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- Set in her home village in rural Hunan province, Egg and Stone is a powerful autobiographical portrait of a 14-year-old girl's attempts to come to terms with her emerging sexual maturity.
- An unusual relationship develops between an urban Chinese couple struggling with heroin and a filmmaker chronicling their addiction, in this provocative documentary on drug abuse, filmmaking and friendship. For three years, filmmaker Zhou Hao chronicled the lives of Long and Jun, a couple struggling with heroin addiction in Guangzhou. Zhou captures Chinese junkie subculture, its members languishing in a slum flophouse, the equivalent of a modern day opium den. When Long is hospitalized after a failed robbery, Zhou speaks out from behind the camera to intervene. Still, Long and Jun persist, soon dealing drugs full-time to make ends meet. As the couple increasingly offers lies for answers, Zhou must confront his ethical responsibilities to them, as a friend and a documentarian. USING probes a dark, cruel reality of contemporary Chinese society that has rarely been seen by any audience. Addicts disclose techniques for dealing with police, confronting sham suppliers and staying high throughout the day. Zhou's unflinching depiction of his friends' repeated attempts to quit blurs the line between filmmaker and subject, and raises provocative questions about the ways in which each uses the other.
- Daily life in an impossibly cramped Beijing apartment takes on epic proportions in this, intimate portrait, with unprecedented access, of a working-class Chinese family.
- Ah-Ming and Yueyue are two out-of-work film school grads living in Beijing who decide to turn the camera on each other and make a film about their lives. While it purports to be the true story of two women filming themselves, Female Directors constantly reminds us of the process that has gone into making it. It is a genre-bending, self-aware piece of experimental filmmaking.
- Li Baicheng is a charismatic fortune teller who services a clientele of prostitutes and marginalized figures whose jobs, like his, are commonplace but technically illegal in China. He practices his ancient craft in a village near Beijing while taking care of his deaf and dumb wife Pearl, who he rescued from her family's mistreatment. Winter brings a police crackdown on both fortune tellers and prostitutes, forcing Li and Pearl into temporary exile in his hometown, where he revisits old family demons. His humble story is told with chapter headings similar to Qing Dynasty popular fiction.
- The "Great Sichuan Earthquake" took place at 14:28 on May 12, 2008. 10 days after: Scenes not seen on official/TV, "survival" is the keyword. Ordinary people are salvaging destroyed pig farms in the mountains, recuperating cents-worth scrapped metals, or pillaging victims' homes. Behind the highly-mediatized official visits, inconsolable grief of families searching for loved ones. Throughout, a vagabond in tattered clothes wanders among the ruins, observing tragic scenes. A monk and a Taoist visionary suggest: "the earthquake is the consequence of Earth-Gods no longer worshipped." 210 days after: Harsh winter, villagers preparing for Lunar New Year, the vagabond and family are detailing grievances about the ill-handling of rebuilding schemes and relief funds. Gearing up for a high official's visit, comes a thorough clean-up of the villages and tent-resettlement for refugees. Promise made for all to live in houses in winter seems tough to keep. Fake parts in the community transformer brought electricity blackout for New Year's Eve reunion dinners. New Year Day starts as never-ending parade of tourists buying DVDs of the most horrific scenes, souvenir albums of corpses being pulled out of the ruins, and photos taken in front of Beichuan, the town most severely hit, where over 70,000 people perished in seconds.
- In a small town near China's North Korea border, a state police station exerts itself as a solicitous caretaker of the locals. As it goes out to catch criminals and punish them too, professionalism fades into the background.
- Working as a secretary for a legal office, Xiaofen records clients detailing the sordid aspects of their lives: divorce cases, medical malpractice suits, financial corruption and old-fashioned personal revenge. Xiaofen starts to question her own relationship with her boyfriend (Deng Gang), fresh out of prison and looking to get into trouble again with his gambling habit. While Xiaofen deals with the overwhelming social malaise surrounding her, rumors spread of a disaster at the local chemical plant, threatening to poison the entire city.
- A 17 year old boy from a village in the Sechuan province leaves for the big city looking for his father, who left 6 years before and has not been heard of since. The fact that his mother still receives money his father does nothing to tame his anger. He his not looking for a warm reunion, it is unconcealed revenge that drives him. Totally lost, he roams the big city with his basket of ducks on his back...
- A young schoolteacher unknowingly enters a tangled web of politics in Yang Jin's unsentimental dissection of the Chinese countryside. When his father dies from AIDS following a botched blood transfer, Jinsheng must return to his home village to take care of his aging grandmother. Taking on the role of a schoolteacher in this barren village, Jinsheng is given a milk cow for his salary in place of money. On behalf of his students, the young man cunningly uses the cow to gain influence within this poor community dominated by stifling bureaucratic governance and backward feudal customs. Will Jingsheng's unexpected rise to power be crushed within this oppressive environment, or will he find his way back out?
