Discover Movies

Focuses on the people, their stories and architecture spanning from the mid-1800s, when Shanghai was opened as a trading port, to the present day.

An insight into the everyday lives of 50 inmates of a mental institution in the Chinese province of Yunnan, who are there for killing someone, committing a crime against a public official, or have a developmental disability.

A documentary following five young artists from around China, who travelled to Beijing in the 1980s to work as freelancers, exploring their lives, careers, and what aspirations they may have for the future.

This film depicts the life of an old couple dwelling in the deep mountains, where they live separately in their own caves, like two parallel universes that can never intersect.

The film explores the evolution of the bride price custom (彩礼) in contemporary rural China. It depicts how this tradition, once a cultural practice, has gradually transformed into a problematic "bad habit" (陋习). Under the pressure of exorbitant bride prices, families develop twisted values, worldviews, vanity, and competitive mentalities, creating significant social issues that affect countless rural households.

A documentary about the life of Tsai Chin, one of the first Chinese actresses to break into the West.

This film tells the story of 9 intangible cultural heritages, including Weifang kites, Yangjiabu woodblock New Year paintings, Zhucheng style guqin, Maoqiang, and shuttlecock, as well as the warm stories behind the inheritors. The movie is narrated by Liu Lin and consists of 9 stories. Based on the essence of real life, it breaks the creative framework of documentary and drama films, combines the popularization of intangible cultural heritage with the stories of inheritors through poetic shots, explores the boundary between reality and fiction, and uses reality as the needle and philosophy as the line to outline a life picture where recording and narrative are both external and internal.

After A Bright Summer Diary (IFFR 2020) and Ningdu (IFFR 2022) we once again welcome Lei Lei to Rotterdam with this compelling tribute to bygone images and memories. As always, the mundane comes alive through a conscientious montage of gorgeous compositions. A two-part quest for what has been lost through time, Break no.1 & Break no.2 fires the imagination.

This film was shot between 2014 and 2019 in the town of Zhili, a district of Huzhou City in Zhejiang province, China. Zhili is home to over 18,000 privately-run workshops producing children's clothes, mostly for the domestic market, but some also for export. The workshops employ around 300,000 migrant workers, chiefly from the rural provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, Anhui, Jiangxi, Henan and Jiangsu.

After two failed marriages, Mei still firmly believes in love.

On February 20, 2022, the closing ceremony of the 24th Winter Olympic Games was held at the Beijing National Stadium.

In Chengdu, China, a grandfather get sick and hospitalized. His family accompanied him and commemorated him in their own way. In San Francisco, USA, music therapist Liu Xiaotian sings in order to provide hospice care to those who were dying. The constructed plot and warm records convey to us that in the face of life, old age, illness and death, cherishing the present is the best solution.

For more then twenty years, tons and tons of metallic and electronic waste from all around the world has been transported to a Chinese town called Fengjang, in the south of Shanghai. Around 50,000 migrant workers have formed a real army to dismantle these metallic wastes. These "green soldiers" decompose, cut, split and recycle, with the most rudimentary means, almost 2 million tons of garbage every year. To remain and assume the minimum materials that is theirs, they work hard, bear an incredible precariousness and put in danger their own health due to the simply unacceptable working conditions. As the recognizable heaps of metal continue to pile up they provide a deeply moving image of a worldwide consumer society.

Yaqin is a girl eager to see the world. WANG Jiong is a boy who stakes his career on a confession. These two newly graduated friends both want to escape their families and realise their self-worth. But when an imperfect society collides with an imperfect self, when cheerfulness becomes a mask, and when initial aspirations waver in reality, what kind of people will they turn out to be after this stumbling coming-of-age journey?

Special Film for the 40th anniversary of Tony Leung‘s debut

This is not a documentary describing the filming process of "The Grandmaster", but a record of Wong Kar-wai and Chen Xunqi's personal visits to martial artists all over the mainland to collect valuable martial arts information. It is divided into two episodes.

Twenty years after the modern world's most notorious child murder, the legacy of the crime and its impact are explored.

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 Opening Ceremony of the XIII Paralympic Winter Games, held in Beijing, China at 4 March 2022.

Searching for the house his father grew up in, director Lei Lei charts the story of a childhood in rural China using a mix of found footage, collage, and animation techniques: a moving account of all the things the father thinks he was not good at.

