Discover Movies

2,122 Matches Found

Taiwan: The Generation After Martial Law

This program illustrates how video activists have developed sophisticated use of small format video, with poetic and powerful imagery, complex mixes of sounds and scores and an effective editing style that belies the urgency under which it is being made. The video movement in Taiwan has made successful use of home cassette distribution, via both mail and street vendors. The Green Team collective has pioneered in this effort with over 100 titles in distribution, documenting the struggles of farmers, students, workers and environmentalists.

Taiwan: The Generation After Martial Law

7.0 1990
Divine Doctor

Guan Kuanyi is seventy-six years old this year, and is the only surviving shaman of the Elunchun. Every first or fifteenth day, Guankani put tribute on the throne and worshiped the gods in the traditional way. After recovering from an illness, Guan Kuanyi had a mindset and hoped that in his lifetime, he could find a shaman's heir and inherit this ancient religious culture. But the young people no longer believe in the gods, which has become the biggest obstacle for Guan Kanni to find his heir. She focused on her daughter, Daisy, and her son, Rongrong ... Recording Notes November 22, 2007 In the morning, the world has become quiet, silent, simple and pure. I began to enter the state, into the world of shaman.

Divine Doctor

NR 2011
Punks from Afar

In 2017, four bands from the Chinese mainland toured in Taiwan. It marks a historic moment in the cross-strait subcultural communication. The tour is the biggest underground rock event made by rock bands from the Chinese mainland in Taiwan. With the GT Bitches's tour as the main plot, the film is an interview of 10 punk bands, gig organizers,and music fans from the Chinese mainland and Taiwan. What is the punk cultural difference across the strait? The interview in the film might provide a partial answer…

Punks from Afar

NR 2018
The Land of Many Palaces

In Ordos, China, thousands of farmers are being relocated into a new city under a government plan to modernize the region. "The Land of Many Palaces" follows a government official whose job is to convince these farmers that their lives will be better off in the city, and a farmer in one of the last remaining villages in the region who is pressured to move. The film explores a process that will take shape on an enormous scale across China, since the central government announced plans to relocate 250,000,000 farmers to cities across the nation, over the next 20 years.

The Land of Many Palaces

5.0 2015
Daba - Portrait of a Na Shaman

After more than a quarter of a century without any form of religious ceremony, the Na, an ethnic group living on the Himalayan plateau, began openly practising their religion again in the early 1990s. Their priests are called daba. Among the few old shamans who are still living today, Dafa Luzo is the most remarkable. As the main character in the film, we see him looking after his farm and his family, as well as performing rituals to expel all unclean spirits and demons and honour the ancestors. His main worry, and his greatest hope, is to make sure his knowledge is safely handed down to the next generation.

Daba - Portrait of a Na Shaman

NR 1999
The New Shelter

A terrible flood destroys the home of the AH family in a small village in China's Southern Guangdong province. Life was already a constant struggle for them, but this disaster turns their existence into a nightmare. Over a period of 12-months the filmmaker follows the family during the challenging period of building a new shelter. During this time they will have to confront many obstacles, material and emotional as well as those associated with local and regional governments, which in the end profoundly changes them forever.

The New Shelter

NR 2012
My Wedding Album

Wedding photos are the development of emotions. The unique cultural etiquette and true temperament of the Chinese society are all recorded in the wedding photos. It makes everyone believe that this is a dream factory that can exchange money for concrete happiness. Before entering into marriage, the prince and princess are looking forward to a happy and happy love and future. On the other side, the couple who are already in marriage, what they hear is a frank conversation between them. Looking back at the photo that symbolizes the marriage contract, what kind of form does the "intimacy", "happiness", or "love" between the two transform into?

My Wedding Album

NR 2019
The Rib of the Greater Bay Area

Fragmented coastal scenes scattered across the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area: a security guard on duty at a Shenzhen beach, a woman posing for bridal photos along the West Kowloon Waterfront Promenade, children playing in the shallows beneath a bridge, the transparent glass interior of the M+ Museum, the rooftop of Sky100, the upper reaches of the Pearl River, and the waterfront of Victoria Harbour in Hong Kong, among others. Most of these filming locations were chosen from lists of photogenic sites popular on Xiaohongshu (RedNotes), i.e. places that have become “internet-famous” through a single viral post, attracting waves of photographers and tourists. Yet the artist deliberately diverges from these original images, turning away from the sharply defined details and edges of these celebrated sites. Instead, the camera retreats into marginalized zones at the limits of visibility, areas suffused with blinding halos of light.

