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Against the background of economic reform, Shanggong village will be hosting the Nuo Dance Ritual for the one last time. This inspired the filmmaker to explore the origins of this traditional ritual, and to interrogate--and empathize with--the identity crisis that have long plagued an author's pursuit of her craft.

Three farming families in Hanyuan, China, strive to give their children a good life in the midst of an ecological crisis, as widespread use of pesticides leads to a dramatic decline in bees and other pollinating insects in the valley.

Filmmaker Jia Zhangke chronicles his local literature festival in Shanxi, China which includes a multi-generational roster of the country's most esteemed writers.

From the Three Great Wars to the founding of New China, from starting from scratch, to China's entry into the world's second largest economy. Looking back over the past seventy years. Relying on 500,000 minutes of precious documentary images, the original sound, and the meticulous ingenuity to build a time-space corridor to the history

Young Masters is an original series commissioned by NOWNESS China focusing on traditional Chinese cultures, and how they continue to be defined by a new generation of the country's youth. High above the clouds in a village in Mao County in Sichuan Prefecture, a post-90’s generation of young cultural guardians work to uphold the values and traditions of ancient Qiang culture. These cultural guardians, known as a ‘Shibi’, remain especially vital for a culture whose knowledge and language exist merely through practice and in sound, and without script. The role of a Shibi involves that of a priest, alongside folk rap, singing, and dance performances, amongst others. As a result, Qiang people have endowed them with a sacred status, believing that they possess a psychic power.

In Close-Up, Jia explores the counterpart to the wide shot. Four elevated surveillance cameras scan a busy traffic intersection, capturing the steady stream of cars, bikes and pedestrians that cross it. Amid all that bustle and movement, a fifth camera with a long telephoto lens picks out one individual. A man with a bandaged hand. A wide shot changes into a close-up. Visitors have the freedom to choose their own context and focus. They can even tell the story of this man. HD video installation on 5 screens, colour, silent

Mount Everest, the highest peak in the world, welcomes the challenge of countless dreamers every year. Xia Boyu is the first Chinese "hardcore man" to successfully climb Mount Everest with prosthetics! In 1975, Xia Boyu joined the Chinese mountaineering team. He helped his teammates while climbing Mount Everest, which resulted in his lower legs being amputated due to frostbite. However, he did not give up his dream of climbing Mount Everest.

The Chinese philosophy of the Five Elements postulates that everything in our universe is based on wood, fire, earth, metal, and water. While traveling through China’s stunning landscapes and witnessing the seasons, this documentary seeks not only the roots of this ancient theory but also the continuing impacts on modern China.

Livestreaming your life to a devoted audience is big business. What happens when the cameras are off?

Suzhou is a city where the ancient and the modern co-exist. For more than 2,500 years, the city has passed down a large number of intangible cultural heritages, including lantern painting, nuclear carving, Song brocade, Ming furniture, boat dots, Suzhou embroidery, Xiangshan gang construction, woof silk and jade carving. The film tells the story of the past lives of these nine crafts and the tender stories that occur between the inheritors and their crafts from the perspective of 12 representative inheritors.

An immigrant artist in Iowa retreats to frozen prairies, forests, and swamps, trying to find a meaningful story and escape from the anxieties of dislocation. Delivered as a film-letter to the protagonist’s little sister in rural China, the film considers his self-exile as well as mental health struggles that were too shameful to address back home.

J Fever, China’s greatest “rap poet”, reinvents the origin myth of fire, in an exquisite performance with Shanghai Philharmonic in Shanghai Concert Hall, featuring composer Soulspeak and Yehaiyahan.

There are the images of before, the images of after and the letters. The images of after come first, they stem from the same surveillance camera in Wuhan, empty streets that only throng with people again on April 4th, 2020.

The story of the six Chinese survivors of the Titanic disaster was written out of history. In The Six, we learn how these remarkable men beat the odds to make it off the ship alive, only to be singled out for expulsion from the US within 24 hours of their arrival. We track down their descendants for the first time. And we trace their extraordinary journey from Southern China to becoming silent witnesses to one of the twentieth century’s most infamous and intriguing events.

The film shows the ordinary lives of young people in China, with all their romantic problems, unfulfilled dreams and existential crises that are interwoven into everyday dialogues and conversations with the director. The two central protagonists try to function in an open relationship, which suits only one of the partners, while the other suffers and longs for a family life. The possibility of emigration to America is a hope, but it is gradually receding due to the worsening political situation. The camera captures even the most intimate moments and puts the viewer in the position of a voyeur observing the exposed bodies and souls.

"Actor" is China's first documentary film to explore the virtues and skills of actors. The film takes the "Twenty-Two Big Movie Stars of New China" as the starting point. It will explore the film experience and artistic achievements of the older generation of artists, explore their insights and thinking about the profession of actors for more than half a century, and pay tribute to the century-old Chinese film with the classic film images they created.

