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Turtle Rock

In a remote mountain village, the lives of three generations of a family are defined by hardship and loss. The aging grandmother fears death while her son struggles to find work and becomes increasingly anxious and impoverished. Meanwhile, her grandson returns from the city to start a chicken farming business, only to fail and go into debt. The village, named after a mythical rock representing a fallen turtle, seems to bind its inhabitants to a shared destiny of defeat and struggle.

Turtle Rock

6.0 2017
Qiang Chisel

A brief journey and a glimpse into a man's heart and his simplicity. In the mountains of Huizhou, Mr. Fang, a wise elder, craftsman, and poet, shares his world with the person behind the camera, a foreigner, from his backyard. Through deep convictions and a connection to their roots, an interaction of culture and humanity flourishes between them, organically and without barriers, inviting us to savor the essence of life's simple pleasures. This poetic documentary embodies the truth that life, in its purest form, is often found in quiet moments, celebrating profound connections that transcend language, culture, or money, and the timeless lessons of a life well-lived.

Qiang Chisel

NR N/A
Mapi

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.

Mapi

NR 2002
1968 Movement of Educated Youths Going to the Countryside and Mountains

Despite the increasing number of people entering the field of documentary filmmaking, historical subjects are less popular due to limited materials and the difficulty in handling them. Hu Jie has chosen to stay in this field and work hard. "I know that shooting these historical subjects is very dangerous, so how can you ask others to do it? It can only be their choice after they have seen your work." Since 2014, due to health reasons, Hu Jie has not been actively making documentaries. This year, in response to an invitation from the Lung Ying-tai Cultural Foundation, he still provided the film "A Sidelight of the 1968 Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement." Over the past three years, he has primarily engaged in printmaking, producing about 70 to 80 pieces, in addition to many small print bookplates.

1968 Movement of Educated Youths Going to the Countryside and Mountains

NR 2018
Gagaland

Small-town kid Boy K is fleeing his job at the duck-down factory when he stumbles into a motley crew of urchins boogieing on the pavement for likes and shares. This is gaga dance: a form of spirited freestyle championed in China by ‘the king’, Pink Hair. Boy K quickly becomes the rising star in Pink Hair’s crew, amassing thousands of subscribers. Will he win the affections of fellow gaga dancer B Girl, or cause trouble in his gang – and the gaga dance underworld beyond it?

Gagaland

NR 2023
All Movements Should Kill the Wind

A man, that animal which shapes its environment, which also shapes its brain. A fog, a bit harder than the air – the dust of stones. A hexagonal structure, like a monolith of which one dare not ask questions. Two hundred kilometres from Beijing I found a sculpture factory where men lived amidst rocks that were waiting to be broken, cut, polished. The same gestures come back again and again to write a history of deterioration and repair. This history is obliterated in the making of monuments. With the wind that inexorably scatters the traces of these actions.

All Movements Should Kill the Wind

7.0 2019
The Good Woman of Sichuan

A young woman goes on an anonymous journey to her late husband's hometown Leshan, a small city in Sichuan province. There, she meets an old friend, a local theatre actress preparing for an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's The Good Person of Szechwan (Sichuan). In a home-place unfamiliar, the traveling woman meets the imaginary. Ghosted by Shen Te the protagonist of the play, the actress loses the self at the intersection between fiction and reality. Unprepared, the filmmaker loses control of her camera. Together, they drift into a polyrhythmic experience of stasis.

The Good Woman of Sichuan

5.0 2021
Street Life

Street Life documents the lives of Chinese migrants in Shanghai, one of the world’s largest and most vibrant cities, now symbolic of China’s economic might. The film centers on Nanjing Road, one of China’s oldest commercial streets and today a popular destination for tourists and moneyed Chinese. The street has also become a Mecca for uprooted and homeless Chinese, who make ends by collecting garbage and recyclables. These characters and their stories are the focus of the film. The central character in Street Life is a migrant known as “Black Skin.” Black Skin faces numerous pressures in the course of the film, including police violence. In the end, these pressures are too much for him to bear and he goes mad. Black Skin’s story intersects with those of fellow bottle collectors, enterprising thieves and even a young boy who has been abandoned.

Street Life

6.5 2006
Correct Me If I'm Wrong

In this vulnerable documentary, the filmmaker captures how their family resorts to spiritual interventions in an attempt to rid them of their queer identity. The grandmother believes they must be possessed by a ‘demon girl’ – the unborn girl their mother was forced to abort before she became pregnant with Hao. Undergoing prayers, therapies, treatments and ceremonies, Hao paints a wry portrait of these complex relationships with admirable clarity and compassion.

Correct Me If I'm Wrong

NR 2025
Yumen

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.

Yumen

7.0 2013
We are the … of Communism

The Yuanhai Migrants Children’s School, which serves children of migrant laborers in Beijing, is shut down by city officials for reasons never made clear. The students and teachers manage to continue class, first by sneaking into the shuttered campus, then moving inside a ruined factory, and even setting up class on the street. Following the personal journeys of students as they battle bureaucratic corruption for their right to learn, Cui exposes a crisis of social values in the wake of China’s economic reforms.

We are the … of Communism

8.0 2007