- This landmark documentary reveals the tragic life of a gifted young woman who was executed for speaking out during the height of Chairman Mao's rule. Lin Zhao, a top student from Peking University, was imprisoned for defending students and leaders persecuted during Mao Zedong's Anti-Rightist Movement in the late 1950s. A gifted writer, Lin composed endless articles and poems from her cell. Forbidden to use pens, she wrote with a hairpin dipped in her own blood. In 1968 she was executed, her tragic life lost to the margins of history. Four decades later, filmmaker Hu Jie brings Lin's story to light and uncovers the details of this forgotten woman's fight for civil rights. . Searching for Lin Zhao's Soul stands as a landmark in the Chinese independent documentary movement, an unprecedented work of investigation and recovery of modern China's suppressed memories. Director Hu Jie digs through artifacts and interviews first-hand witnesses to Lin's persecution, illuminating an era of political terror that sent millions to their deaths. The result is a lasting testament to a young woman's legacy of courage and conviction. In the words of Chinese writer Ran Yunfei: "Lin Zhao is the spiritual resource for all Chinese people and the legacy for the whole world."
- This documentary reviews and summarizes the development of homosexuality as an issue in the past three decades in China. We interviewed thirty prominent figures in the gay community, who have experienced the changes of views and life-styles regarding homosexuality.
- A rebellious teenager endures boarding school expulsion, family pressures and the harsh realities of rural life in northern China, until an uncovered secret from his past changes his life forever. Er Dong lives alone with his devout Christian mother in a small village. Frustrated with his bad behavior, his mother takes him to a Christian school with the hope that he will find God as well as a new direction in life. Instead, he finds a girlfriend, Chang'e, and their misconduct leads to their expulsion. Together they must face up to the harsh realities of work, parenthood and adult life in the tough economic reality of contemporary China. Recurring nightmares that plague Er Dong lead him to a shocking revelation of his own past.
- Armed with video cameras, twelve artists present a highly stylized portrait of SAN YUAN LI, a traditional village besieged by China's urban sprawl. China's rapid modernization literally traps the village of San Yuan Li within the surrounding skyscrapers of Guangzhou, a city of 12 million people. The villagers move to a different rhythm, thriving on subsistence farming and traditional crafts. They resourcefully reinvent their traditional lifestyle by tending rice paddies on empty city lots and raising chickens on makeshift rooftop coops. Directed by acclaimed visual artists Ou Ning and Cao Fei and commissioned by the Venice Biennale, SAN YUAN LI explores the modern paradox of China's economic growth and social marginalization.
- The mysterious closing of a Beijing school sends hundreds of migrant children on a desperate struggle to reclaim their right to an education. The Yuanhai Migrants Children's School, which serves children of migrant laborers in Beijing, is shut down by city officials for reasons never made clear. The students and teachers manage to continue class, first by sneaking into the shuttered campus, then moving inside a ruined factory, and even setting up class on the street. One after another, these makeshift classrooms fail. Over the course of the semester, attendance drops from 720 to 16. Due to the dedication of the school staff and parents, the students persist in taking lessons, whether inside a decrepit minibus or in their teacher's tiny apartment.
- Aunt' Lam is in the church choir in one of the many small villages on the plains of China. She is rehearsing for a wedding. Her husband is lying in hospital with pneumosilicosis, the most common occupational disease in China, caused by breathing brick-dust. An oxygen supply keeps him alive. Their child, the nine-year-old girl Sheng-yue, has to leave school because she can't afford tuition fees. That is the way life is, without any prospect of improvement. Interwoven with this we see how Chen Shun-jun builds a house on the spot where he hopes the railway will be built. Raised from Dust presents Aunt Lam's problems, as common as insolvable, not as a great existential struggle, but with biblical minimalism, as it were. In the words of the maker: 'like the River Nu Jiang in southwest China - tranquil on the surface, but churning underneath'.
- With groundbreaking honesty, performance artist Li Ning turns his life into art in this epic work of experimental documentary. For five grueling years, Li Ning documents his struggle to achieve success as an avant-garde artist while contending with the pressures of modern life in China. He is caught between two families: his wife, son and mother, whom he can barely support; and his enthusiastic but disorganized guerilla dance troupe. Li's chaotic life becomes inseparable from the act of taping it, as if his experiences can only make sense on screen. Tape shatters documentary conventions, utilizing a variety of approaches, including guerilla documentary, experimental street video, even CGI. Much like Jia Zhangke's Platform, Tape captures a decade's worth of artistic aspirations and failures, while breaking new ground in individual expression in China.