The film prototype Dandong Fengcheng Dali Village Party Committee Secretary Mao Fengmei is a representative of excellent grassroots cadres, he firmly believes that "the Party's policy will have a good day", in more than 30 years as a village cadres, leading the Dali Village party members and the masses to carry forward the spirit of "dry", open up barren mountains, plant fruit trees, tourism, out of an integrated development of agriculture, industry, commerce, trade, travel.

Last year, my mother used her mobile phone to read the news every day to earn gold coins. The gold coins earned at the end of the day could be withdrawn for a few cents. She started to get pain in her wrists from using her cell phone too much. I made a deal with her, asking her to shoot videos for me, and I would give her 1 yuan for each video. Starting from June 30, she would send me videos every week. Until today, she has sent 165 videos, and The materials I shot were edited together to form a book from two places... About the Author Dai Xu, male, born in 1995, is from Yunnan. Graduated from Hebei University, worked in documentary media and short video companies, and now is a bookstore clerk. In 2021, I will film my own life with my mother. The new film "A Book from Two Places" comes from the material shot by myself and my mother.

The No. 6 People’s hospital is one of the largest hospital in Shanghai. Through a range of crossed stories, of weakened lives, this is a portrait of China today that stands out.

Documents the life of the director's friend, a rapper named Liu Shankin, between 2017-2021.

The Greek shadow puppetry began 130 years ago. A student of Greek shadow puppetry travels to China, where shadow puppetry began over 2000 years ago. There he follows Chinese shadow puppeteer master He Shihong in Wushan of China. Watching his performances and listening to him talk about his art and his career in it, many parallels are drawn and he expresses them by including his Greek shadow puppetry teacher in the film. This documentary is a cultural bridge between Greece and China through the art of shadow puppetry.

Along the desert, through the Gobi, across the mountains, bypassing the valley, is a piece of green land. Scattered residents have settled down in various villages by the mountain. The villagers of each town promised to return to the original site where they lived 27 years ago. Grazing sheep, galloping horses, and dog-fighting tournaments, is it the joy of reunion or sacrificial delight?

Part-fiction documentary into the New Silk Road. AAA Cargo traces the anticipation of infrastructure and trade on a planetary scale, following its distribution networks which are expanding across vast regions between China and Europe. Here, government efforts to speed up the movement of trade collide with more-than-human choreographies of sand, people and goods.

A boy and his mother sit in a cardboard car in front of painted landscape. This postcard from his childhood is what triggers Chinese artist Lei Lei to go on a journey down the rabbit hole of memory. Put together with his signature style of melancholic collage, time jitters in and out of its usual flow as screenshots, found photos and propaganda images appear in succession as if pulled through an archaic machine to explore how truth is coloured by nostalgia.

After being steeped in Chinese traditional culture for 30 years, CHEN went to Paris in 1984. The different cultural environments of China and France enabled him to grow into a unique figure in the field of classical music. CHEN neither seeks approval from the West, not even his advisor Olivier Messiaen, nor caters to China. Instead, he uses his personal musical language to tell Eastern stories.

From 2000 to 2008, China was the leading country for U.S. international adoptions. There are now approximately 70,000 Chinese adoptees being raised in the United States. Ninety-five percent of them are girls. Each year, these girls face new questions regarding their adopted lives and surroundings. This is a film about Chinese adopted girls, their American adoptive families and the paradoxical losses and gains inherent in international adoption. The characters and events in this story will challenge our traditional notions of family, culture and race.

Heading south from the 38th parallel, the Shipindao team turned their attention to South Korea. They spent over three hours telling a story of Korea and its history, one that differed from the legends.

Qin, Sonya and Muna are in love with an AI. Their conversations with chatbots allow them to assert themselves and gain confidence in a Chinese society where social pressure on marriage and success is still omnipresent.

"The river Lek reminded me of the river Xiang in my hometown Changsha. I had not been home for 3 years and one of the connections with home was the poems my dad wrote me every day via WeChat. The rivers seemed equally significant for the people in the Netherlands and in Changsha. They are both a romantic connection and an important symbol of daily trade and industry. In a Wechat session my father and I simultaneously read three pairs of poems we wrote for this occasion, he by the Xiang and I by the Lek. Giving the words to the waters that ultimately will meet somewhere in the ocean. The video shows fragments of the performance which took place at the same time in Changsha and Culemborg in June. The full-length documentation is presented as a dual-screen video installation. The three poems written by me can be found on the page "Writing"."

