This film is a realistic record of a sixty-year-old couple living in a remote village (Gurenay) in the Badain Jaran Desert of Alashan, Inner Mongolia plant thousands of mu of ammodendron and euphratica to fight against expanding deserts.
Before the Flood is a study of the final weeks of a dying city, as thousand-year-old Fengjie on the Yangtze River is reduced to rubble and its inhabitants uprooted to make way for the new Three Gorges Dam that will flood the entire valley.
Secrets and mysteries lose power when they are spread too widely. This is what the villagers discover when they invade an old man's vision-inspired shrine to the namelessly holy.
The year 2003 is a rather turbulent period for Hong Kong – the economy was in recession, the government constantly implemented futile policies, the SARS outbreak, and, on July 1st, 500,000 people went on strike opposing the adoption of Article 23 of the Basic Law. It was against this political atmosphere that YIN Zhao-Jian gave up his social worker job, a 10 year long and steady career, and joined the political circle and participated in the district councilor election, which he had no idea about.
A Jian, Zhang Chiand Gou Zi took the train from Beijing to Tongliao. They made a promise that no one could speak during the trip, and who broke the rules should be punished. But it's still necessary to pick up some phone call, ask the way after you get off the train...For educated decadents, life is as if always in a state of intoxication, without goal or objective.
In northern Shaanxi, those three-wheeled trucks who came to the city from rural areas came to be suffering. They talked hard and finally sent their children to distant universities. Four years have passed, the big children can't find a job, the future is uncertain, the smaller children have come to the age of the university. It seems to be in the instinct, a family is still like a hen hatch, waiting for the new hope to break out.
Class 172 is a key class for their excellent students of an ordinary secondary school in Hunan province, from which the kids’ main goal is to upgrade into one of the best province-level high school – No.1 high school of the county. In the recent few years, the school’s enrollment rate to high school was not quite satisfying, and this year, the newly promoted class in charge teacher – Mr. Xiang, who’s only graduated a few years ago, became their brightest hope to teach the students and raise the enrollment rate for school.
This film records Mr. Tang, a 90-year-old retired English teacher living in Zhuhai, Guangdong. It is divided into four parts: teaching, stories, feelings, and getting older. Through the documentary author’s deep understanding of Mr. Tang, an old man lives in his twilight years Jump above the light and shadow.
In the summer of 2007, Gan Xiaoer led an independent film projection team, using projectors and self-made screens, to tour villages in Henan province to show his feature film "Raised from dust" for 8 times, and recorded the process. The 81-minute version of Church Cinema records only one stop, the Qiliying Church, where "Raised from dust" was shot.
China marks the beginning of the extensive Asian theme in Ottinger’s filmography and is her first travelogue. Her observant eye is interested in anything from Sichuan opera and the Beijing Film Studio to the production of candy and sounds of bicycle bells.
In the sound of rice huller, the rice falls to the jar; and in the booming sound of thunder, the rain drops falldown on the ground. Witha shovel on shoulder, we're farming under the sky. -- This is a children's folk rhymes used to be very popular among the Hakka people lived in the westernpart of Fujian Province, China. While farming is not an easy work, rice hulling is an even more laborious work. Rice-huller is a tool used by the peasants in southern China to hull the rice for thousands of years in theirfarming history. This documentary films the making of probably the last rice-huller ever made by mankind.
Seedlings protection rite (also called the parade of big rice dumplings) is a spring agricultural festival of Hakka people in Western Fujian, China. People worship the God of Grains (Shennong) in the rite. People collect thousands of fresh bamboo leaves, sew them together and make a pair of big dumplings filled with 120 kilograms of rice each. They also make tens of thousands of finger-sized rice dumplings for believers to take home. On the 15th day of the 2nd lunar month, villagers carry out the statues of the God of grains and big dumplings. Followed by flowers cars, eight sheds carry children chosen from every clan name in the village who are dressed up as ancient heroes, as people parade around the village. After the rite, villagers believe that farmland is awakened and that disasters are averted. A new agricultural cycle begins.
"Huangyangchuan, Gansu province, China. It's an arid mountain area with poor roads. Ma Bingcheng is well-respected local doctor, so many patients (most of them farmers) come to see him every day. In his small clinic, people chat with each other about their lives, local conditions, or the people they know. The clinic seems to open up like a microcosm, the information and experiences of different people intertwine, revealing the conditions of typical Chinese farmers, and the typical fates of both young and old--"
Structured as a labyrinth-like game and inspired by Jorge Luis Borges, Aleph is a travelogue of experience, a dreamer's journey through the lives, experiences, stories and musings of protagonists spanning ten countries and five continents.
Eco-Terrorist: The Battle for Our Planet follows the most wanted environmentalist today, Captain Paul Watson. In this unique and groundbreaking film, Brown takes a deeper look into what really goes on behind the scenes in the deep waters of our world. More pranks, the glory of successful missions, and fiercer encounters with some of the most infamous and illegal marine hunters, while stopping at nothing to protect wildlife on a global scale. The film takes the audience right to the frontlines of the modern day environmental movement via those who started it.
Li Shouwang is the leader of a blind storytellers team, learned storytelling at the age of 19. His childernare living hard in other cities. Li's money amost goes to his children's pocket every year. But with urbanisation, the storytellers have lost almost all their audience. As the conflict between the storytelling team and the village team intensified, his son, who was far away from home, became the only spiritual sustains... When he was excited that his son would be taking his family home for Chinese New Year, what's await is a sigh.
This investigative documentary gives a comprehensive record of the development of China's "August 3 Crackdown on Mafia" campaign. Li Xiaoming, the main character of the film, escapes from the incident and goes through many ups and downs. The film explores that period from a personal point of view, slowly revealing the untold story of that period.
The player of Jia Zhangke's early film "Xiao Wu" and the famous independent film activist Wang Hongwei talked about Chinese independent films at the IFF Independent Film Forum.
Filmed over three years on China’s railways, The Iron Ministry traces the vast interiors of a country on the move: flesh and metal, clangs and squeals, light and dark, and language and gesture. Scores of rail journeys come together into one, capturing the thrills and anxieties of social and technological transformation. The Iron Ministry immerses audiences in fleeting relationships and uneasy encounters between humans and machines on what will soon be the world’s largest railway network.
"Go Further" explores the idea that the single individual is the key to large-scale transformational change. The film follows actor Woody Harrelson as he takes a small group of friends on a bio-fueled bus-ride down the Pacific Coast Highway. Their goal? To show the people they encounter that there are viable alternatives.
Workers, peasants, soldiers, students and merchants were five groups of Chinese society in the 1950s, after the so-called elimination of the exploited class. Borrowing this concept, the umbrella is taken as the clue to rediscover changes in various social classes after the economic reform, and to analyze the social problems in China. Workers making umbrellas, merchants selling umbrellas, students looking for jobs in the rain. Umbrella is used as a metaphor that can be seen everywhere. As the raindrop, what we see is sometimes clear, sometimes untraceable.