A Young Patriot

Livestreaming your life to a devoted audience is big business. What happens when the cameras are off?

Mio blir som barn skickad till Sverige för att tjäna ihop pengar till sin familj i Thailand. Men det går inte som föräldrarna planerat. Under tre år följer regissör Jonas Embring Mio och hans gäng på Henriksdalsberget utanför Stockholm. De lever i en hård vardag med kriminell identitet och våld. Till sist bestämmer sig Mio för att förändra sitt liv.

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.

In their infinite quest for virgin big walls, adventurers Sean Villanueva O’Driscoll, Nicolas Favresse, Stephane Hanssens and Evrard Wendenbaum, head in September 2013 to a remote valley in the westernmost region of China. There, they found a fantastic 1200m vertical pillar, culminating at 5842m. They spent 14 days on the wall facing snow storms and harsh conditions to finally achieve this amazing ascent with some frost bites but never forgetting to have a lot of fun and to play unreal musical sessions.

In China more people are on death row than the rest of the world combined. The children of the convicts are often left alone, stigmatized and living in the streets. Grandma Zhang, as the kids call her, is a former prison guard who has founded an orphanage in Nanzhao.

New Castle is a remote rural village where houses and mountains have been distorted due to excessive mining. Under the "New Village" campaign, all the villagers will be moved into the nearly completed Luxury Buildings. The documentary depicts the life of two groups of people, miners and villagers. The miners who are from all over the country, lost their jobs because of the Olympic Games in Beijing - the mine was shut down to make the air less polluted. The villagers had no better luck. Granny Fan lost two sons and two grandsons in a mining accident. Old Han and Old Wang are still farming. Some youngsters are gambling in the house of Han Bin, who was crippled in another mining accident. In the film, you can also see the village election, the service of local Christians, and people worshipping for a better year to come.

Toronto filmmaker Charles Officer profiles the young people of Villaways Park, a housing project on brink of historic change.

"China Gate" tells the story of young Chinese fight to change their fate through studying. Right before dawn, students in Huining have already started their self-studying session; hard working youngsters have filled up the space of school ground. This is one of the most poverty-stricken Counties in Western China; here people's only hope is in education, as the way to change their social status. Therefore all their effort point towards the College Entrance Examination, the process is like going through a gate, those who pass can study at urban Universities, and have the chance to build a better life. During the same winter season in Beijing, a graduate student faces a big decision. Should he keep trying to survive in the big city or get back to his countryside home? The exhausted faces at the Beijing underground seem to be revealing the truth about their distance in between. The student comes to see the flag ceremony at Tiananmen Square, where the pulsing symbol of the nation lies.

Village Diary

I just watch the news of war in a distant country on my mobile. My fingers go back day by day to the day the war broke out and pose to see comments posted on the Facebook News Feed that I follow. Outside, I have friends who participated in anti-war rallies.

In this talk, Li Hongqi reviewed his transition from fine art to cinema, and his aesthetic and philosophical exploration from his early 'So Much Rice' to recent 'The The'. Dir. Li Hongqi also shared his strong anxiety of his existence(born with melancholia), his thought on cinema art (actually, I don't think there's any movie worth making), his epistemology, his religious view, his consideration on contemporary cinema, and what he learned about living in seclusion.

Dwarves Kingdom is a documentary film about a theme park featuring performances by little people with dwarfism who live in a fantasy recreation of a magical empire. Built by a wealthy Chinese businessman, this other-worldly kingdom, officially called World Ecological Garden of Butterfly and Little People Kingdom, is located in the mountains surrounding the city of Kunming in Western China.

Unusually popular religions and extreme secular beliefs, unconstrained power and no authoritarian society, people work hard on the land and live thrifty but do not believe in the meaning of life at all. This is Longwang Village, an empty old farming society, the most essential reality of an ordinary western village. The film does not have a perpetual plot. The images are presented with the changing of the four seasons. There is no great joy or great sadness. Everything is recorded, and no results are produced. Strictly speaking, this is actually just a rural video file, a running account of ordinary western villages without all rhetoric.

Only a few days before the Spring Festival of 2008, several truck drivers set off from Nantong, Jiangsu Province, to Guizhou province to deliver goods. But what they didn't expect was that they ran into a big snowstorm not long after their departure. What would these drivers do after they got caught up in a snowstorm and coudn't do nothing about it but wait? How would they react to this unexpected halt? And what would happen to this convoy?

This is a documentary filmed in a subjective perspective. Without any commentary, the film records, in the switches and transitions of the faces, the gamut and track of emotions and vision of the author in enjoying the photographs by Koudelka—from the scenes of life in “Gypsies”, to the conflicts in “Invasion”, further to the still images in “Exiles”, and finally focused on desolately dignified “Chaos”. The four chapters of the film echo the four photo albums of Koudelka. With the indoor CD player playing the music by Shostakovich, the invasion of the landscape without the windows, intermingled with the background noise, complicates the ambient circumstances of the film and renders an immediate sense of urgency and relevance.

Painter Lin Xin tells the story of a thousand-year-old ceramic town in the hinterland of the Loess Plateau in this first experimental documentary "Chen Furnace". The film consists of a 360-degree panoramic prologue and three parts: "Self-Talk", "Bone Style" and "Style". "Fengqing" focuses on the unique scenery of the ancient town's folk customs, houses and famous-tank wall.The film consists of a 360-degree panoramic prologue and three parts: "Self-Talk", "Bone Style" and "Style".The charm and product production process of traditional ceramic crafts such as hand-drawn blanks and engravings are displayed; "Fengqing" focuses on the unique scenery of the ancient town's folk customs, houses and famous-tank wall. The whole film, with its gazing gaze and poetic language, tries to leave in the video the final scene of the "Furnace Never Ending" and the traditional Chen Fa gradually fading away.

Kampf um Tibet

Tibet Les nourritures spirituelles

Tibet - Les nourritures terrestres

The city of Ordos, in the middle of China, was build for a million people yet remains completely empty. Ordos is not so much a place but a symbol of babylonic hype. But nothing will change - as long as people believe.