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In the Chinese countryside, an old woman tells the story of her deceased son, while a little girl paints her dreams on the walls of the house. A personal and attentive perspective on the territory, which articulates the memory of a disappearing generation and the hopes of the one to come.
Several boys who are about to graduate live in the 2006 dormitory. All-day long eating, chatting, playing cards, and playing with mobile phones, to kill their youth, just to get a high school diploma. Finally, I graduated from high school, but where is the future? Go to work or continue to join a college? Facing such students, it is difficult for teachers to show enthusiasm for teaching. Only Teacher Hou carefully wiped the bulletin board , as always. The original site of Duancun Middle School in Pingyao County was an ancient temple in the Ming Dynasty. In the summer of 2011, more than 150 students from the school merged with two other high schools and moved into the new school in the city. Grass grows on the playground, and the gatekeeper Laomi and his family continue to live in the teaching building.
A former gangster gains new prestige in his small mining community when he displays an uncanny ability to predict the deaths of people around him.
After being abandoned for nearly seven decades, the old tribal village is difficult to reach with almost no roads leading to it. The only guide on our journey in search of our roots is Wilang, who drags his octogenarian body up the mountain. As we follow Wilang’s footsteps, we travel a tunnel back in time...
What is going on in Chinese elementary schools where students go to school with red scarfs? The film captures the campus life of students and teachers in detail, such as gossiping in teacher's rooms, fighting among students, students being punished, school gatherings that are overly orderly, military like class recitals, and teachers who are already deeply captivated by the school system. Strangely, the images of the Chinese elementary school seem very familiar to viewers. Except for the few scenes such as kids pledging themselves to the Communists and dancing with red outfits, the teachers' attitude, school system, and students, seem to capture those of the Korean elementary school. Because of such similarity through the film, we Koreans will naturally reflect upon our memories than try to understand Chinese culture. One may ask what elementary school education has done to us. Interestingly, we Koreans can look at ourselves us through China.
Wanderlust refers to the desire to wander, to explore the world, be free, and feel like a stranger in your surroundings. When the wanderlust takes over you, you know that the adventure has begun, but not where or when it ends. And how do you make a documentary without an end? This is one of the questions that directors Cristiana Pecci and Matteo Maggi ponder on his film The Fifth Sun.
In the village of Doupo, Pianxian Township, Pengyang County, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, there is a villager named Xu Wenwen. He is a Feng Shui master and who goes by the name “Yin Yang.” Due to the drought in the mountainous areas, it is difficult for farmers to use water for both domestic and agricultural purposes. In order to solve the problem of farmers' water use, Pengyang County Water Conservancy Bureau plans to help farmers repair the water cellar through government subsidies, so that the rainy season can be stored in the cellar and then used for farming, but due to limited funds, it is not Every family can receive subsidies, so everyone decides the right to play in the cellar by grasping the way. The cellar is laid, the water storage is increased, and the corn is also planted. The life of the mountain people seems to have hope.
In southwestern China, state athletic coaches scour the countryside to recruit poor, rural teenagers who demonstrate a natural ability to throw a good punch. Moved into boxing training centers, these boys and girls undergo a rigorous regimen that grooms them to be China’s next Olympic heroes but also prepares them for life outside the ring. As these young boxers develop, the allure of turning professional for personal gain and glory competes with the main philosophy behind their training – to represent their country. Interconnected with their story is that of their charismatic coach, Qi Moxiang, who – now in his late thirties and determined to win back lost honor – trains for a significant fight.
The movie tells an intimate story of one woman's journey that questions traditional notions of family and identity, revealing the wounds that tear at the heart of Chinese society in the aftermath of the one-child policy.
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.