The Rib of the Greater Bay Area

NR 2026
Tape (Jiao Dai)

With groundbreaking honesty, performance artist Li Ning turns his life into art in this epic work of experimental documentary. For five grueling years, Li Ning documents his struggle to achieve success as an avant-garde artist while contending with the pressures of modern life in China. He is caught between two families: his wife, son and mother, whom he can barely support; and his enthusiastic but disorganized guerilla dance troupe. Li's chaotic life becomes inseparable from the act of taping it, as if his experiences can only make sense on screen. Tape shatters documentary conventions, utilizing a variety of approaches, including guerilla documentary, experimental street video, even CGI. Much like Jia Zhangke's Platform, Tape captures a decade's worth of artistic aspirations and failures, while breaking new ground in individual expression in China.

Tape (Jiao Dai)

NR 2010
Devoted Love

The Ewenki people, who live in the Daxinganling Mountains, have been infected by modern life, with most of their young people moving away from reindeer herding and the forest, and the old fading fast. But there are still some of them who have stuck to the forest and lived with the reindeer, never leaving them. They want their culture to be inherited, not to disappear, because it is something they have loved all their lives. The film focuses on the life of the director's grandmother, Balajeyi.

Devoted Love

NR 2016
Stone Town

The easternmost fishing town in China sits on the cusp of radical change, as this quietly devastating film details. Once a major hub for the Chinese fishing industry, Stone Town is facing seismic change. With its economic bedrock at risk, the small, secluded town is turning towards tourism as a way to support its local population. Jing Guo and Dingding Ke’s film balances intimate portraits of the townsfolk, whose lives are impacted by the coming change, with a wider perspective on the modernisation project driven by Xi Jinping’s government. The filmmakers capture the anxiety, sorrow and confusion of the people, in tandem with a perspective on a burgeoning environmental crisis, the ramifications of political turbulence and injustice at the way rapid modernisation impacts everyday lives. Stone Town is a compelling portrait of a world where feelings of despair and frustration are drowned by late-night drinks and non-stop karaoke singing in dingy bars.

Stone Town

NR 2023
Religion

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.

Religion

NR 2006
He Film

The Chinese government provides the villages in the mountains of Sichuan (China) with films. The main character of this film is a projectionist who, 37 years ago, used to carry his old projector on foot and bicycle. He would display a small screen across the road or between trees in front of a farm... It's the same today except that he rides a motorcycle, carries a large screen and that the films travel two thousand kilometers from Beijing to Chengdu by satellite, before he picks them up on his motorcycle. Up in the mountains, people bring a stool out on the road and watch. That story takes place in Beijing and the beautiful mountains covered with bamboos above Chengdu

He Film

5.7 2011
One Tree Three Lives

One Tree Three Lives, an intimate film on the novelist Hualing Nieh Engle, who has been a major influence on generations of writers in the Chinese Diaspora, and beyond. The director has known the author and her family since the Seventies. The film reveals a woman of unusual charisma, integrity and determination, and a person in continual exile. She is the author of 24 books. She also co-founded the International Writing Program in Iowa, USA, with her now deceased husband, the poet Paul Engle. One Tree Three Lives is also their love story.

One Tree Three Lives

9.0 2012
The Sisters of Baima Tibetan

Set against the backdrop of the reconstruction of the Baima villages in Pingwu, the film follows the daily lives of four sisters and their family in the Baima Eri Village. Interwoven with memories from two decades ago, it traces their journey of resilience and renewal amid the sweeping changes of the times. Through their personal stories, the film also reveals the living heritage of the Baima Tibetan culture — its legends, songs, dances, language, and the traditional ritual of Cao Gai — offering a poetic reflection on identity, endurance, and the passage of time.

The Sisters of Baima Tibetan

NR 2025
Foolish Village

This is my fifth time coming back to my own village, where I was born and brought up. After I graduated from college, when I was staying in my village, I was always suspected and judged by the village people. Xizhu grandpa was called ‘fool’ by other villagers, and Zengxiang aunty was looked down by others. They come into my life, and I stayed with them. Their naïve and strange thought made think about my village in a new way. In this quite ‘normal’ village, who are normal people? In those normal people’s eyes, am I another fool of this village?

Foolish Village

NR 2014