Quote:
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.

Bumming.in.Beijing.1990.VSHRip.Original.Cut.x264.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2 h 15 min
Size: 	2.39 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	720x570 
Aspect ratio:  	5:4
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 214 kb/s
BPP: 	0.216
Audio
#1:  	Chinese 2.0ch AAC LC @ 317 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/92BD8D6E2C5FA37/Bumming.in.Beijing.1990.VSHRip.Original.Cut.x264.mkv

Language(s):Mandarin
Subtitles:Mandarin (hardcoded), English

The post Wenguang Wu – Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dreamers (1990) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
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. During his search he meets some directors and producers (including some underground film people), some famous, some not; some businessmen; people from the film censorship authority; and some students from the cinema institute. In fact, in Beijing his life is very hard, no money, no secure place to sleep. In the summer he has to sleep on the roof of a school dormitory. Finally, Wang fails to realize his dream: never will he see his film made.

Another character is also a young man from the countryside. His name is Xiao Wu, 19 years old. His love of cinema is shown in his chosen occupation of selling pirated DVDs, some of which are quite famous foreign films, for example award winners from the Berlin, Venice, and Cannes Film Festivals. Every day he puts all his DVDs into a bag and goes out on his bike to find his frequent customers, young people or students who are film buffs or involved with filmmaking.

Apart from these two, this documentary also features young girls who dream of becoming movie stars. We learn of their love of film and their ideas about life as they audition for a role.

Throughout this process not only am I the director of this documentary but also a person who is puzzled about why we make films. Of course, I also appear in this documentary, and never hide my bewilderment, or the conflicts between my characters and me. For example, Wang accuses me of using his miserable story to enhance my own reputation.

Fuck Cinema 2005 Longer Cut WEB-DL AAC2.0 x264.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2 h 53 min
Size: 	2.09 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	720x540 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	1 463 kb/s
BPP: 	0.151
Audio
#1:  	Chinese 2.0ch AAC LC @ 256 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/11707A87F2C3C88/Fuck_Cinema_2005_Longer_Cut_WEB-DL_AAC2.0_x264.mkv

Language(s):Mandarin
Subtitles:Chinese (Hardcoded), English (.srt)

The post Wenguang Wu – Fuck Cinema (2005) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis

Jiang Hu features “Yuan Da” (Far and Wide), an amateur entertainment troupe that roams the countryside around Beijing and neighboring provinces, providing corny programs to local people. The film is full of socio-ethnographic information, as the camera witnesses the routine operations of the troupe and its members’ interactions. Sometimes tension is revealed when members confess to Wu their worries and complaints in a hushed voice.

(Qi Wang, “Wu Wenguang and the Performative Turn of New Chinese Documentary”, chapter 16, A Companion to Chinese Cinema (2012), ed. Yingjin Zhang)

Background

In May 1988, Wu Wenguang (b. 1956), a 32-year-old unemployed man who had a BA in Chinese literature and who had taught in high school and worked as a television journalist before leaving it all, turned a borrowed video camera onto his freelance artist friends in Beijing. Like his filmed subjects, the filmmaker himself was far away from home (kunming, Yunnan province), belonged tgo no “work unit”, had little money, and basically scraped temporary living spaces from friends or in cheap rented homes. At that moment, Wu was unaware that he was making the first independent documentary in contemporay China: Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dreamers (1990) link As a matter of fact, the concept of documentary (jilupian) did not dawn upon him until a few years later, when BIB entered the 1991 Yamagata Internation Documentary Film Festival and other international film festivals.

(Qi Wang, “Wu Wenguang and the Performative Turn of New Chinese Documentary”, chapter 16, A Companion to Chinese Cinema (2012), ed. Yingjin Zhang)

Director statement
One day, in order to celebrate, and because the troupe members hadn’t seen a piece of meat in days, I went to the butcher shop in town and bought ten catties of pork and cooked up a big wok of my specialty, hongshao braised pork. The cook stove was right next to the stage, where a performance was in full swing, so the aroma of braised pork wafted out into an atmosphere already full of song and dance. Everyone backstage crowded around the stove, and as the actors finished their parts and came off stage, they made straight for the wok… It really felt like a festival. In my right hand I held the ladle and in my left, the DV camera, kidding around and randomly recording stuff. After a while someone else took the camera, and then countless hands snatched it back and forth, everyone filming each other.

(Wu Wenguang, quoted in Qi Wang, “Wu Wenguang and the Performative Turn of New Chinese Documentary”, chapter 16, A Companion to Chinese Cinema (2012), ed. Yingjin Zhang)

1.81GB | 2h 30mn | 702×526 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/FCEABEC814B3DC1/Jiang_Hu_-_Life_on_the_Road_(1999).mkv

Language(s):Mandarin
Subtitles:English hardsubs

The post Wenguang Wu – Jiang Hu: Life on the Road (1999) first appeared on Cinema of the World.