- A remote village in southwest China is haunted by traces of its cultural past while its residents piece together their existence. Zhiziluo is a town barely clinging to life. Tucked away in a rugged corner of Yunnan Province, Lisu and Nu minority villagers squat in the abandoned halls of this remote former Community county seat. Divided into three parts, this epic documentary takes an intimate look at its varied cast of characters, bringing audiences face to face with people left behind by China's new economy. A father-son duo of elderly preachers argue over the future of their village church. Two young lovers face a break-up over harsh financial realities. A twelve year-old boy, abandoned by his family, scavenges the hillside to feed himself. "Directed with scrupulous attention to detail by Zhao Dayong" (Manohla Dargis, The New York Times), Ghost Town is "one of the most important films to have emerged from the booming (but still underexplored) field of Chinese independent documentaries" (Dennis Lim, Moving Image Source). Ghost Town "has a strong sense of historical consciousness, an eye for unique material, and a real sympathy for the people in the film and their tough lives" (Chris Berry, Goldsmiths University). "I do not expect to soon find scenes to match Ghost Town's mountaintop funeral, the running along after a rowdy exorcism, or the scanning of faces at the town Christmas chorale. His back to prosperity, Dayong finds hallowed ground" (Nick Pinkerton, Village Voice).
- Along a sleepy Hunan riverside, two delinquent boys experience a summer of love and violence. Ali and Xiao Yu are two teenage rebels idling away their days along the banks of a river in Jishou, a quiet town in Hunan province. They steal motorbikes, bully and rob kids, sing karaoke and get into fist fights outside the local internet bar, but their rough exterior belies a deeper romanticism, and a tenderness unfolds between them and their teenage loves. As one day bleeds into the next in this impoverished rural setting, it becomes apparent that these sun-baked days of misspent youth will be the wildest, freest time of their lives.
- Meishi Street shows ordinary citizens taking a stand against the planned destruction of their homes for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. In order to widen traffic routes for the Olympic Games, the Beijing Municipal Government orders the demolition of entire neighborhoods. Several evictees of Meishi Street, located next to Tiananmen Square, fight through endless red tape and the indifference of fellow citizens for the right to keep their homes. Given video cameras by the filmmakers, they shoot exclusive footage of the eviction process, adding vivid intimacy to their story.
- This powerful documentary explores the cruel realities of sweatshop labor and workplace injury in China, and one lawyer's mission to defend worker's rights. Shenzhen, one of China's most prosperous cities, attracts thousands of migrant workers every year. These workers come with dreams of opportunity and success, but many find themselves in dangerous working conditions with no regulations to protect them. STRUGGLE tells the story of three workers who lost their limbs in factory accidents that are all too common in China. The workers describe 17-hour shifts that leave them exhausted while operating heavy machinery, leading to disaster. Management denies responsibility for the accidents, often refusing to pay medical bills or compensate injured workers. But a crusading lawyer takes on the bosses, leading to a groundbreaking lawsuit that changes workplace regulations in China. STRUGGLE examines one of China's most crucial problems underlying its booming economic production: the lack of worker's rights. With first-person interviews and rare courtroom footage, director Shu Haolun explains the exploitive policies and practices of government officials and factory bosses, and how lawyer Zhou Litai has taken up the cause of worker's rights. STRUGGLE reveals the harsh realities of sweatshop labor in China, and shows the inspirational efforts of those seeking justice and reform.
- Explores the growing African migrant community in Southern China through the turbulent history of a church founded by a Nigerian missionary.
- SUPER, GIRLS! follows ten female teenagers on their quest to become instant superstars on China's biggest television show. The Chinese equivalent of "American Idol," the "Super Girls Singing Contest" spawned an unprecedented pop culture phenomenon. Drawing over 400 million viewers, the show's runaway popularity spurred the Chinese government to ban it after only two seasons.
- The film chronicles the low lives of migrant workers in China's No. 1 cosmopolitan Shanghai. As pressure built on, one man named Black Skin finally collapsed and went mad.
- As the completion of the Three Gorges Dam draws near, townspeople from Gongtan, Chongqing are pressured to pack up and leave their homes. Interviews with locals open up many ethical questions involved in this enormous power project. Among them are a barber, a cell-phone proprietor, and a boat puller.
- Gai Shanxi and Her Sisters (Gai Shan Xi He Ta De Jie Mei Men) tells the story of one woman's brutal ordeal as a "comfort woman" for the Japanese Army during World War II. Hou Dong-E, known as "Gai Shanxi," the fairest woman in China's Shanxi province, was one of the many women abducted from their villages to be sexually enslaved by Japanese soldiers stationed nearby. Fifty years later, she joined other women throughout Asia to seek justice and reparations, but she died before her demands were answered.