Weijia Ma was working on an animation film in Strasbourg when COVID descends on France. She very quickly fled to Lyon before returning to Shanghai.

When conducting archaeological research on family video materials from the last century, in order to obtain authorization for a foreigner to shoot a video in my hometown of Hangzhou, I embarked on a journey of searching the internet to find his contact information.

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.

At Tsinghua University's campus, four people are standing at the intersection of their lives. Among them, there are those who just passed the college entrance examination, the first-generation of post-00 college students who entered their favorite universities with twists and turns , some are leaving their ivory towers, PhD graduates facing difficult choices and some have returned from the United States to enter Tsinghua University. Young teachers are full of "viewing the sky" ideal but face challenges, there are old academicians who still stand behind lectern after their retirement. The film tells the life ideals of the four Tsinghua people and the eternal youth that belongs to this university behind them.

Filmmaker and activist He Xiaopei’s first feature-length documentary commences with an attempt at reconciliation with her mother, before taking the audience on a journey from the 1920s through to the 2020s. With a raw, DIY aesthetic, the film brings to life the experiences of three generations of Chinese women – He’s mother, herself, and her daughter – as they come to terms with political and social change. Combining interview, video essay, and home movie formats, the film offers a refreshingly irreverent perspective on historical experiences, while wryly documenting the potential of lesbian and polyamorous lifestyles to challenge established ideas of feminine propriety. Through intimate conversations, Bad Women of China demonstrates how women are unconsciously led to belittle their own desires, experiences and hopes.

After hiding in the mountains for a century, a Miao ethnic village choir is discovered by an outsider and becomes a national sensation. Two young Miaos and all the villagers must reconcile their faith, identity, and love with the real world of China.

The Great Leap Forward of the People's Republic of China was an economic and social campaign led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from 1958 to 1962. Chairman Mao Zedong launched the campaign to reconstruct the country from an agrarian economy into a communist society through the formation of people's communes.

TONG Meimei, a psychotherapist, her father committed suicide when she was 3 years old, and lost her husband in a car accident when she was 40. Sunteck Yao, a mime actor, was raped by a strange elder after he went to school in the wrong bus when he was 12. As time goes by, how do they bring their pasts to live peacefully in the present? With the deepening of their relationships with the film crew, the influence of past experience began to emerge in the interaction, and the director was forced to show up from behind the camera and get involved in this unavoidable conversation.

Luo Luo’s intense fear of Covid-19 keeps her in the house during the pandemic. She listens to her father relate their family history, and spends time on Zoom with fellow Folk Memory Project members Wu Wenguang and Zhang Mengqi.

A propaganda documentary on Sino-France Diplomatic Relations, started from the stories behind 1958 film “The Magic of the Kite”.

After a massive earthquake razed a Chinese city to the ground, thousands of parents who lost their children are encouraged to give a new birth so that they can move on with their lives. AFTER THE RAIN follows two of these families for over a decade. Haunted by fear, resentment, and unspeakable grief, the families find hope beyond their intergenerational trauma is hard to build.

An Anshan Story uses a real family's life as its backdrop. The director casts his grandpa, the revolutionaries of the left wing as the film's lead, retracing his family saga of post Chinese cultural revolution history.

A Day of Trans is a groundbreaking, intimate look into the lives of four individuals – across three generations set against the backdrop of China's rise on the global stage. The short documentary film explores their lived experiences, professional career paths, community involvement, social barriers, and their unique approaches to life as transgender individuals across the generations.

Jin scowls into the camera when her sister – the filmmaker – asks about her earliest memories. No wonder: these memories are anything but pleasant. Jin was born in the 1990s, during China’s one-child policy. It was normal then for unborn girls to be aborted – right up to the last month of a pregnancy, because boys were preferred. Living babies were also ruthlessly dumped in the garbage, or in the woods. Jin survived for a week in a box on the streets.

With the following motivation: Every brick in the great wall of China was carried up by a man. More than 800,000 men, for more than 20 years. As we follow the reconstruction of a very small part of that old wall, we feel the dimension and Sisyphean effort carried out almost 2000 years ago. At the same time, this small part of the wall portrays the different social classes and transformations of modern China. A society that moves from the collective ideals to the personal capitalist aspirations of individuals.

It tells the story of the abandoned child Xiao Yunjie (nicknamed Dwarf), living in a mountain village with his grandmother and two half-sisters. In a village where there are no young people, the 12-year-old Xiao Yunjie not only has to study hard, but also bears heavy housework.

A once-prosperous coal mining town is now in decline, as Chinese economic policy has pivoted away from coal. Through the director’s own family, the film depicts the source of life—mined from the darkness of 800 meters underground—that has given, as well as taken away from them.

This film is a realistic record of a sixty-year-old couple living in a remote village (Gurenay) in the Badain Jaran Desert of Alashan, Inner Mongolia plant thousands of mu of ammodendron and euphratica to fight against expanding deserts.

