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The documentary marks the directorial debut of Chinese actor Zhang Zhehan, it documents his deeply personal journey of self-healing in the aftermath of a devastating cyber media storm in August 2021 that abruptly halted his acting career.
Filmmaker Fang Li and his crew explore exhaustive historical investigation, as far as possible to find the core of the British, American, Japanese and Chinese parties and descendants, trying to infinitely close to the truth of the World War II "Death Ship" — "Lisbon Maru", which is 30 meters under the sea off the East Polar Island in Zhoushan, China.
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.
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.
The film is a stage documentary of Zhang Jie's three closing concerts of "Wei · LIVE -" Yao · Beidou "tour held at the National Stadium - Bird's Nest in Beijing in August 2023. The tour started in Suzhou in October 2021 and ended in Beijing in August 2023, with a total of 13 cities, 23 performances, and a total mobilization of over 900000 people.
Literally translated from the Mandarin Zou Xian, Walk the Line chronicles the perilous journey across the Darién Gap, the jungle corridor between Colombia and Panama that has become a route for asylum seekers heading to the United States. Amid China’s Zero-COVID aftermath, economic decline, human rights concerns, and growing uncertainty, Chinese migrants have become one of the fastest-growing groups arriving at the U.S. southern border. Filmed over eight months across multiple countries, the documentary follows several migrants: Ivan and Lee, a same-sex couple who concealed their identities until reaching the U.S. and hope their story inspires China’s LGBTQ+ community; Cindy, the only woman willing to appear on camera, who endures severe hardship in the jungle and detention at the border; and Mr. Yu, who lived in a van in Beijing to escape lockdowns before undertaking the journey, later rebuilding his life in Los Angeles.
With the theme of "One Heart to the Future", the grand ceremony reviewed the online audio-visual masterpieces of the past year in a condensed audio-visual language. In the five chapters of "Same Dream · Live up to Shaohua", "Same Hope · Long Source", "Tong Creation · Building Dream Future", "Tongxing · Oriental Spring Tide" and "Tongxin · Hexing World", Mango TV selected six atmospheres of "Mountain and River Map", "Super Time and Space Reunion", "Happy Friends", "Blue and White Porcelain", "Soundless" and "Run to Tomorrow" The magnificent program showing the youthful style will also officially meet the audience. In multiple forms such as national style singing and dancing, musicals, sitcoms, operas, intangible cultural heritage clothing shows, etc., this grand ceremony will show the spirit of the young people and the great prospects for the vigorous development of the online audio-visual industry.
Making-of documentary of Wei Shujun's 2021 film Ripples of Life.
"Urumqi Middle Road" depicts the 2022 White Paper Protests in China, where people took to the streets in Shanghai and across the country to protest the draconian Zero-Covid and lockdown policies.
A man lies in bed illuminated by the blue-white light of his mobile phone. He doom scrolls past cute pets, outraged opinion pieces and haunting images from the world's hotspots – and he feels absolutely nothing. With curiousity and humour, director David Borenstein travels the world to investigate how bad things really are. Who is pulling the strings when the internet makes us angry, sad, horny or just plain indifferent? And is there any way back? From the American internet troll, a burnt-out superstar in the Asian influencer industry, a cynical fake-news factory in Eastern Europe, Russian state propagandists and an online dominatrix, this is an alarming contemporary diagnosis, with a bold attempt to also look at solutions.
Freediving champion Jessea Lu nearly died during a world-record attempt. She revisits the site of her near-death in this documentary, facing past traumas and struggling back to life.
The film "Safe and Sound" starts with a weekly piano class at the ward school, telling the story of several little assistant teachers with different personalities and their families' different life experiences and changes in fate. After a few years of bone marrow transplantation, the protagonists Haoxin and Qinxin choose to leave Yanjiao, where they have lived for many years, return to their unfamiliar hometown to start a new life, and return to campus.The film focuses on the daily life of themselves and their fellow leukemia patients before they left Yanjiao."Returning to Hometown for School" often means "Pressure" and "Confusion" for them. After experiencing multiple "Separations", the"Future"seemed so uncertain to them.
The 92-year-old previous nightclub dancer Coby Yee decides to get back on stage again after joining the senior dance troupe Grant Avenue Follies. Together they go on a tour for the last time, bridging once isolated Chinese communities in the US, Cuba and China.
This Documentary offers a poetic portrait of the film-maker’s grandmother, Shou Ai Xia, who suffers from dementia. It explores the fading memories of her ordinary life and the vivid hallucinations reflecting her decades of commitment to the Chinese Communist Party, providing a pathway beyond the traditional views of dementia.
