Weekends

Six life stories of German, Austrian and Russian Jews which intersect in exile in Shanghai. Out of narratives, photographs, documents and new images of the biggest and most contradictory metropolis of the Far East an entity develops in which the historic exile takes and turns on a completely current power and appeal.

Hong Kong, at the height of the protests. A young woman visits her father, whom she has not seen for a while. Her plan is to have lunch with him before the Umbrella Movement reaches a critical juncture. Celebrated, committed filmmaker Ying Liang contributed with a beautiful moving short with an special angle asking: Where do we live, and what is citizenship?

If It’s Not Now, Then When? mostly takes place in an apartment inhabited by three members of a family (though never at the same time): mother Pearlly Chua (from Tsai Ming-liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone), daughter Tan Bee Hung and young son Kenny Gan. Their father seems recently to have died. The mother leaves early and returns late, out on long walks in the park with a lover whom the daughter and her best friend try to spy on. The daughter pecks away at a computer at work and has a desultory affair with her married boss, which he carries on between his business and family phone calls. And the son breaks into cars and “recycles” the electronics he finds.

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.

Xiayao Village, Youyu County, Shanxi ProvinceThe 7-year-old and big-footed Bai Nu and Liu Buhan, both of whom died because of their loved ones, were brought together with their three children more than 40 years ago. (Bai Danu 2 Men 1 Women) (Liu Buhan 3 (Daughter) Nowadays, the children have become grandparents, and most of them are not next to Bai Bainu and Liu Buhan. The children of both sides have differences over the old age of raising the two elderly people ... so despite the two They are all in their eighties, and still need to get up and return to the field to farm in the morning and night, and the old lady Bai is more because of her little feet, she has to stagger in the wind and rain, kneeling in the fields ... A foot-binding old lady faces the camera and talks to her little feet ...

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.

Unusually popular religions and extreme secular beliefs, unconstrained power and no authoritarian society, people work hard on the land and live thrifty but do not believe in the meaning of life at all. This is Longwang Village, an empty old farming society, the most essential reality of an ordinary western village. The film does not have a perpetual plot. The images are presented with the changing of the four seasons. There is no great joy or great sadness. Everything is recorded, and no results are produced. Strictly speaking, this is actually just a rural video file, a running account of ordinary western villages without all rhetoric.

Interview with three victims of the Chongqing bombing.

The work reflects on the relationship between technology and us by constructing an advanced technological product from the future. This future product will replace people's worship and spiritual sustentation of the power of gods and Buddhas in religion with technology, turning the invisible into visible. This paper probes into the possibility and influence of the deification of technology in the future, and puts forward the solution of "love, nostalgia and nature" to relieve the pain caused by the excessive intervention of technology.

The core of the work is to explore and experiment the viewing mechanism of the image. Try to recreate the third space with the characteristic of "halo" through images. The halo points to ambiguity and a sense of distance, while the third space is the difference space constructed by reality and consciousness. The work uses fragments of daily life and poetic non-linear narrative as two narrative means, interspersing and advancing the narrative, which corresponds to the two viewing states of the audience, namely reverie and trance, and hopes to connect the audience with the image in the form of flowing water.

Since 2007, the director of this film has initiated and participated in charity activities for the relief of the refugees in Tiananmen Square. The main line of the film is the director and Japanese friendly people who visited the refugees in Nanxiao Street, Beijing, where they lived in 2014, and tracked the scene of their livelihood on Tiananmen Square. The film was edited in combination with the old video materials shot by the director for eight years.

The player of Jia Zhangke's early film "Xiao Wu" and the famous independent film activist Wang Hongwei talked about Chinese independent films at the IFF Independent Film Forum.

‘Body’ is an object we are all familiar with. For British sculptor Anthony Gormley, it is a medium for expressing thoughts about space, while for young female artist Wang Ying, it is a potential vehicle for expressing emotions. This documentary uses a split-screen method to create a three-dimensional space like a "body". It not only explores the artistic concept and development of Wang Ying, a female artist born in the 1990s who studied in the UK but also completed it on this basis. The documentary creator (me) thinks about her and her body, from'meeting','seeing' to'existence'

I just watch the news of war in a distant country on my mobile. My fingers go back day by day to the day the war broke out and pose to see comments posted on the Facebook News Feed that I follow. Outside, I have friends who participated in anti-war rallies.

When the night falls, Luke climbs up to the deserted lighthouse, where he tries to"light up" the memory buried underneath the glass curtain wall of the city's skyscrapers with the old and worn equipment there.

A series of processes weave a dragnet, covering the lives of animals, and also trapped in the future of human beings. If we exchange identities with animals, will you choose to suffer or fight?

In this talk, Li Hongqi reviewed his transition from fine art to cinema, and his aesthetic and philosophical exploration from his early 'So Much Rice' to recent 'The The'. Dir. Li Hongqi also shared his strong anxiety of his existence(born with melancholia), his thought on cinema art (actually, I don't think there's any movie worth making), his epistemology, his religious view, his consideration on contemporary cinema, and what he learned about living in seclusion.

The film tells about an artist named Banpo, who suddenly returned to Songzhuang one day in 2019, silently packed hundreds of his paintings, packed his luggage, attended the worship service, watched an exhibition, and then said goodbye to his old friends. Finally, he completely left the story of Songzhuang in a quiet early morning. This story seems to be during the process of documenting artist Banpo moving out，the director reveal a huge change in the environment the artist lived in. As if the artist Banpo has foreseen the turmoil of 2020(as Coronavirus epidemic spreading across the world, a massive demolition began at Songzhuang Art District. Many artists, like Banpo, have left Songzhuang. The small town once was famous for Chinese contemporary art 20 years ago, is now gone.)

Bao, a blind woman, sings every day on the streets of Peking to make a living. She is caught up in an endless lawsuit in the hope of having some money reimbursed while doing her best to rear Ming Ming, her mentally ill daughter. After a car accident, and to her mother's great despair, Ming Ming decides to drop out of school and become a street artist. History seems to repeat itself.

Yu Tian (played by Hu Tian) is a senior this year. He hasn't returned home for a few years while studying in a big city. The estrangement between him and his mother (Lin Jiehua) is somehow getting bigger and bigger. He is immersed in his artistic dreams and is not practical, but his mother, who has always been conservative, does not understand. His friends remained the same, still the same young people in the small town. Friends booed that he would be the most promising one among them, but he himself was convinced. He told his sister (played by Sun Nan) that he would go to the big city to make a fortune.