Be a Woman

Xu Xin’s film “Dao Lu” (China 2012) offers an exclusive “in camera” encounter with Zheng Yan, an 83 year-old veteran of the Chinese Red Army, who calmly relates how he has navigated his country’s turbulent history over three-quarters of a century.Born to a wealthy family in a foreign concession, Yan joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1941 because he sincerely believed in the socialist project, and in its immediate capacity to free China from the Japanese yoke and eradicate deep-rooted corruption.

What happens when 300 lesbians from around the world attend the largest United Nations conference? How did two busloads of lesbians headed to an underground nightclub help spark the birth of a lala (LBT) movement in China? At the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, the first ever lesbian tent at an UN NGO Forum was created. Emerging from hidden shadows of shame and invisibility, Chinese lalas began a hard-fought path of deliverance from themselves, from family, and from an apprehensive environment. In doing so, they sought empowerment and change as they explored concepts and issues from self-affirmation to rights consciousness. The film powerfully moves forward to the present day and shows the drastic change in today’s young feminist lalas – their challenging of sexism and homophobia with daring public street actions on subways – a parallel action to their forerunners in 1995, with much vigor and defiance 20 years later.

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.

In the summer of 2007, Gan Xiaoer led an independent film projection team, using projectors and self-made screens, to tour villages in Henan province to show his feature film "Raised from dust" for 8 times, and recorded the process. The 81-minute version of Church Cinema records only one stop, the Qiliying Church, where "Raised from dust" was shot.

A microcosm of China past and present flows through Xu Tong’s intimate docu “Shattered,” in which the maverick indie filmmaker continues to refine his techniques and concerns shown in his previous “Wheat Harvest” and “Fortune Teller.”

Filmed over three years on China’s railways, The Iron Ministry traces the vast interiors of a country on the move: flesh and metal, clangs and squeals, light and dark, and language and gesture. Scores of rail journeys come together into one, capturing the thrills and anxieties of social and technological transformation. The Iron Ministry immerses audiences in fleeting relationships and uneasy encounters between humans and machines on what will soon be the world’s largest railway network.

In Yuncheng County, Shandong, there is a girl born in the 90s named Han Wenjing who was paraplegic in a car accident in her childhood. As Han Wenjing gets older and older, she is worried about her future life. Marriage has become the biggest concern of parents. Han Wenjing got acquainted with a soldier online, but finally broke up under his father's opposition. The younger sister-in-law also had a dispute between the two over her marriage. When Han Wenjing was depressed, her father proposed to carry her to Liangshan. First, fulfilling Han Wenjing's wish was also compensation for Han Wenjing. Later, Han Wenjing met a dumb while studying e-commerce sales. The dumb liked her very much. Both parents were satisfied when they met. However, Han Wenjing felt that she still couldn't accept the disabled and wanted to try to combine healthy people, even if it failed. Under the pressure of her parents and sister-in-law on Han Wenjing, Han Wenjing still insists on her choice

Li Shouwang is the leader of a blind storytellers team, learned storytelling at the age of 19. His childernare living hard in other cities. Li's money amost goes to his children's pocket every year. But with urbanisation, the storytellers have lost almost all their audience. As the conflict between the storytelling team and the village team intensified, his son, who was far away from home, became the only spiritual sustains... When he was excited that his son would be taking his family home for Chinese New Year, what's await is a sigh.

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.

A silent film by Vietnamese director Truong Minh Quy in collaboration with Belgian director Nicolas Graux, was shot on the set of a film by Graux. We Sit in Silence at the Memorial Table is inspired by Educational Objectives, a poem written by Aleksey Garipov and translated to English by Nicolas Graux.

In 1946, Heidi is entrusted to a Swiss family by her father. He will never come back for her. Today, François Yang questions his mother about her past. What follows is a journey to China, a quest to reconstruct memory. Through contact with her brothers and sister, Heidi measures the extent of the drama experienced by her family that remained in China, persecuted by the Communist Party.

Taiwan's democracy is the envy of Chinese people all over the world. At the same time, when this two-party system-'blue' and 'green'-get at each other's throats, it seems to cast a dark cloud over this beacon of advancing democratization. How does the young generation, many of them first time voters, feel about the political environment they've inherited? Will they allow for their political differences to drive a deeper wedge into the Taiwanese society? A year and a half before Taiwan's 2012 Presidential Election I gathered a group of young people from across the blue and green spectrum to participate in a political dialogue. Although they're from opposing parties, they were willing to talk politics. Through these deliberately arranged dialogues, what sparks will fly?

"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.

The "Great Sichuan Earthquake" took place at 14:28 on May 12, 2008. In the days after, ordinary people salvage destroyed pig farms in the mountains, collect cheap scrapped metals, or pillaging other victims' homes. Behind the media circus of official visits is an inconsolable grief of families searching for loved ones. As the Lunar New Year approaches, vagabonds and family tell of the ill-handling of rebuilding schemes and misuse relief funds. As they prepare for another visit from a high official, the refugees are swept out of the town and into tent cities. The promise to put a roof over their heads before winter seems impossible to keep.

Old Jia gave up his city life and returned to the countryside with his wife. He abandoned chemical fertilizer to practice natural farming. His philosophy attracted a big group of admirers from the city, whereas local villagers disagreed on his approaches.

Yu Guangyi's stunning debut explores a grueling winter amongst loggers in Northeast China as they employ traditional practices through one last, fateful expedition. For generations, the lumberjacks of Heilongjiang, China have made their living harvesting timber amidst a barren, wintry landscape. These woodcutters confront the elements, living in makeshift cabins surrounded by snow and ice. Hand tools, sleds and horses are the only technology they employ to drag massive trees down the perilous slopes of Black Bear Valley. At constant risk of injury and death, they attempt to appease the mountain gods with ancient rituals and sacrifices. Despite their heroic efforts to subsist, the deforestation caused by their decades-long customs may lead to their ultimate demise.

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.

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.

The location of Hunan's southwestern Hunan, the local economy is not active, the people either go out to work or go up the mountain to mine. Due to the constant mining disasters, despite the government's efforts to rectify and regulate, many people still illegally mine. Miners often do not pay attention to the protection of mines. Many years later, many miners have pneumoconiosis. The film started shooting in 2010 until 2018, with a filming period of nearly ten years, until the death of Zhao Pingfeng, the protagonist of pneumoconiosis, leaving young children and mentally handicapped wife.

A documentary chronicling the coming of age of a young chinese man.