Takeuchi Ryo revisited the protagonist of the documentary many years ago and completed his ten-year promise with the Yangtze River.
Chinese-Australian artist Jiawei Shen's plans to create an epic work depicting his homeland's tumultuous recent history.
Shot in Cambodia and borrowing a title and a punk sensibility from Qiu Miaojin’s classic queer novel, Daphne Xu’s Notes of a Crocodile follows an unnamed woman who roams the streets of a Phnom Penh in flux, encountering humans and animals in her search for a lost friend.
Ying, the son of a Chinese fisherman, devotes his heart and soul to contemporary dance. After founding his own company in Beijing, he is confronted by the challenges of the pandemic and the harshness of urban life. He eventually returns to his village to stage a monumental performance in honor of the ocean gods, in the very place where he danced for the first time.
A "Chinese" father reflects on the changing relationship of China and US during his trip to Beijing to retrieve his 3-year-old "American" daughter who has been stranded because of the recent "decoupling" of the two countries. Born in China and living in the American Midwest, filmmaker Yinan Wang attempts to unpack his own experience of how a transnational migrant family deals with the distress caused by identity, nationalism, and geopolitics.
"Sweet Osmanthus Flowering Late" is a feature-length ethnographic film that envisions social rejuvenation and collective convalescence in the aftermath of the pandemic. Filmed in Wuhan, the film follows the everyday lives of three middle-class households. It postulates the existence of a mass dreaming phenomenon that facilitated fatigued Chinese inhabitants to rejuvenate themselves following the secluded episode of lived experience and to coexist with the enduring imprints of "the event" on their social lives.
In modern day China, two women strive to preserve Nushu, an ancient secret language which bonded generations of Chinese women together through centuries of oppression in a clandestine support system of sisterhood and survival.
Marking the 30th anniversary of Derek Jarman's passing, close friend and collaborator Tilda Swinton leads a poetic tribute to the late artist and filmmaker with a slow, meditative journey into Jarman’s poem "Chroma" during a visit to Beijing.
The short animation attempts to express the world view of Buddhism. Buddhism is not spiritualism as commonly understood by people. In fact, Buddhism emphasizes illusion. All things that can be perceived and thought in the world are illusions, and only the self nature is the real noumenon.
This film documents Mr Zhang Xiangqian, one of the three major cases of alien contact in China. He claims to have been taken by aliens to live on an alien planet for a month in 1985 and gained extraterrestrial knowledge. Upon his return to Earth, he taught himself maths and physics and claimed to have written the Unified Field Theory. Despite the fact that much of his correspondence was returned, he continued to insist. We visited and filmed him with scepticism and found that he did have a deep knowledge of physics and mathematics. The film leaves it up to the viewer to determine the authenticity of his experience.
The last days of M on the Bund, the restaurant that reinvented fine-dining in Shanghai, and its maverick founder Michelle Garnaut. A remarkable three-decade journey in China’s global city, from the changing geo-politics of the new millennium, to the importance of food and community in challenging times.
The film records the inspiring story of a Chinese boy who was inspired to pursue his racing dream after watching the first F1 race in his hometown of Shanghai, and eventually became China's first and so far only F1 racing driver.
The third film in the "Hooly Bible" documentary series.
The film follows the people and workers of Xi'an through the whole process of making a bowl of the local special - Biang Biang noodles. The landscapes tell a story of their own, as do the faces of the people.
A group of city dwellers, bearing the weight of doubt, leave for the countryside to practise ecological farming. But the beautiful vision they carry collides, again and again, with the reality they encounter. On the long, obstacle-strewn road of this experiment, the distances between the people in the community begin to grow.
A dreamy journey along the corridor of Chinese history spanning more than 5,000 years, a wonderful encounter with ancient cultural relics and splendid civilization, and a shocking trip to taste the colorful Chinese culture. On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and France and the China-France Year of Culture and Tourism, French host Olivier traveled 8,000 kilometers from France to China, co-produced by China and France, and used 8K ultra-high-definition images to start a journey to experience the magical China.
In the scorching heat of the Gobi Desert, an infrastructure project unfolds in the unforgiving natural environment. An endeavor so immense in scale that the individuals navigating through it appear minuscule in comparison.
A song is heard in the distance. It comes from the Hekeng village, famous for its ancient earthen buildings, also called tulou. It is where the last original Hakka families live amidst the exodus of those looking for a more modern environment. Among them there is Zhang Zhouyin, an elderly man concerned about the state of the village's temple; or her daughter-in-law, Wei Yi, who spends her entire day guiding tourists through these awe-inspiring houses. And then there’s young Zhang Weibo, her son, who manages to find joy even in the simplest of things... Hekeng: a place frozen in time whose songs have endured for centuries.
