-impaired since birth, she cannot communicate with the others but her greatest desire is to speak and express herself. Hazel has cerebral palsy and cannot walk; even though wheelchair can replace her legs, she is fed up with the prolonged pain. Life is strenuous, but Joanna, King, Baobao and Hazel rediscovered the passion for life when they embarked on a journey to the theatre stage, making the impossible possible. Light Up is a documentary about the struggle of the four protagonists against their personal restraints in the Hand in Hand Capable Theatre, witnessing how they made their way to the stage after difficult but ultimately positive training and rehearsals.

After the electricity went off, many eyes grew from the playground.

In China, boutique agencies hire foreigners to stand around and make people and places appear more prestigious to the Chinese gaze. What underpins this widespread cultural phenomenon?

A filmmaker and rapper duo revive Michel Gondry’s “Be Kind Rewind” protocols - a set of filmmaking “rules” with which groups of strangers can conceive, shoot, and screen a film in just two and a half hours. Against the grim backdrop of the stringent Shanghai lockdown, the event soon turns into a sanctuary for individuals to forge collective dreams.

This correspondence between Spanish auteur Jaime Rosales and critical chronicler of contemporary China Wang Bing is divided into three short films each consisting of documentary observations.

Aspiring Chinese athletes and their international coaches arrive in the island of Hainan. Together, they attempt to become the country’s first Olympic surfers. Surf Nation follows this team and two of China’s top surfers, Alex and Lolo, as they train, compete and discover what they want their lives to be.

During Luo Bing's second return to his village, Ren Dingqi finally accepts to showhim his memoirs.

The village of Haiyang on the Liaodong peninsula boasts 1,200 hectares of beaches rich in clams. At low tide, thousands of people walk nine kilometers there and back to collect clams. This documentary records their labor.

Thirteen dinners of a Chinese migrant worker's family over the course of fourteen months. The film portrays a series of random occurrences. Joys, frustrations and the struggle for survival. The meals unfold in real-time through thirteen static, long takes. Each take captures with vivid detail the reality of the relationships between the different family members. As the seasons unfold, so does time and the echoes for better working conditions penetrate the frame. Issues such as the one-child-policy and the possibilities for better wages weigh heavily on the minds of the three-generation family.

Yang Yi and Brother Qi are like birds of feathers, both of them stepped into the society at around 16 or 17, they led the followers, collected the debt, solved problems, fought, thrived, it was in the 90s of last century. Now, they are in their middle age. Every time in reminisce, they would sigh how things have changed.

Wang Peiying, a widow with seven children, was a worker at the Ministry of Railways. The famine precipitated by the Great Leap Forward, which killed perhaps 30 million people by the early 1960s, had horrified her, and as political turmoil began again only a few years later, she publicly called on China’s leader, Mao Zedong, to take responsibility for his mistakes and resign. Ms. Wang was sent to a psychiatric hospital and drugged. Released and paraded around the capital, she refused to recant. Instead, she repeated her accusations. Her jaw was broken to stop her from talking. After a mass trial at the Workers’ Stadium on Jan. 27, 1970, she was executed.

Documentary series on the students of reform schools in Beijing. Originally edited into a six-episode TV series and later a 90-minute feature film version was made.

A documentary shot over the course of five years telling five stories in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics: the construction of the Bird's Nest Olympic Stadium, Gold medal hopeful & Olympic hurdler Liu Xiang, the selection of the Chinese women's gymnastics team, the training of the Beijing SWAT team, and the story one of the 4000 families relocated to make room for the Olympic Athlete's Village.

The story is about Lao Jia, a farmer on Chongming Island, Shanghai. On this island, he applies natural farming to show his wish and love to the land. Lao Jia calls himself a natural farmer. He left the metropolis Shanghai and his wife LiZi for Chongming Island three year ago. There Lao Jia contracted a farmland of about 25 acres. Without using any fertilizers or chemicals, he believes in his land and tries to plant with an ancient agriculture philosophy of returning the land to nature, which is the so called natural farming. Lao Jia said: “Farming helps people to find back some simple but real things in life, and the farmers’ emotions will in return affect the land and the plants.” Now there are many people who agree with his idea. But the reality is cruel, when Lao Jia described to me his wish to his land, problems keeps cropping up to test his attitude of “re-discovering the love to land”.

In Shenzhen, Guangdong province, Yu Liang Yuan (21 years old) and his father, Yu Ting Yong (45 years old), on the occasion of the celebration of the Chinese New Year, are getting ready to begin their annual journey from the industrial colony where they work and live to their hometown in Henan. This year, however, appears to be crucial for the future of both of them.

A subtle combination of documentary and fiction filmmaking, Luo Li’s remarkable Rivers and My Father was inspired by stories from his father’s childhood. Li inventively structures sound, image and narration, evoking the ways in which memory operates.

The film is for the 1st Moscow Biennale. The director's father, Cao Chongen, is a famous sculpture artist. Ever since his juvenile time, he has been engaged in producing the sculptures of those who were the exemplars in industry, agriculture and military, together with the political and cultural figures as well as the leaders of Communist Party. In order to celebrate the centenary anniversary of Deng Xiaoping, he was assigned by a former revolutionary base in Guangxi Province a full length sculpture of young Deng Xiaoping, particular the "A Journey of Deng Xiaoping's footprints" was put forward as a tourism brand of Red Classic. Following Father's sculpture, the director stepped on this Red Journey. With the giant sculpture stands erect, a relationship between Father's artist ideal and present reality was unfolded evidently to the furthest.

