Sparkling Red Star

Cao Fei explores a virtual metropolis within the online platform Second Life. The work blends real and fictional elements of Chinese identity and urbanism to comment on capitalism and development in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Marxist iconography intersects with modern corporate structures, creating a dystopian yet whimsical reflection on 21st-century economic realities.

China, in the early sixties: an angry mob is persecuting a rich landowner. Mei, a young worker, who is part of the crowd. Suddenly she recognizes the victim who she secretly loves. Frightened of revealing her feelings, Mei doesn't know what to do.

During the period of Culture Revolution in 1960s and 1970s in China, a disable old man wanted to use his handicraft, a snuff bottle with inside painting, for the exchange of “Grain Coupon” from a soldier. The soldier promised to give more coupons if the old man can forge a precious stamp. The old man had to do it, however, he failed and fell out with the soldier. At the end, the old man got grain in another way.

An artist looks back on his younger years at the Chongqing Art Academy in the turbulent 1990s. The selection and demands used to be killing. He was close friends with two boys and a girl. They fought with local youngsters and tried to give each other pep talks. Parallels with the childhood years of his parents, during the Cultural Revolution, also show violence and gun battles. Semi-autobiographical, with motion capture.

In 2017, twenty years after the British handed over Hong Kong to China in 1997, young people, more politicized than any previous generation and proud of their land, do not feel Chinese and actively fight against the oligarchs who want to subdue them to China's authoritarian power.

Tiananmen: Forbidden Memory

Ma révolution culturelle

A flying saucer hidden in a Red Chinese peasant village is sought by teams from the United States and U.S.S.R. On finding it, they band together to explore the saucer and take a trip into space.

The friendship between two children is threatened by their parents’ differences. Malú is from a family that was upper-class before the Revolution and remains well-to-do through remittances from relatives overseas, and her single mother (Larisa Vega Alamar) does not want her to play with Jorgito, as she thinks his background coarse and commonplace. Jorgito’s mother (Luisa María Jiménez Rodríguez),

The Journey of a young man who is making a documentary about forgotten narratives around an old piano, takes him through an unknown path towards restoring history, culture and identity of his homeland, Iran, in dusty and abandoned objects.

After a fateful encounter in the summer of 1966, the lifepaths of two brothers from a middle-class Roman family diverge, intersecting with some of the most significant events of postwar Italian history in the following decades.

The touching encounter of two drifting beings - Meiting, a hairdresser, and Chen Mo, a street vendor, in Beijing. A strange relationship on the background of survival and anonymous urbanization, a chronicle on the survival of feelings.

In an epic tale of theater, gender, love and class, two Beijing opera actors navigate political turmoil as their friendship evolves over decades.

During the Cultural Revolution, two young men are sent to a remote mining village where they fall in love with the local tailor's beautiful granddaughter and discover a suitcase full of forbidden Western novels.

A portrait of Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo (1955-2017), a witness of the Tiananmen Square massacre (1989), a dissident, a woodpecker who tirelessly pecked the putrid brain of the Communist regime for decades, demanding democracy loudly and fearlessly. Silenced, arrested, convicted, imprisoned, dead. Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2010, alive forever. These are his last words.

Set in the frozen steppes of Mongolia, a young nomad is confronted with his destiny after animals fall victim to a plague which threatens to eradicate nomadism.

The film Morning Sun attempts in the space of a two-hour documentary film to create an inner history of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (c.1964-1976). It provides a multi-perspective view of a tumultuous period as seen through the eyes—and reflected in the hearts and minds—of members of the high-school generation that was born around the time of the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, and that came of age in the 1960s. Others join them in creating in the film’s conversation about the period and the psycho-emotional topography of high-Maoist China, as well as the enduring legacy of that period.

Kekaiulu Hula Studio follows the Proclaimed Hula Halau of the same name, showcasing their twist on what the real reason for hula is and what life as a dancer in the halau is really like. Something previously unseen in the public eye.

Red Guards were a student movement supported by Mao Zedong in 1966-67 during the Cultural Revolution. A group of students at Qinghua University who issued 2 big-character posters in May-June 1966 called themselves Red Guards. The students criticised the university administration of elitism and bourgeois tendencies. In August 1966 Mao Zedong expressed support for the Red Guards. This gave the student movement political legitimacy and it spread outside Beijing. The Red Guards started to attack the Four Olds and marched across China to eradicate old ideas, old cultures, old customs and old habits. Ultimately the struggle between different Red Guard factions led to a chaotic civil-war-like situation. During 1967-68 the Peoples Liberation Army got the movement under control and restored social order. Beginning late 1968 members of the Red Guard movement were sent to the countryside to undergo re-education. We met and filmed them in August 1971.

Northern China, 2004. When miner Zhang Baomin returns to his home, a small and isolated mining village, his wife tells him that their son has mysteriously disappeared while shepherding his small flock.