Directed by award winning filmmaker, Zhang Yimou, ninety percent of the film consists of footage shot over six months by 2,000 children using 180 camcorders distributed among 72 schools in Cangxi country in Sichuan Province. The documentary was made as part of Porsche China's fifth anniversary of Empowering the Future Programme and part of its collaboration with UNICEF and the Ministry of Education to improve the quality of education for children in the remotest parts of the country through Mobile Education Training and Resource Units (METRU)

Documentary about the making of Zhang Yimou's fiction movie Shadow.

The film uses a documentary approach to tell the stories of 12 Chinese pioneers, chosen from the fields of business and the arts. The protagonists reflect upon their life journeys against the backdrop of modern China.

Zhao Liang’s film portrays AIDS sufferers of both genders; they are all people with very different biographies. As if it wasn’t bad enough being infected by HIV, their suffering is compounded by the fact that in the People’s Republic of China the disease is hushed up and people living with AIDS are ostracised. In China, the public at large knows very little about the disease and most people associate the virus with promiscuity. This fear of discrimination forces most patients to hide the fact that they are positive. The AIDS sufferers in Zhao Liang’s film were willing to share their experiences with him. The filmmaker was able to make contact with them via internet support groups; he also visited children with Aids at a ‘red ribbon’ school; but above all, he talked to AIDS sufferers during the making of Gu Changwei’s film. It is their presence which lends Changwei’s film its particular authenticity.

China is the first country in the world to classify Internet addiction as a clinical disorder. Caught in the Net features a Beijing treatment center where Chinese teenagers are being "deprogrammed," and follows the story of three boys from the day they arrive at the center, to their three-month treatment period, and their long awaited return home. The film provides a microcosm of modern Chinese life and investigates one of the symptoms of the Internet age. It examines inter-generational pressures and the disregard of the human rights of minors who get caught in the net.

Revisit 100 years of Chinese cinema through the RTHK TV program A Century of Light and Shadow. Aired in 2005, this interesting and informative documentary traces the development of the Chinese film industry from the pioneering years to contemporary times. From the volley between Mandarin and Cantonese films to the rise of the New Wave, this program touches on all the major trends and developments that have helped define Chinese cinema and explores different genres and representative figures and films. From actors to directors, over 200 film industry names, including Jackie Chan, John Woo, Sammo Hung, Connie Chan, Andrew Lau, Peter Chan, and Lau Ching Wan, appear in the program, bringing their intimate knowledge of the industry and providing insight about what lies ahead for Chinese cinema.

In Sichuan's Liangshan mountains, Yi children grow up between tradition and change. When a father returns from prison seeking redemption, he finds that his daughter dreams of basketball but is torn over her schooling, and his son longs to earn money. As summer ends and walnuts ripen, their separate journeys begin.

The 2008 Summer Olympics opening ceremony was held at the Beijing National Stadium, also known as the Bird's Nest. It began at 8:00 p.m. China Standard Time (UTC+8) on August 8, 2008, as 8 is considered to be a lucky number in Chinese culture. Featuring more than 15,000 performers, the ceremony lasted over four hours and cost over $100 million USD to produce.

A propaganda documentary for the 70th anniversary of the Korean War.

December 1944, 24-year-old Wei Shaolan and her 1-year-old daughter were seized and sent to a Japanese camp, where Wei was forced to work as a 'comfort woman' -- a woman forced into prostitution for Japanese servicemen during World War II. Despite being physically and mentally abused, Wei unbelievably escaped the heavily guarded 'Comfort Station' pregnant, shamed, and unsure of what fate awaited her return home. This documentary presents the true legendary story of Wei Shaolan and follows her traumatic and courageous journey from forced prostitution to life today with her Japanese son. 'Real Heroes' are people who can face life bravely even after a tormented life, and Wei's story offers inspiration to those faced with seemingly hopeless adversity.

ZhouZhou was born with a mental handicap on April Fool's Day to a cellist family. He loves to follow his father to attend all his performances. One day, after on interval of a concert, Zhou Zhou takes the baton and starts to conduct the symphony that he has been listening to for years. The result surprises everybody and obviously reveals his inner musician!