A Sunny Day

Zhang Ming went back to hometown to visit his aunt.

To commemorate the 70th anniversary of the victory of WWII, this documentary film describes the eight years of dauntless air-force fighting of the republic of China during the Anti-Japanese War, with only 300 combat-capable aircraft from China while Japan had over 2000.

Mr. Zhu has reached a point in his career where he is left with only a few acting offers on the table, so he hops on a ferry in search of his wife, on the island where they first met. It is low season on the island, with few visitors in plain sight. Yet Zhu continues to actively photograph everything on the island. He encounters various islanders, gets familiar with a hotel owner, becomes attracted to a primary school teacher, and engages in romance with the manager of a local dance club. While he begins a fascinating journey, his wife is still nowhere to be found…

This important, patient documentary follows a year in the life of the sidings dwellers who eke out a living, begging, foraging, stealing and sleeping rough near the Baoji railway station in Shaanxi.

Before the Flood is a study of the final weeks of a dying city, as thousand-year-old Fengjie on the Yangtze River is reduced to rubble and its inhabitants uprooted to make way for the new Three Gorges Dam that will flood the entire valley.

Coming back to her broken family, pregnant writer Huang Xiaoyu and her French husband, Benjamin, finds herself trapped between her cult brainwashed mother, Li Jiumei, and her secretly homosexual father, Huang Tao.

The little-known Hunan Suining County is an ordinary but full of magical places. As the theoretical point of the rocket wreckage launched by the Xichang Satellite Launch Center, it has greeted the rocket wreckage from the sky dozens of times in the past 20 years since 1990. This mysterious and dangerous “out-of-town visitor” broke the poor and peaceful life of the 160,000 locals in the jurisdiction. 2008 is China's "Olympic Year" and "Aerospace Year." The people of Suining, like the people of the whole country, are looking forward to the Olympics to pay attention to the Olympics and are proud of the growing strength of the comprehensive national strength including aerospace strength. They also have to bear the fate of falling from the sky.

A wistful but witty account of a trip to Beijing by filmmaker Viv Li, a Chinese art student who has been living abroad for ten years. Her stay with her family mercilessly exposes how uprooted she has become by her life abroad.

July 27th, 1976 - a day the people of Tangshan will never forget. When that fateful day ended, tens of thousands had been killed, and the lives of the survivors would be changed forever. No public official, no expert, nor anyone among the seismological personnel - regardless of what they were doing that day - should ever forget. History will always remember the twilight of that day.

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.

"Huangyangchuan, Gansu province, China. It's an arid mountain area with poor roads. Ma Bingcheng is well-respected local doctor, so many patients (most of them farmers) come to see him every day. In his small clinic, people chat with each other about their lives, local conditions, or the people they know. The clinic seems to open up like a microcosm, the information and experiences of different people intertwine, revealing the conditions of typical Chinese farmers, and the typical fates of both young and old--"

Gentle, easy-going Or Kia moves from the countryside to Kuala Lumpur to work for his cousin and best friend Ah Soon, a mid-level gangster and enforcer. While Or Kia works hard to put a sister through school, Ah Soon cares for an unstable girlfriend prone to mysterious disappearances. As they both sink deeper into a nocturnal world of debts, drugs, and betrayal, Or Kia's loyalties are strained when Ah Soon falls out of favor with the bosses and tries to escape the business.

The Chinese Department of Sun Yat-sen University (Guangzhou) staged the Chinese debut of "The Vagina Monologues" in December 2003. Since then, this feminist play, which came from the US and has been committed to the elimination of gender-based violence, has incited a vagina hurricane that blew all over mainland China.

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.

An exploration of the Cultural Revolution that depicts both its chaotic later years – through the story of a squad of Red Army guards running amok in the countryside – and its continuing legacy in today’s China.

A Yangtze Landscape utilizes a non-narrative style, setting off from the Yangtze's marine port Shanghai, filming all the way to the Yangtze River's source, Qinghai/Tibet - filming a total distance of thousands of kilometers. Experimental music and noise recorded live on scene are used in post-production, painstakingly paired with relatively independent visuals, creating a magically realistic atmosphere contrasted with people seeming to be 'decorative figures' right out of traditional Chinese landscape scrolls.

Xuan is a young man working in the film industry in Beijing. To make a documentary film that he wants to present at international festivals, he decides to take advantage of the holidays of the Day of the Dead to return to Chengdu, his hometown located at the other end of the country. The documentary he is about to make is about his relationship with his own lover. He leaves for Chengdu, accompanied by another man, Bo, the cameraman of the film. The two men take the train to Chengdu where Hong, Xuan's lover, is waiting for them. From the first moment of their arrival at the station, Xuan and Bo begin to turn with their camera, Xuan having already explained to Bo what he wanted to film and that Hong would always be "playing", Bo then trusting in Xuan. But Hong is more and more opposed to this camera and the presence of Bo.

Six-year old Lin resides in an isolated fishing village with her brother and their widowed mother. When the family gets an opportunity to start a new life, Lin has a startling revelation. A melancholic tale inspired by real events.

China marks the beginning of the extensive Asian theme in Ottinger’s filmography and is her first travelogue. Her observant eye is interested in anything from Sichuan opera and the Beijing Film Studio to the production of candy and sounds of bicycle bells.