Zhou Hao's father was criticized and beaten during the Cultural Revolution. Though he was born with a congenital intellectual disability, Zhou Hao's parents loved him very much, and created a unique world with his unique talent for imitation. Since he was a child, Zhou Hao attended church with his grandmother, so he was able to recite passages from the bible despite never having been to school. Because he tries to persuade people to love each other, everyone calls him Little Angel. Now, he is more than 30 years old. In rural house churches where many people are illiterate, Zhou Hao has become their preacher. In this film, the camera observes the adult child, situating his behavior in the context of a real society lacking love and faith. The story captures the concrete influence of the old political madness on an ordinary couple; however, it is this child who still retains innocence and fantasy, reflecting the spiritual deficiencies and the absurdity of secular society.
The 23-year-old director, fresh out of university, lives at home with her mother and grandmother. She rebels against them but also tries to understand the generation gap between them. While she gets angry and questions their expectations of her as a woman (i.e., to marry and have children), she also gropes for the meaning of real love. Along with her mother and grandmother, the three women wring out their loves and hates with explosive strength. The director in her performance piece uses her own body to project the images of her mother, turning her lost loves into springboards, practically jumping out of the screen so she can shout with all her might.
An intimate portrait of three Chinese women in different stage of their marriage, representing 16 million other women who are deceived into marriage by their gay husbands.
On October 24th, a concert named "Yellow River Ballad—Wild Children Band 20th Anniversary Concert," organized by Shu Music, will be held at the Workers' Gymnasium in Beijing. It will feature an extravagant lineup of folk music's golden generation, including Wan Xiaoli, Xiaohe, Zhou Yunpeng, Wu Tun, Hu Defu, and the "King of Chinese Rock Stage," Xie Tianxiao, taking turns to witness and participate in this extraordinary musical event. In addition to Beijing, the Wild Children Band's 20th-anniversary concert will also take place on a grand stage in Shanghai. However, the significance of the Wild Children band within the folk music community over the past twenty years far exceeds the significance of this performance.
In a nursing home in the northeast of China, the last stages of the lives of the elderly are dramatized. At the same time, the director, as the filmmaker, becomes an actor in this life drama.
Filmed over 17 years across Southern China, this remarkable film is an intimate and heart-wrenching portrait of Li Ermao, a transgender migrant worker, who performs in clubs looking for love and acceptance. Living as a “ladyboy” with a string of boyfriends, she faces repeated encounters of prejudice and aggression with equal measures of resilience and vulnerability. With a flair for the dramatic and her budding career as a popstar, Ermao’s story takes many dramatic twists and surprising turns as she moves between the urban and the rural, searching for identity and fighting for a better life.
Old Jia gave up his city life and returned to the countryside with his wife. He abandoned chemical fertilizer to practice natural farming. His philosophy attracted a big group of admirers from the city, whereas local villagers disagreed on his approaches.
Ryuji Otsuka and Huang Ji are the ‘main characters' in this very personal homemade documentary that's funny, angry, scary and stirring all at once. He's the Japanese director of the film; she's his wife and a prizewinning filmmaker in her own right. For independent artists and filmmakers, finding an affordable place to live with their young daughter is a never-ending struggle. A side effect of China's astonishing prosperity is sky-high property prices – about $10,000 per square metre in Beijing. The landlords, movers and neighbours they encounter seem bent on driving them nuts. But never underestimate the resilience, determination and lung power of enraged, protective young Chinese parents. Otsuka's sometimes concealed camera reveals intimately how life feels, from ground level, in urban China today.
There is a sports meeting in the forest, and Axiong, Azhu and the first "donkey champion" in the last competition signed up for cross-country running. Before the opening of the sports meeting, Ah Xiong and Ah Zhu practice hard every day, but the donkey champion thinks that the opponent is too weak, and he can securely win the first place without practicing.
They are four of the most successful businesswomen in China: Belonging to a generation who experienced the austerity of China's cultural revolution, followed by the subsequent economic boom, they have worked their way to the very top in a patriarchal society. Today, Yang Lan is the owner of one of the leading private media companies. Dong Mingzhu is a tenacious female CEO, heading up the world's largest manufacturer of air conditioning systems. Zhang Lan is a tycoon in the luxury restaurant business. Zhou Yi is a top manager working for a big american IT company. How were these careers built? What are the social and economic contexts in which they operate? And what do these women think about the political, social and cultural state of their country?
