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Content

Contemporary China

Contemporary China


CHINA STORIES IV

1. Behind the Scene
2. The Birthmark of a Village (Leprosy Village)
3. Reap What You Sow
4. Silo-Cave
5. A Step Away

5 DVDs (With English Subtitles) / 2019 / 150 minutes

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CHINA STORIES III

In the last few decades, China has been experiencing tremendous changes in its economy, society and infrastructure. Each episode of "China Stories" shows audience China by presenting them with stories, characters and images, in the hope that they may understand what the Chinese think, do, and care about now. Leaders have dreams, but what about the dreams of the people?

1. The Lost Generation
2. Master of Suona Horn
3. A Young Conductor
4. Ballerina in a Field

4 DVDs (With English Subtitles) / 2018 / 120 minutes

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DEAD SOULS

By Wang Bing

In Gansu Province, northwest China, lie the remains of countless prisoners abandoned in the Gobi Desert sixty years ago. Designated as "ultra-rightists" in the Communist Party's Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957, they starved to death in the Jiabiangou and Mingshui reeducation camps. The film invites us to meet the survivors of the camps to find out firsthand who these persons were, the hardships they were forced to endure and what became their destiny.

DVD (Mandarin, Color, With English Subtitles) / 2018 / 495 minutes

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GIRLS ALWAYS HAPPY

By Yang Mingming

Rising Chinese director Yang Mingming both directs and stars in GIRLS ALWAYS HAPPY - a mother-daughter story that goes for the jugular.

Wu (Yang Mingming) and her mother (Nai An) live in a Beijing hutong - an old community of cramped alleyways where everyone knows your business and houses are so close together you can smell when neighbors start using a new cooking oil.

It's not just the neighborhood that's claustrophobic. At the heart of GIRLS ALWAYS HAPPY is the relationship between Wu, an aspiring screenwriter in her 20s, and her bitter, superstitious mother, who has recently turned to writing as well. The tension between the pair is raw, honest, mean, and sometimes funny - with no blow too low and no memory too painful to poke at. But their relationship has its moments of intimacy and tenderness too, especially over meals in their leaky, jam-packed home.

As Wu and her mother bicker, they also worry about money and carry on their own misadventures in love. Wu dates and then dumps an older film professor (Zhang Xianmin, playing himself), while her mother cynically cares for Wu's grandfather, hoping the women will be written into his will.

GIRLS ALWAYS HAPPY is a more conventional narrative film than Yang Mingming's earlier work. But it is no less remarkable - marked by the keen eye for visual detail, and unique sense of humor and irony she previously showed in her genre-bending film FEMALE DIRECTORS. Particularly striking are the shots of Wu on her scooter - bright, carefully composed sequences that follow her through the alleyways of the hutong and the broad boulevards of Beijing.

Emotionally intense and sometimes jarring, GIRLS ALWAYS HAPPY is a film about fraught relationships, life in contemporary Beijing, and the challenge of finding your way forward while tied down by the past.

DVD (Mandarin With English Subtitles, Color) / 2018 / 116 minutes

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SPARK

Directed by Hu Jie

SPARK opens by the side of a road in Lanzhou City, northwestern China, as trucks rumble through a blasted hillside. An elderly man walks along the dusty road and pauses to point to a nearby spot-the former execution grounds. "They executed many," the man says. "Then fewer and fewer."

Two of those executed were contributors to Spark, a short-lived magazine from Gansu Province whose young, intellectual contributors bravely shone a light on the horrific realities of life during the Great Leap Forward. More than 35 million people died of famine between 1959 and 1961, in large part because of Communist Party policies. To this day, the Party has never fully acknowledged the scope of the disaster.

In SPARK, filmmaker Hu Jie-who has been described as "China's most important unofficial historian-filmmaker"- tracks down the surviving men and women of Spark, including founder Gu Yan, allowing them to tell their stories.

Weaving together their interviews, the film is in an oral history of the magazine and the tumultuous period that from which it arose. The interviews are striking in their clarity and their emotional immediacy 60 years later. The son of Du Yinghua, a local Communist Party county committee secretary executed for his sympathy for the Spark writers, breaks down in tears after laying out copies of his father's books. Tan Chanxue seems completely at ease-even smiling-as she recalls being herded, bound, through throngs of schoolchildren brought to witness and cheer the Spark members' public outdoor trial. Remarkably, Hu even gets the Tianshui City leader at the time, Tao Yanlie, to admit that authorities prevented people from leaving town, while 100,000 residents died of hunger. Their deaths, he says, were "recorded but useless. We had to report it, but so what?" At one point, Hu suspects he is being followed. During an interview, the phone rings. The interview subject replies, then refuses to continue the conversation.

