A Clear Sky

Huangyangchuan township, Gulang County, Gansu province. In a village, two members of a family died in accidents in a short period. People took it seriously, they decided to rebuild the old temple in the village, hoping it could bless them with peace. In the ceremony after the rebuilding was finished, the figure of Buddha, the picture of Chairman Mao, the Taoist and the country shamen, gathered together…This film documented the details of this ceremony, hoping to reveal the common status of Chinese people’s religion.

Follow the lives of the elderly survivors who were forced into sex slavery as “Comfort Women” by the Japanese during World War II. At the time of filming, only 22 of these women were still alive to tell their story. Through their own personal histories and perspectives, they tell a tale that should never be forgotten to generations unaware of the brutalization that occurred.

A short documentary that captures the longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century, The Yellow Bank takes you on a contemplative boat ride across the Huangpu River in Shanghai, China. Filmmaker J.P. Sniadecki, who lived and worked in Shanghai nine years earlier, uses the eclipse as a catalyst to explore the way weather, light, and sound affect the urban architectural environment during this extremely rare phenomenon.

Hakka, a special and little-known ethnic group in Hainan, is a branch of the Chinese Hakka system that has been neglected. They are far from the mainland, and they are rarely mentioned. The relatively closed environment has allowed the Central Plains culture to be completely preserved. After that, it has formed a special change with the ethnic minorities such as Li Miao. However, this unique traditional culture is now fading away in the erosion of modern civilization.

The story took place in 2008. Henan Guo Hui, who was a harvester, went to the provinces to harvest wheat for him. He and his father then invited a driver and set off. I went to Shanxi, Shaanxi, and also included Henan. They met other mairs to talk about the earthquake in Sichuan and talk about the difficulties of collecting wheat. Bargaining with the farmers, thinking of the law less to give the leader a little commission, sometimes to think of the way to get money, sometimes to think of ways to escape the control of the leader. The driver complained that the car owner was too bad, and the owner complained that the driver had eaten too much. In the middle of the road, I also encountered the need to collect the toll, and finally met the young and confused.

Legendary Peking Opera master, Yuling Fang, emigrates to New York where he works in a nail salon. Realizing there is no one to inherit his legendary skills, he decides to mount an amateur production in order to keep alive the vanishing world he loves.

Datong, the mining capital of the Shanxi province. Bai Budan interviews miners, the invisible auxiliaries of Chinese society in the throes of change.

In northeastern China the Songhua River flows west from the border of Russia to the city of Harbin, where four million people depend on it as a source of water. Songhua is a portrait of the varying people that gather where the river meets the city, and an ethnographic study of the intimate ways in which they play and work.

At the end of the 1990s, about 40-50 million industrial workers were laid off in China, and the family population involved was hundreds of millions. He Guoping was one of them. After he was laid off, his wife opened a rental house. He became the "housekeeper" who cooks and cooks every day. His son He Huan was also raised by a playful child. Twenty years of follow-up shooting of this ordinary family, this continued "presence", the film has a time tentacle of "seeing the growth of grass". Some people say that this is a "civilian epic".

This documentary, edited over a period of six years, spans 20 years in the lifetime of three families of workers who were made redundant by their company. This work is divided into four parts, each part focusing on one family, the Zhou family, the He family and the Tao family, as well as one part about my hometown. This four-part documentary is an attempt to take a closer look at the process of privatisation in China over the past 20 years.

The experience and reflections of a red guard. Every time after a political disaster, most people are turned into victims of the disaster. The individual actions of the victims in the disaster are always overlooked. These actions overlooked ran through the entire process of the disaster. The entire process of the disaster turns most people into victims of the disaster. In every political disaster……

For Chinese parents, finding out that their kid is gay usually presents a major tragedy, with the big majority utterly unable to accept the homosexuality of their son or daughter. However, during recent years a fresh rainbow wind has been blowing over the Chinese mainland: a pioneer generation of Chinese parents has been stepping up and speaking out on their love for their gay kids. This documentary features 6 mothers from all over China, who talk openly and freely about their experiences with their homosexual children. With their love, they are giving a whole new definition to Chinese-style family bonds.

Over the course of 3 years, Fan Popo visited a bar called “Only-Love” in Nanning, China, getting to know the dancers and drag queens there and discovering who they really were behind their exuberant costumes and personas.

All There Will Be

Documentary about a tribe of indigenous people in northern China.

Gei Libao, the former Olunchun hunter raised more than 100 Hunting horses in the traditional way. Although hunting was banned, Libao occasionally went into the mountains, not for hunting, but for the ancestors' hunting culture. Libao's son Liang Liang and his partner are inseparable from the forest, and are more enthusiastic about modern extreme sports. They have formed an off-road motorcycle team, which is consuming the youth of the mountain. One day in summer, Libao's horses was hit by a poacher's bullet, which caused a series of cultural collisions.

Han Tao’s latest film is set in a textile factory of the 1970s. Chong Er, a worker there, is in love with newcomer Xiao Lan and pursues her. They get married, but the happy time does not last long. Chong Er was executed, allegedly for breaking the law. More than 30 years later, the textile factory is closed down. The truth behind the case is finally revealed, but time has diluted everything and changed everyone’s visage. The film attempts to reconstruct the mental state of that generation, even though the workers and everything in the factory have been forgotten. Once upon a time, there were so many energetic lives that worked and lived there. The confining space was everything they had – where life began and ended, becoming eternally trapped in memories.

In Luxi, a county in southeastern Yunnan Province, someone’s corpse was burned. The parents of the murdered man don’t know the truth and have been waiting for their son to return home. A nomadic female poet comes to Luxi to shoot a documentary and hears about the story. A few days later, she leaves the man she met on the road without saying goodbye, and the reason is written into a verse: "One person blocks the wind so that other clouds can see the rain in the afterlife. We’ve been stuck in it.” The vicissitude of life can be sensed from the ancient street in Luxi.

Part mournful meditation through documentary footage, part experimental narrative. This film looks at the life of the Chinese who have been displaced within their own society.

"If the old doesn't go, the new never comes" recites a teenager hanging out near a demolition site in the center of Chengdu, the Sichuan capital in western China. In Demolition, filmmaker J.P. Sniadecki deconstructs the transforming cityscape by befriending the migrant laborers on the site and documenting the honest, often unobserved, human interactions, yielding a wonderfully patient and revealing portrait of work and life in the shadow of progress and economic development.