Haohao and Zhouzhou, two sisters aged five and eight, spend most of their days at an electronics market in Shenzhen. A year earlier, as new immigrants to the city, their parents opened a shop on the market’s ninth floor. The girls’ gaze turns the soulless world of electronics into a universe full of monsters and ghost stories that make life more magical.

Young Masters is an original series commissioned by NOWNESS China focusing on traditional Chinese cultures, and how they continue to be defined by a new generation of the country's youth. Puning City in Guangdong Province is known within China as the 'Cultural Hometown' of Chaoshan, with the folk dance Yingge being one of its most famous customs. Yingge, meaning "Hero's Hymn", combines Nanquan routines and opera acting skills, and is a vibrant and upbeat performance in which dancers don intricate costumes and facial makeup, and play the role of the heroes in Water Margin《水浒传》- an ancient Chinese novel about brotherhood.

The newest instalment in a series set in a small village in a mountainous region in China. In the winter marking ten years since the director began filming, she tries to get a new building constructed in the village. The girls, who had thus far been the subjects of her films, take up the camera themselves, and begin recording scenes of the village.

Young Masters is an original series commissioned by NOWNESS China focusing on traditional Chinese cultures, and how they continue to be defined by a new generation of the country's youth. Its first episode, Young Masters: Bajiquan, spotlights Wu Hao (吴昊), a young man in his twenties from Hebei province who is a stalwart practitioner of Bajiquan—a traditional Chinese fighting style known for its graceful stillness and sudden moments of targeted and ferocious violence. Director Haonan Shen traveled to the Mengcun Bajiquan International Training Center to profile Wu Hao whose paternal ancestor Wu Zhong (1712–1802) was the first recorded Bajiquan teacher. In this evocative portrait of a young man’s passion for sharing his family’s rich heritage, we get up close and personal with the violent elbow strikes, staff jabs, fierce rising and firm falling stances that characterize the martial art.

At the beginning of 2020, the new corona virus epidemic broke out. On January 23, Wuhan city went into a lockdown. 9 million people in Wuhan, together with front-line personnel from medical systems and other industries across the country, started the fight against the corona virus in Wuhan! The content of "Wuhan Day and Night" comes from the thousands of hours of material that more than 30 local photographers in Wuhan have been shooting for several months on the front line of the fight against the epidemic since the beginning of the epidemic. The film takes the medical staff and patients in the intensive care unit of the hospital as the main line, and the volunteers who transport pregnant women late at night as the auxiliary line, showing the touching stories of fighting against the epidemic.

After the outbreak of the war with Japan, all Beijing universities were closed or bombed. A group of young students, aged 18 or 19, set off in a hurry, moving south on foot, crossing Xiangqian and Yunnan, and eventually forming a temporary university on the Kunming plateau - the Southwest Union University, a joint venture between Tsinghua, Peking University and Nankai. They crossed a city to listen to the "best Chinese language class ever", to listen to Toselli's "Serenade", and to join the Flying Tigers. For these "post-90s" seniors, who are now in their nineties, SWU is not a dusty piece of history, but a memory of youth that is still as fresh as ever. Yang Zhenning, Xu Yuanchong, Pan Jiluan, Yang Coix, Wang Xiji and Ma Zhitu - 16 students of the University with an average age of over 96 years old are cast together to take you back to a time when war was raging and stars were shining.

Documentary woven together as the universal story of father and son, focusing on the ethnic Chinese Koreans who live outside the Korean Peninsula.

20.000 Buddhist nuns live in a monastery on a snowy plateau in Tibet, China. Surrounded by harsh nature and secluded from the outside world, these women offer us a glimpse into their religious exploration of life’s biggest questions.

In the city of GenHe, the coldest part of China, a team of teenagers from underprivileged backgrounds run every day under extremely harsh circumstances. The sports school has provided them with something they couldn’t get from their families: joy and hope for a better life. A heart-warming documentary devoted to the vivid, optimistic, and positive spirit of youth, introducing a group of ordinary characters and guiding us through a stunning natural landscape.

What is real and what isn’t in a replicated city? Ella Raidel made this penetrating ghost-town film in contemporary China, interweaving actors and ordinary people, sets and footage of the city. Aren’t the real estate agents, construction workers and investors simply playing a game? What remains of reality in a world dominated by the vagaries of capitalism? A Pile of Ghosts is a mysterious puzzle where the dividing line between fact and fiction becomes increasingly blurred. In this strange world, subjected to speculation, it actually doesn’t seem to matter anymore.

After missing the meeting with his friends, Qasem, an insomniac old Afghan man, roamed the city night, trying to find the stone he had seen with his friends on the mountain.

Edited together from materials taken from Caochangdi performances and activities between 2012-2013 and Wu Wenguang's own body camera record, this film can be regarded as a kind of "story follow-up" version of "Because of Hunger". In short, it is a kind of "remembrance".