In 2010, while he was filming "Three Sisters" in the mountain of Yunnan province, Wang Bing met two teenagers, Yonggao and Yongjin, whose father, a stonemason, had gone to the city in the hope of finding work. Wang Bing met up with them again in 2014, when they had been reunited with their father after four years in Fumin. For about a month, Wang Bing filmed their daily lives in the single squalid room that was their home. The fixed camera recorded the micro-events that punctuated their days : their father leaving for work, the youngsters themselves waking up, breakfast time, in front of the television, etc.
A documentary about Tibetan divorce and orphan issues
Documentary on Tibet co-directed by Chen Zhen and Li Ying.
On October 3rd, 2016, I went on a journey with my college roommate to revisit the places I once passed by back in 2009.
Poet and photographer Ren Hang was renowned for his sensual images of Chinese youth, and in I've Got a Little Problem, Zhang chronicles the artist's struggle with the depression, public morality, and painful criticism that sent his life spiraling out of control.
Chinese poet Xiuhua Yu, who has cerebral palsy, became instantly famous when her poems went viral on social media. When it happened she was stuck in a violent and loveless marriage in rural China. Director Jian Fan’s award-winning 2016 documentary Still Tomorrow followed her throughout her breakthrough year, when she gained the financial freedom to end her marriage. All that was missing was love.
Li Xinmin's first return to her village in Yunnan province. Alongside interviews with some village elders, the film reveals the filmmaker's family and their views on her film project.
"Birds would fly, China caged at all." Unlike the West, China and its economic activities fend for themselves during the COVID-19 pandemic. The exports have been halted overall due to the Chinese CCP's confidence in the totalitarian control and the mirage of domestic economic resurgence throughout the socio-political regime. The countless factories and plants like I recorded this time were scraped by the stress. China re-enters a dilemma of self-consuming, selling at home and being like the rest part of the world as well as enclosed again, similar as the circling laborers in this documentary film. The impacts spread to at least millions of manufacturing are as such as the Shangyu, Wufu plant in Zhejiang Province.
A documentary on the filming of the movie Red Cliff
This is a surrealistic documentary with a strong format which is based on the point of view of author. Tan can't fall in sleep in the night, is that because too noisy in the world, or it's just her thoughts bothering herself? It seems life itself it's a mixture with the reality and the dreams.
This is a lifelong love story that endures as times change in China. When Rao Pingru's wife Mao Meitang passed away, he began to paint memories of their lives – together and apart. He looked back and reflected, on love and sufferings, on happiness and death. In 2018, his painted book became a hit in countries including Britain, the U.S., France, Spain, and South Korea. CGTN has now reproduced his story, based on his life, words, and paintings.
The artist works around the different individual experiences which consolidates the different changes in the body while examines intimate relationships under the structure of the disease, all by making her experience visible and public. Within the realms of Ruijing’s discussions, she hopes for the work to push the boundaries of the marginality of the body, for the work to allow oneself to look at their and others’ body in an objective manner that escapes the ontological. She further wished for the experience of living and the reflection on the mass would help the discovery of the self and its connection with society, while reflecting on life itself by doing so.
Finalist for the 1991 Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. The pottery produced in Penyao Village, Henan Province, is black, which is the same texture of the exquisite pottery of Longshan culture in China in 2000 BC. In the village, these black pottery basins and black pottery jars are indispensable to life. Wang Zhengcheng began to learn how to make pottery at the age of 13. He has always wanted to become an excellent craftsman like his grandfather in order to restore the glory of his family.
Yu Opera is the most important local opera in Henan, China. Because of the large population migration caused by the civil war in 1949, Yu Opera went from Henan to Vietnam, and finally moved to Taiwan and took root in Taiwan. Today, Yu Opera has become a Taiwanese Yu Opera, with traditions, innovations, homesickness and local presence.
An uncomfortable encounter between the filmmaker and the famed artist.
