China

The only 1 of 5 artists interviewed in the 1990 Bumming In Beijing, Sen Mou had organized an unsuccessful stage attempt at capturing the disappointment by young actors at the transition from a failed Communism to a more capitalist China.Read More »

Two boys meet at an opera training school in Peking in 1924. Their resulting friendship will span nearly 70 years and endure some of the most troublesome times in China’s history.Read More »

When Lynn discovers that she is pregnant, finishing her studies as a flight attendant are in doubt, not wanting to have an abortion and hide her pregnancy from her absent boyfriend, Lynn hopes to give the child away at birth.Read More »

A girl who is not aware she crossed over into the afterlife; is life itself but a dream within a dream?

The title’s a misnomer: dream water’s not to be waded through, better rather to drift. Splashing along the lazy river you’re just going roundabout, but if you catch the natural current it’s got an outlet in mind. If the dream’s a reflection and the stream is its source then that’s the direction we’ll drift: beyond. Drink deep from the cosmic microwave background radiation and you’ve got the shimmer of a looking-glass alright: this screen’s glazed with waves. The pool’s got defined walls only until they disappear in the haze; hallucination concealing hallucination offers strange clarity – that’s vaporwave.Read More »

China 1839. Because the British imports of opium into Southern China are creating such widespread medical and economic problems, the weak Manchu emperor Tao Kuang is forced to take action that precipitates the ‘Opium War’.Read More »

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NEW YEAR SACRIFICE is based on the short story by the prolific Chinese author Lu Xun and was recently named one of the top 100 Chinese films of all time by Asia Weekly. In a mountain hamlet in eastern China, a poor woman faces trial after trial. Sold into marriage as a child, she is left a young widow and enslaved by her mother-in-law, who sells her to a poor peasant. Her second marriage turns out to be happy until fate takes away her husband and son. Now seen as a bearer of bad luck, she becomes a social outcast. When the New Year comes, can this poor woman find any hope in this society?Read More »

Observations of three varied corners of China’s garment industry: workers in a large-scale production line factory; a designer who rallies against the mass-machine-production of clothes and has created the eponymous hand-made collection called ‘Useless’ (Wuyong) for Paris Fashion Week; and finally the simple life of increasingly out-of-work tailors in small town Fengdang.Read More »

Near the final throes of director Jessica Kingdon’s shockingly incisive, observational nonfiction feature debut “Ascension,” a young woman, presumably a social media influencer, poses for an impromptu photo session in the grounds of a luxurious hotel. Opulence surrounds her as far as the photographer’s lens can see. Suddenly, however, cinematographer Nathan Truesdall unveils a landscaper in close proximity working arduously under intense heat. The jarring contrast of the two realities contained within the same frame illustrates an abominable economic gap.Read More »

Country girl Yu Hong leaves her village, her family and her lover to study in Beijing. At university, she discovers an intense world of sexual freedom and forbidden pleasure. Enraptured, compulsive, she falls madly in love with fellow student Zhou Wei. Driven by obsessive passions they can neither understand nor control, their relationship becomes one of dangerous games – betrayals, recriminations, provocations – as all around them, their fellow students begin to demonstrate, demanding democracy and freedom.Read More »