To find the hometown in his memories, Zhu Xin tries to restore a Song Dynasty poem from a millennia ago, setting off a journey across time and space.
A young Chinese woman living in the United States is waiting for the results of the visa lottery. This time becomes a period of reflection for her, as she is visited by the memories of family banquets prepared by her grandmother, together with the ghosts of the past. In this enchanting journey through time, noodles take on a Proustian flavour.
In Xinjiang, in northwest China, an underground river brings life to the desert for the Uyghur people. An ancient construction whose waters flow from the depths of the earth to the lush grape fields, the Karez is known to those who benefit from it as the Mother River.
In November 2022, the lockdown measures in Wuhan city became increasingly strict. A group of trailer workers dragged their carts through the metal barriers. This absurd game seemed endless, but an unexpected protest changed everything.
The caudal vertebrae (coxxyx), the most significant part of the body that distinguishes humans from animals. The symbols and images derived from it form the "signifier chain" of the body and objects And becomes narrative in the gaze of the viewer: An office in the middle of ecology and the jungle, The bodies of white-collar workers are alienated by the materials of their profession and office ...... PHYSICAL GUERRILLAS invaded the office space in an office building, where they checked in together every day in hundreds of trees, and fully integrated into this unique field with anxiety and involution: Different groups of people are spaces – any psychological and spiritual communication will create a "new space", and the sound environment of the area will regain a new space with a unique texture.
A drone tends to sugarcane growth, eliminating threats in a world where humans are extinct. An encounter with an ant reminds it of its first patrol, after the collapse of 20th-century collectivism and a sugar mill’s destruction by globalized predictive behavior.
This is Life is a documentary purely made with UGC footages. It tells stories about common Chinese people regarding four aspects of their life: what they wear, what they eat, where they live, and how they migrate. Stories presented in this film is not just showing people's life in first-tier cities, it also represents probably 3000 counties, 40000 towns, and 660000 villages in China. The way how this documentary is made guarantees you to see a raw, but vivid China you have never seen before.
Departing from the traditional factory lines of production on the plastic plant manufacturing industry. From there, the film expands into the realm of synthetic nature, portraying a highly engineered landscape,developed by startups. The images appear to be bound together by a dark slime—an oily, recurrent presence as a connection to the strange and gory logics of petro capitalism and global territories of extraction.Petroleum, in both refined and unrefined forms, serves as a temporal vector: it is the raw material for plastic plants, Revealing the absurd techno-solutionist vision of the future.
In the hilly city of Chongqing, a painter searches for the old apartment where he and his parents used to live. He asks local residents for directions, walks through narrow passages between buildings, and calls his 90-year-old mother for confirmation. But the city has changed beyond recognition. Behind the camera, his daughter documents his journey.
The documentary Fen records the daily life of Li and Lianzi, a couple who have been migrant workers in a Chinese megacity for 20 years. Lacking local Household Registration, their adolescent elder son, Manshan, is facing a lot of stress as he prepares for the high school entrance exam. The younger son, a left-behind child, has been raised by the grandmother over these years. In hope of family reunion, Li and Lianzi want to convert to the local Household Registration through a point-based system offered by the government. If they cannot acquire enough points, Manshan will face more competition to get into public high school, and the prospect of bringing the younger son over will remain slim. What future awaits this family? Fen is the required points to convert to local Household Registration. It is the admission score for public high school. And it is the looming separation weighing on the family.
Chinese poet Xiuhua Yu, who has cerebral palsy, became instantly famous when her poems went viral on social media. When it happened she was stuck in a violent and loveless marriage in rural China. Director Jian Fan’s award-winning 2016 documentary Still Tomorrow followed her throughout her breakthrough year, when she gained the financial freedom to end her marriage. All that was missing was love.
Two families in Awat County, southern Xinjiang, China, the Uyghur family of Aierken and the Han family of Guan Xiaoyan, make a living by growing cotton. During the busy cotton picking season, they encountered various unexpected situations such as difficulty in finding harvesting hands, injuries, and continuous rain. But with the concerted efforts of their respective family members, the year's hard work of the two families finally paid off satisfactorily. This film uses the shooting and narrative style of real movies, with the connection of local folk songs and music, as well as the exotic audio-visual language, to show the real life texture and simple family values of Xinjiang cotton farmers in an idyllic way.