The writers who contributed to Spark were not all driven by the same motives. Xiang Chengian, who describes thousands of bodies lining the railway tracks between station and city, thought Party officials must be unaware of the extent of the disaster and would intervene if they knew. In contrast, Zhang Chunyuan wondered how the Communist Party could have become so corrupt in so few years, and said it was clearly fascistic. And Lin Zhao, one of several women contributors, couched her critiques more obliquely, in the form of poetry. All were branded as rightists and faced persecution during the Anti-Rightist Movement of the late 1950s, and both Lin and Zhang were sentenced to hefty prison terms, subsequently changed to death sentences.

A brave and powerful document, SPARK is a testament to the threat to power that comes from people willing to speak out about what they see-and an invaluable contribution to understanding the period of the Great Leap Forward.

SPARK makes an excellent companion to Wang Bing's monumental DEAD SOULS, about victims and survivors of the Anti-Rightist Movement, and Hu Jie's SEARCHING FOR LIN ZHAO'S SOUL-which details the persecution of Lin, a Christian, and is a testament to her legacy of courage and conviction.

DVD (Mandarin with English Subtitles, Color) / 2018 / 114 minutes

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OBSERVER, THE

Directed by Rita Andreetti
By Rita Andreetti, Matteo Bosi

In August 2014, the 11th Beijing Independant Film Festival was shut down after repeated threats from local authorities. The government wouldn't tolerate the screening of some 'sensitive' works, particularly a historical documentary called "Spark". The news shook filmmakers and public opinion alike and filmmaker Rita Andreetti couldn't help but begin on a search for the man whose work had pushed the government to the edge of tolerance.

The Observer is the portrait of the extraordinary and undetected work of Chinese dissedent artist, Hu Jie. Despite making huge contributions to historical research by uncovering essential testimonies from China's past, his body of work hasn't been recognized the way it deserves.

Carefully ducking away from the spotlight, he has managed to make more than 30 documentaries throughout his career. The content of his work is vital to understanding Chinese society and the preservation of the memory of its past; he is the first artist to dare talk about the Great Famine, the labor camps (Lao Gai) and the Cultural Revolution in an uncompromised way. For that, he is commonly considered the first historical documentary maker of China, despite his blacklisted status.

Rita Andreetti, director and young Italian film critic, allows viewers to discover Hu Jie's humanity and social commitment as she searches herself for Chinese identity. Inspired by the tenacity and the inner strength of Hu Jie himself, the documentary shows how his prolific activity has recently turned into a more intimate pictorial production. Although under increasing pressure, Hu Jie continues today, with different means, to tirelessly fight for the truth.

DVD (Mandarin with English Subtitles, Color) / 2017 / 78 minutes

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WE THE WORKERS

By Wen Hai, Zeng Jinyan

Shot over a six-year period (2009-2015) in the industrial heartland of south China, a major hub in the global supply chain, WE THE WORKERS follows labor activists as they find common ground with workers, helping them negotiate with local officials and factory owners over wages and working conditions. Threats, attacks, detention and boredom become part of their daily lives as they struggle to strengthen worker solidarity in the face of threats and pressures from the police and their employers. In the process, we see in their words and actions the emergence of a nascent working class consciousness and labor movement in China.

DVD (English, Mandarin, Color, With English Subtitles) / 2017 / 174 minutes

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WIDOWED WITCH, THE

By Cai Chengjie

Winner of the top prize at the Rotterdam Film Festival, director Cai Chengjie's debut feature is, like its titular protagonist, defiantly low-fi, unexpectedly powerful and fiercely unpredictable.

Deemed cursed by the local villagers, three-time widow Er Hao (played by Tian Tian) has her hands full with a rogue fireworks explosion, a tagalong teenager, and a veritable army of crazed local men who can't keep their hands off her. Turned away when she seeks shelter from her neighbors and forced to take up residence in a cold camper van, Er Hao's future looks as bleak as the stark, snowy countryside.

