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The Human Scale

50 % of the world’s population lives in urban areas. By 2050 this will increase to 80%. Life in a mega city is both enchanting and problematic. Today we face peak oil, climate change, loneliness and severe health issues due to our way of life. But why? The Danish architect and professor Jan Gehl has studied human behavior in cities through 40 years. He has documented how modern cities repel human interaction, and argues that we can build cities in a way, which takes human needs for inclusion and intimacy into account.

The Human Scale

6.4 2012
Super Hummingbirds

Hummingbirds are amazing creatures to behold. They are the tiniest of birds, yet possess natural born super powers that enable them to fly backwards, upside-down, and float in mid-air. Their wings beat faster than the eye can see and the speed at which they travel makes people wonder if it was indeed a hummingbird they actually saw. They also are only found in the Americas. These attributes have both intrigued scientists and made it challenging to study the species, but with the latest high-speed cameras and other technologies, Super Hummingbirds reveals new scientific breakthroughs about these magical birds.

Super Hummingbirds

NR 2016
The Chinese Mayor

Once the thriving capital of Imperial China, the city of Datong now lies in near ruins. Not only is it the most polluted city in the country, it is also crippled by decrepit infrastructure and even shakier economic prospects. But Mayor Geng Yanbo plans to change all that, announcing a bold, new plan to return Datong to its former glory, the cultural haven it was some 1,600 years ago. Such declarations, however, come at a devastatingly high cost. Thousands of homes are to be bulldozed, and a half-million of its residents (30 percent of Datong’s total population) will be relocated under his watch. Whether he succeeds depends entirely on his ability to calm swarms of furious workers and an increasingly perturbed ruling elite. The Chinese Mayor captures, with remarkable access, a man and, by extension, a country leaping frantically into an increasingly unstable future.

The Chinese Mayor

8.0 2015
Mao Fengmei

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.

Mao Fengmei

NR 2017
Wo Ai Ni Mommy

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.

Wo Ai Ni Mommy

NR 2010
Stories Through 180 Lenses

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)

Stories Through 180 Lenses

NR 2014
Together

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.

Together

6.0 2010
Web Junkie

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.

Web Junkie

6.6 2014
Thirty Two

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.

Thirty Two

9.7 2013
The Sound of Dali

The second of Zhang Yang's Dali Documentary Trilogy. An orchestra of sound and images of Dali, a symbolic city of romance and art. It includes various sounds including those of nature and human, of different seasons, arts, and all kinds of voice in Dali. There is daring inclusion of the religious voices. The crew filmed in Dali for an entire year. It takes people to a harmonious and peaceful journey. By capturing the voice and lyrics from locals and natures, it composes the symphony of Dali. The directors give a poetic demonstration of the spirit of Dali and presents the melodies of the city’s four seasons through the lens. It is also wonderful to see the change of the clouds in four seasons.

The Sound of Dali

NR 2019
Three Days in Wukan

the disappointments and hopes of Wukan villagers at the height of their dramatic protests against the government’s seizure of their farmland. Ai and a group of volunteers secretly entered the village on December 19, 2011, the day Shanwei City Party Secretary Zheng Yanxiong’s speech on the protests was delivered to the village. In the next two days, the provincial party officials entered the village and the provincial vice party secretary met with the villagers’ representative, recognizing his and other representatives’ legitimacy. Ai’s documentary, with interviews of villagers, therefore records Wukan’s protests as it turned a new page.

Three Days in Wukan

NR 2012
Behemoth

Under the sun, the heavenly beauty of grasslands will soon be covered by the raging dust of mines. Facing the ashes and noises caused by heavy mining , the herdsmen have no choice but to leave as the meadow areas dwindle. In the moonlight, iron mines are brightly lit throughout the night. Workers who operate the drilling machines must stay awake. The fight is tortuous, against the machine and against themselves. Meanwhile, coal miners are busy filling trucks with coals. Wearing a coal-dust mask, they become ghostlike creatures. An endless line of trucks will transport all the coals and iron ores to the iron works. There traps another crowd of souls, being baked in hell. In the hospital, time hangs heavy on miners' hands. After decades of breathing coal dust, death is just around the corner. They are living the reality of purgatory, but there will be no paradise.

Behemoth

7.5 2015
China's Haze: Under the Doom

Chai Jing's documentary about the massive smog problem in China. Chai Jing started making the documentary when her as yet unborn daughter developed a tumour in the womb, which had to be removed very soon after her birth. Chai blames air pollution for the tumour. The film, which combines footage of a lecture with interviews and factory visits, has been compared with Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth in both its style and likely impact. The film openly criticises state-owned energy companies, steel producers and coal factories, as well as showing the inability of the Ministry of Environmental Protection to act against the big polluters.

China's Haze: Under the Doom

8.0 2015
Evoé: Portrait of an Anthropophage

A film that mixes labyrinthine recent testimonies and historical images of the career of the tropicalista director, actor and playwright Zé Celso, of Teatro Oficina, one of the greatest personalities of the Brazilian arts of all time. The documentary acquired its main verb in four trips to key points in the trajectory of Zé: Bahia badlands, Cururipe Beach in Alagoas (where Bishop Sardinha was devoured), Epidaurus and Athens in Greece and his apartment in São Paulo.

Evoé: Portrait of an Anthropophage

2.3 2011
Taming the Horse

Tao and Dong promised each other they’d return to the village where the latter grew up, in Inner Mongolia, before following his family, who left to find better fortune in a large city in Southern China. This voyage is a mere pretext meant to reconnect the two childhood friends, who were separated for ten years. With a rare sensitivity, Tao Gu films this companion, who was lost not only “from view”, approaching him stealthily to capture all of his tragic intensity, his disillusioned generosity. Dong has remained a dreamer besotted with rock, an incensed body struggling to find money (he comes up with a jade business which does not work out), love, sex and, above all, to live following his own conceptions of liberty, under the ambiguous gaze of his parents and his “successful” brother.

Taming the Horse

6.0 2017
Lost in the Mountain

The film is director Gao Zipeng’s first fiction film which takes three years to complete. It premieres on March 27, 2001 in UCCA and stars the poet A Jian, Xiao Zhao and the writer Gou Zi. The film is based on a true crime of disappearance. It creates an atmosphere of what Ma Zhiyuan, a celebrated poet and playwright of Yuan Dynasty, portrays in his famous poem “Autumn Thoughts”: Over old trees wreathed with rotten vines fly evening crows/ Under a small bridge near a cottage a stream flows/ On ancient road in the west wind a lean horse goes/ Westward declines the sun/ Far, far from home is the heartbroken one.

Lost in the Mountain

4.0 2011