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.
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.
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.
Wang Wo’s experimental documentary takes the direct cinema approach to the realm of avantgardism, immersing the viewer in a non-narrative, highly sensory experience of urban China in its visual and aural splendor.
A highway is waiting to go through a quiet village in Hunan, a province in central China where Mao was from. Due to the high cost of construction, construction companies and migrant workers who live on road work rush to here like the tide. In the following four years, they root in this strange place for interests, paying sweat and blood, even their lives. With their arrival, local village and peasants are forced to change their lives. Many hidden interest lines and hidden rules about road construction of the nation are unveiled, together with the shocking truth and emerging secrets.
The Shoe Shiner's Journey
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.
All There Will Be
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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
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.
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 China, most families have difficulties facing their lesbian, gay, bisexual and/or transgender (LGBT) children. They have to contend with common social beliefs that homosexuality is shameful, abnormal, a perverted condition caused by deviant family relationships. Many parents see their kids as their property, and fathers often assert their authority to ensure that no harm comes to the family reputation. The documentary 'Papa Rainbow' features six Chinese fathers who talk openly and freely about their experiences with their LGBT children. Speaking out against discrimination and stigma, they redefine what it means to protect a household. They fully embrace their kids for who they are, and become pioneer activists fighting for an equal and diverse society.
Different veterans, different memories of the Anti-Japanese War, and different lives. The oral narratives of 7 veterans show you the pictures of the Anti-Japanese War in that year, and take you to understand the current situation of the veterans of the Anti-Japanese War in Guangdong.
Interviews with Dalai Lama and some Chinese intellectuals about Tibet/China relations and related issues.
Workers, peasants, soldiers, students and merchants were five groups of Chinese society in the 1950s, after the so-called elimination of the exploited class. Borrowing this concept, the umbrella is taken as the clue to rediscover changes in various social classes after the economic reform, and to analyze the social problems in China. Workers making umbrellas, merchants selling umbrellas, students looking for jobs in the rain. Umbrella is used as a metaphor that can be seen everywhere. As the raindrop, what we see is sometimes clear, sometimes untraceable.