With a contemplative letter to a friend as its point of departure, this video essay examines the complex, paradoxical visuality of the atom bomb in China. From 1960s military documentaries to contemporary CGI-enhanced fictions, a visual trope of the communal “People’s Bomb” was orchestrated in counterpoint to the evils of imperialism and the untamed wilderness of the Gobi Desert. Amid the ecological crises of the Anthropocene, Letter to T suggests that despite the disenchantment with and the re-politicisation of the image, we might find radical sources of connection and endurance in nuclearity.
Pebble is about the life of a young Chinese christian who lived a hobo life in Beijing, battling a rare disease that’s slowly killing him. Tired of waiting for God’s salvation, one day he decided to go home.
Zou Xueping continues to interview old people in her village, this time with the help of local children. They start collecting names and money to erect a memorial for the victims of the famine.
This documentary is named after the well known novel (and later propaganda film) of the same title, which offered a telling of an historic event in 1946 in Northeastern China, when the CCP initiated Land Reform as a means of attracting peasants to join-up with the PLA and help seize state power. Decades later, residents who are still alive and can recall those days offer their personal memories of the class struggle that erupted in Yuanbao Village. Meanwhile, in today's Yuanbao, the local cultural bureau is setting up the Museum of Land Reform as a memorial and a space for education.
This documentary traces Shanghai’s experimental music scene through Shanghai Community Radio founders, with sound and music framing both the city’s fragmented underground and the challenges of censorship in 2020.
Documentary short film by Zhang Yiqing.
An elderly woman decides when to reveal her decision about the inheritance after her passing.
In 1972, Xu Xing wrote the first love letter of his life and sent it to a girl in school, whose parents had been sent to the countryside. Not knowing, what to do with it, she showed the anonymous letter to her teacher. Xu Xing was identified as author through his handwriting, and was detained…In this autobiographical piece, Xu Xing tells the story of his own experiences of the Cultural Revolution by tracing his personal encounters of the past in contemporary China.
Nilufer marries her husband at a young age despite her mother’s objection. Now, with a child, life after marriage is not as wonderful as she imagined but she has to live with her choice. This documentary presents a young housewife’s life in an objective perspective. In the film, Nilufer talks about her dreams with passion, but the life she is living is totally different. She remains optimistic about her future, although it seems like she is trying to numb herself with her dreams so that she can stay strong in real life.
Video essay ‘Rock and Cliff' investigates the creation of Horn Town, a new model village and centre of large scale tourist development, and the experiences of rural residents moved there through government-led displacement. Horn Town is located in Wulong, a rural district near the Three Gorges Dam administered by the Chongqing municipality (a city of 30 million people). Narrated in the style of a science documentary but using local Chongqing dialect, the video brings a geological and topographical perspective to types of 'rocks' found in the area,from mythological stones from a mountain cliff, to ruins of the original settlement, to a stone sculpture from a dubious 'Land Art Biennial', in order to address issues of land acquisition, top-down development and spatial politic.
Chinese photographer Weicheng Hua meets the vagabond Zhighuo Sun in 2015 at an amusement park just outside Chongqing. Hua’s first film is an affectionate portrait of the drug-using, possibly psychotic, sensitive and always cheerful Sun, who moves through the amusement park like a kind of shaman, holding forth about mystical concepts such as “the principle of zero” and “understanding the self.” The central figure seems to fit perfectly into this odd environment.
What does subtitle translation mean in my eyes? I have devoted my youth and effort of 4 years of campus life and 2 years of work life. When I have given up translating subtitle, I want to look back to and remember such a bygone by documentary. Subtitle is equal to public: By this documentary I want to show how a cinephile makes a link with film and makes effect to more cinephile in such a special situation in China. This documentary also displays a tip of the iceberg of the cinephile cultural history in China. Subtitle is equal to privacy: I hope to experience the progress of subtitle translation again, in order to cast my ambition and burden in the old days. I want to say goodbye to that ego with subtitle translation and move forwards to that ego with indie-documentary direction. I want to search more possibilities to the films.