But a series of fluke changes in fortune causes Er Hao to embrace the mystical identity her villagers have assigned to her. As a sort of modern shaman, she steers superstitions into small subversions, helping others who once shunned her and proving that to survive as a woman is a kind of magic.

THE WIDOWED WITCH fearlessly addresses the power of religion in China which, according to the dictates of Communism, is effectively banned. It also conveys the cruelty that can come with village life, and counters the Western narrative of China as a superpower by showing a place where the rule of law is all but nonexistent. Not only is there no recourse or safety net, even the rape that Er Hao suffers goes unpunished. Abused and shunned, Er Hao gains power over the men who have wronged her-but can she find a place in a misogynist, patriarchal and deeply lonely social structure?

With a stunning array of visual styles and a genre-exploding approach to storytelling, THE WIDOWED WITCH is a simultaneously idealistic and despairing film-a bleak view wrapped in a fabulist aesthetic, and one that encompasses both magic realism and crushing social satire.

DVD (Mandarin with English Subtitles, Color, Black and White) / 2017 / 118 minutes

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BITTER MONEY

By Wang Bing

BITTER MONEY documents China's rapid economic and social transformation by following the rural workers who leave their Yunnan hometown to move to the city of Huzhou, one of the busiest cities of eastern China (with the highest number of part-time workers), to labor in its textile factories. But what they find are few opportunities and poor living conditions that push people, even couples, into violent and oppressive relations. The camera follows Xiao Min, Ling Ling, and Lao Yeh closely, capturing the emotions of their daily hard work and disappointments upon receiving their wages. The film deals directly with the effects of 21st-century capitalism, as filmmaker Wang Bing acts as witness to the lives of people forced to adapt to a new economic landscape.

DVD (Mandarin, Color, With English Subtitles) / 2016 / 152 minutes

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CHINA STORIES II

In the last few decades, China has been experiencing tremendous changes in her economy, society and infrastructure. Her leaders dream about revival of the Chinese race: domestically, they want to lead nationals out of poverty towards a reasonable standard of living; internationally, they want to propel the realization of an economic corridor, via both land and sea, and draft a blueprint for a rising power. Leaders have dreams, but what do their subjects dream about?

Each episode of "China Stories" shows audience around in China by presenting them with the stories of some characters, as well as some images, in the hope that they may understand what the present-day Chinese think, do, and care about.

1. The vanishing shadow
2. The invisible citizens
3. The Rise of Online Celebrities in Mainland
4. Guangxi 1968
5. Building a Utopia
6. Speedy Home Coming
7. The last animal tamer
8. Blind Soccer
9. Human-Elephant Conflict
10. Invisible Wings

10 DVDs (With English Subtitles) / 2016 / 300 minutes

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OF SHADOWS

By Yi Cui

Includes two short films, LATE SUMMER and THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS.

OF SHADOWS is set in the unique landscape of China's Loess Plateau, where the shadow play, as an enigmatic art form, has entertained people and deities for centuries. The film follows a lively and resilient group of shadow play performers as they navigate between the rural staging of ancient plays and the urban spectacle of national cultural heritage.

The film starts when the local performers in a small county called Huanxian are gathered to rehearse for the region's shadow theatre festival. The performance of modern cultural preservation is contemplated, as the folk artists move towards a grand stage. Meanwhile, the filmmaker follows the same group of performers into mountain villages where the shadow play theatre serves local life. A poetic picture of the folk artists unfolds as their everyday life and performance meander through light and shadow.

By juxtaposing the rural and the urban, the grassroots and the official, the state and the local, the light and the shadow, the film paints a haunting portrait of a revered folk tradition transforming against the backdrop of a country in constant transition.

As the last part of Yi Cui's trilogy Ying, which explores the theme of cultural decay and revival, OF SHADOWS goes beyond the melancholy over the decline of traditional culture and searches for the resilience and vitality in the grassroots and the folklore. This poetic ethnography continues the filmmaker's pursuit for the rhythmic flow in cinematic medium - meanings are conveyed not only through narrative threads but also through the musicality.

