China

Gu Wentong, a middle-aged food critic, is drifting through the local eateries of vibrant Beijing with his younger photographer colleague Oyang. A divorcé with a 6-year-old daughter and estranged from his father for decades, he is looking for a new perspective on life while reconsidering his failings as a father, a son, and a lover. While the seasons come and go, people get together and move apart. Only one thing will remain the same: The White Pagoda where they all meet sooner or later.Read More »

Synopsis:
A young woman joins the army in place of her sick father, and she becomes a true heroine of the Chinese people.Read More »

When an asteroid hits the Earth leading to underwater volcanic eruptions, the inhabitants of a small riverside town start to flee inland. Before she leaves, Nian decides to say goodbye to her childhood friend.Read More »

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A documentary following five young artists from around China, who travelled to Beijing in the 1980s to work as freelancers, exploring their lives, careers, and what aspirations they may have for the future.

This is an EXTENDED CUT of this important “6h generation” doc.Read More »

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This documentary shows how different young people try to realize their dreams or become famous through the film industry. One of the main characters of this documentary is named Wang, a young man from the countryside, aged 28. He comes to Beijing out of a love for the cinema; however, all he can do every day is line up outside the gate of a film studio in the hope of landing a job as an extra, getting 30 yuan for one day! During his stay in Beijing he writes a film script based on his own experience in the city as an extra. He thinks his play presents the darkness and desperation of survival in China. Then he wants to find an investor or a director who can produce his play as an “underground film”, because in his opinion many Chinese directors are successful on the international stage this way.Read More »

87-year-old Alzheimer’s patient Lou has forgotten everyone but her husband Feng, who has been her only caretaker for the past 10 years. Yet after a medical check-up, Feng was diagnosed with a pancreas mass. The man who went through a life of hardship in good spirits finally bursts into tears. Before going to the hospital, he takes her out shopping and makes her pretty. Does it mean their time of separation is coming near? Can they still live a life with dignity and freedom? On the way home, they walk hand in hand as Lou says, “We are together no matter what.”
—Violet Du FengRead More »

Throughout history, women have survived the stifling strictures of patriarchy by using their own codes of communication — be it intergenerational secrets, whisper networks or gestures legible only to other women. Several centuries ago, in Jiangyong County in southern China, women went a step further, inventing an entire language that they used to write songs, poetry and furtive missives to one another.

This fascinating language, Nushu, is the subject of the documentary “Hidden Letters,” though if you’re expecting an illuminating deep dive into its history, you’ll be disappointed. The director, Violet Du Feng, uses Nushu mostly as a cursory framing device for a broad portrait of gender relations in modern China, structured around the stories of two Nushu practitioners: a divorced museum guide, Xin Hu, and a soon-to-be-married musician, Simu Wu.Read More »

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Set against the backdrop of massive economic growth in the 1990s, the story follows A Bao, a self-made millionaire and his journey from being a young opportunist with a troubled past to accumulating dazzling wealth in the city of Shanghai. It also follows his entanglement with four women who represent the pursuits of his life: adventure, honour, love and innocence.Read More »

The story about the arrest and enslavement of a crashed American airman by a backward tribe of the Yi people in central Sichuan during WWII.Read More »