Based on three different places, the film portrays the infractions to which people living in modern day China are subjected due to rapid developments: in the deceptively idyllic Yangshuo in the rainy south; in the apocalyptic coal mining site of Wuhai in the parched north; and in Chongqing, the urban behemoth on the Yangtze River. The protagonists give their accounts of the unsurmounted past, the precarious present and their tentative steps into the future. The film thus paints a complex image of the mental state of the people in this complicated country.

On September 30, 2021, musician Yiran Zhao died of illness, ending his legendary life. He lived passionately, loved deeply, and brought a lot of music and joy to friends and his fans. In his later years, Zhao was tormented by illness, living in isolation and rarely seeing friends. "Farewell to 1988" records his life in rural Beijing suburbs from 2017 to 2020. audiences can get a glimpse of Mr. Zhao under the stage, his illness, his persistence and rejection, his thoughts and regrets.

Educational film about the scenery and people at the Kanas Lake region.

In Comedy Family Style, stand-up comic Helen brings her son to Beijing to connect with their roots. He wants Wi-Fi and boba—she wants gratitude. Between culture clashes and punchlines, they confront the gap between love and perception, asking: How do we know we matter to the people we love.

There are two large talent markets in a Shenzhen called Sanhe in Longhua District, Shenzhen. In the alleys around the market, there are small hotels, small supermarkets, and cheap Internet cafes. Many young people live here for a long time, and they may not have ID cards. Perhaps they are burdened with huge debts, and some of them cut off contact with their families and linger in Internet cafes all day long. They have become popular on the Internet with the survival method of "you can play three days a day, one day."

Chinese lesbian couple Sesame and Bean had to travel thousands of miles away from home to get married and again to get pregnant as both are illegal for same-sex couples in their own country. Now they are determined to create a more rainbow-friendly society for their babies.

Two orphaned teenage brothers leave their remote mountain village behind to seek their fortune in two separate major cities. Meanwhile, their young neighbors anxiously await the return of their father, a migrant worker who left the village a year ago. This is the story of four boys from the Chinese countryside, their hopes and dreams, and the challenges they face.

The film was made in 1935 in what is now Inner Mongolia, but which was then part of Japan's puppet state of Manchukuo or Manchuria, explaining the presence of Manchu officials sporting queues and pointed tasselled hats, both of which had disappeared by this time in the rest of republican China.

Yuguo, from Mongolia, lost his father when he was very young. His mother Liuxia was not able to raise him as a heavy drinker. With social support, she sent Yuguo to Wuxi for free education. Liuxia is depressed all day long, and she finds sustenance of missing Yuguo in reindeer and wine. One winter holiday after many years, Yuguo returns to his hometown, the Evenki settlement deep in the Greater Khingan mountains. At that time, he is no longer the boy who just left home, but a thirteen-year-old teenager. Facing alcoholic mother, poetic uncle, pure people from the tribe, familiar yet strange forest, Yuguo, who grew up in the city, doesn’t know what to do. In the snow-laden mountains of Aoluguya, northeast of Inner Mongolia, the film chronicles their brief time together. Yuguo and His Mother is the second documentary of Gu Tao’s Evenki trilogy.

Hakka, a special and little-known ethnic group in Hainan, is a branch of the Chinese Hakka system that has been neglected. They are far from the mainland, and they are rarely mentioned. The relatively closed environment has allowed the Central Plains culture to be completely preserved. After that, it has formed a special change with the ethnic minorities such as Li Miao. However, this unique traditional culture is now fading away in the erosion of modern civilization.

Twenty-something Peng Tian returns to China after studying in London. He feels adrift. His friends are enjoying themselves, his father wanders around chanting advertising slogans, while his mother expounds her inevitable plan for his brilliant future: boss, father, business owner. Sprawled on the couch, he tries to resist the demands of a rapidly evolving Chinese society.

A documentary produced to disseminate historical truth about the 1937 Nanjing Massacre to international audiences. It records the Shorinji Kempo Organization of Japan’s 40th-anniversary visit to China, but rather than serving as a simple travelogue, it uses the 299 participants’ journey—beginning in Nanjing—as a confrontation with the facts of Japan’s wartime aggression and the choices demanded in the present. Through Chinese filmmakers’ perspectives, testimony, archival images, and narration addressing the Nanjing Massacre, nuclear war, militarization, and historical responsibility, the film asks viewers to reject indifference, self-justification, and the concealment of inconvenient history. It argues that peace cannot remain an abstract ideal or be left to governments and power-seekers; each person must begin from the shared human right to survival, face history honestly, and choose concrete action toward mutual understanding and peace.

The baby is a temporary floating population. He works diligently, from a small restaurant owner to a tea shop manager to a bar manager. This film records the survival state of children centered and gay comrades: trivial, messy, boring, and entertaining themselves. The camera calmly captures every bit of their daily life for more than two years, and as time goes by, the changes the baby presents are more ordinary. The film calmly explains the relationship between "comrades" and "society", and the various small details interpenetrated in the film also metaphorically reflect the changes of today's society

Documentary on the Tangshan earthquake made for the 30-year memorial.

In Taiwan, there was once a voice, connecting the north and south, hiding amongst the common people, bitterly hated by the ruling power that wished him bound and silenced. It became the song of democracy, the people's requiem, and the horn of freedom. For decades, WU Le-tian narrated the famous story of Taiwan’s very own virtuous thief – Taiwan’s Robin Hood – "LIAO Tian-ding". In the era of martial law, he used fantastic stories as a cover for arousing rebellion, and a guerrilla-style strategy to disrupt the state media. With an audience of millions, the common people was viewed WU as their very own Robin Hood! Surviving prison, escaping the jaws of death and disappearing without a trace for a decade, rumours have unceasingly circulated about the reappearance of the legendary virtuous thief.Today, in the raging storms of social unrest and rebellion, the legend has indeed quietly reappeared. The hero is alive! (docs.tfi.org.tw)