DVD (Mandarin With English Subtitles, Color) / 2016 / 79 minutes

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TA'ANG

By Wang Bing

Director Wang Bing brings his careful eye to the mountainous border-region of northeastern Myanmar in Ta'ang, a powerful and revealing observational documentary that follows members of the Ta'ang minority as they flee to China to escape an ongoing and escalating civil war. In a pair of refugee camps, those displaced by the war attempt to create reasonably safe living conditions, while others go deeper into China where they may find work in sugarcane fields or try their luck in urban areas. Meanwhile, those still in Myanmar must journey across the mountains, belongings and livestock in tow, as the sounds of gunfire and artillery echo around them.

Ta'ang captures the constant insecurity, instability and disorientation that come with life as a refugee, the complexities of the choices the Ta'ang face, and the emotional toll they take.

DVD (Color, With English Subtitles) / 2016 / 147 minutes

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CHINA STORIES I

China has experienced tremendous changes in terms of her economic, socialand infrastructural developments in the recent decades. She has progressed from poverty to moderate prosperity. However, prosperity is achieved at the expense of unprecedented social problems, including environmental pollution, food safety issue and moral degeneration. On the other hand, we also see the struggles of individuals. Some parents are ready to do anything to make their children succeed in life; someone still feels emptiness despite the possession of a fortune while someone else still holds to his ideals and beliefs despite numerous failures and attempts ...

Upon coming to the crossroad, one cannot help but ask: Which direction will China go?

What has modernisation brought to the 1.3 billion people on the soil of China? What will be the next step?

1. A New Age
2. Through the Eyes of Villagers
3. Mayor, Policeman and Teacher
4. The Stage of Their Own
5. A Way Out
6. The Predicament of Wenzhou
7. The Inventor's Dream
8. Lost & Found
9. Dreams of Stardom
10. Laobanzhang
11. Life in Dafen
12. My Husband is Gay

12 DVDs (With English Subtitles) / 2015 / 360 minutes

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THARLO

By Pema Tseden

"Renowned Tibetan filmmaker Pema Tseden returns with his profoundly moving new feature (adapted from his own novella) about a Tibetan shepherd named Tharlo. Visiting a Tibetan town in Qinghai province to obtain a proper ID card from the local police station, Tharlo surprises Police Chief Dorje by reciting from memory a lengthy excerpt from one of Chairman Mao's essays. But things develop in a romantic rather than a political direction. To prepare for his ID photo, Tharlo needs his hair washed, and so meets Yangtso, a beautiful local hairdresser. Their courtship is both exquisitely awkward and enthrallingly suspenseful. Tharlo is smitten, but town-dweller Yangtso's ideas of fun are not quite Tharlo's, and he spends an uncomfortable evening with her at a local karaoke joint.

"This is a passionate love story with darker undercurrents, where basic pastoral imperatives such as protecting his sheep from hungry wolves run against Tharlo's discovery of the contemporary pleasures of smoking, drinking, singing and sex.

DVD (Black and White, Tibetan with English Subtitles) / 2015 / 123 minutes

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INSIDE CHINA: 5. CHINA RICH AND POOR

  • China's social development
  • Modern China
  • Conditions in rural China

    • A big principle of socialism is equality, but China's new society has glaring inequalities. The communist party calls it "socialism with Chinese characteristics" but, in the rush for growth, have they created a society far harsher than western capitalism?

    COMMUNISM COMES TO IKEA The new China now has a growing middle class with the same aspirations as their western counterparts - they want good schools, a good apartment, holidays, a decent retirement package - and furniture from Ikea!

    TOWN AND COUNTRY But the "economic miracle" has left millions behind - there is much hardship in China's vast hinterland where water is scarce and harvests are poor. The government says it is listening to the protests of the disenfranchised - but are they not more interested in holding on to power?

    DVD / 2014 / 23 minutes

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    INSIDE CHINA: 6. THE GREAT MIGRATION

  • China's urban migration
  • Modern China
  • China's industrial revolution

    • Chinese development has depended on a vast influx of 250 million migrant workers into the cities - some have prospered but most are poorly paid and housed, with few rights. Mass protests mean the government can no longer take them for granted.

    THE TRAINEE CHEF'S STORY Li Xu Bin is a migrant worker like millions of others, on low pay and with little job security, living with his wife in a single room in Beijing's suburbs. They have left their child behind, the cause of much heartache.

    THE FRUIT VENDORS Like Li Xu Bin, Mr and Mrs Zhang have moved to the city to earn money to pay for their children's education. The rules say their children must stay behind. Meanwhile they have to work all hours to make ends meet. Says Mrs Zhang: "We never have a single day off."

    DVD / 2014 / 21 minutes

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    INSIDE CHINA: 8. EDUCATION AND WOMEN'S RIGHTS

  • Women In China
  • Education In China
  • Universities In China
  • China's "One-Child" Policy

    The communist revolution gave women theoretical equality, but centuries-old oppressions still persist. Women have suffered through the "one child" policy. But women are now among China's top entrepreneurs.

    "ONE CHILD" POLICY China's coercive policy of forbidding more than one child has had a cruel effect on China's women. The policy is now being relaxed - but some women are happy with one child.

    SUICIDE WATCH China is the only country where the suicide rate is higher among women than men - experts say this may be down to the low status of rural women. Can education help?

    "EDUCATION COMES FIRST" Language professor Wu Quing runs a vocational school for young rural women. "It's a man's world - but change rural women and you will change China."

    "THE STUDIES ARE DEMANDING" Architectural student Ghuan Zhaoyu is one of China's growing university population. She wants to study abroad but, as an only child, she has to think of her parents.

    DVD / 2014 / 26 minutes

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    IRON MINISTRY, THE

    By J.P. Sniadecki

    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, 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.

    DVD (Color) / 2014 / 83 minutes

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    MOTHERS

    By XU Huijing

    Mothers is a gripping cinema verite documentary that shows how China's one-child policy plays out in the daily lives of women in a northern Chinese village.

    There are not a lot of job prospects in Ma, a community of 2,000 in Shanxi Province. Factories have closed, young people are leaving, and declining numbers are more of a problem than over-population. Still, town officials must strictly enforce the one-child policy. In the case of Ma, this means meeting an annual quota for the sterilization of women who have had more than one child.

    At the heart of the documentary lies a high stakes cat-and-mouse game. On one side are the male deputy mayor Zhang Guo-hong and the female local director of women's care, Zhang Qing-mei, On the other: a schoolteacher named Rong Rong who is a mother of two - and who has managed so far to avoid sterilization. Now - faced with the prospect of failing to meet their quota - Qing-mei and Guo-hong are determined to make sure Rong Rong doesn't outwit them again. They appear at her house early in the morning, try to track her down through her relatives (including a grandmother who emphatically berates Guo-hong), and hold out a carrot in the form of the residency papers she will need for her second child.

    Meanwhile, Qing-mei also travels through town on her red scooter, spreading the gospel of family planning at rallies and celebrations, and trying to exhort as many women as possible to submit to sterilization.

    Without resorting to voice-over, Mothers offers a powerful feminist perspective, as we watch men developing and enforcing reproductive policies for women. Here, women's bodies are not an ideological battleground, but the epicenter of the conflict over the most banal of undertakings: meeting a quota. Eventually, even Guo-hong admits to the camera, "We're just scared of losing our jobs. Do you think I am really committed to this?"

    DVD / 2013 / 68 minutes

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    QUESTIONING, THE

    By Zhu Rikun

    "Early in the morning on July 24th, 2012, after meeting some friends in Hongkong, I drove a car of my brother back to Shenzhen and got Guo Feixiong and three other friends who take part in human rights protection to the car and went on driving to Xinyu, Jiangxi Province to cheer Liu Ping and two other local independent candidates. They have been oppressed by the government and the police for taking part in the election and other human rights protection events.

    We hurried to Xinyu before dawn on July 25th. By the time dawn broke, we found a hotel and put our luggage there, then we went to meet Liu Ping and others, went to see a lake where Liu had been imprisoned nearby, and interviewed them about their experiences. While doing these things, we found ourselves tailed. At 11o'clock at night, we came back to the hotel, there were some police cars and a group of policemen scattering by the building. The owner of the hotel came to us in a hurry and told us that the police had already been into our room before, and said it had never happened before. At 12 o'clock at night, some policemen came to our room and started the so-called "room inspection."

    As they began to knock at the door, I turned on a small camcorder which was prepared in advance. This short film is the record of such a moment." - Zhu Rikun

    DVD (Color) / 2013 / 21 minutes

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    TIL MADNESS DO US PART (FENG AI)

    By Wang Bing

    Master director Wang Bing documents the inmates of an isolated mental institution in rural Zhaotong, in southwest China's Yunnan province, in 'TIL MADNESS DO US PART. Within the facility's gates, the patients are confined to locked floors of a single building. Once locked on that floor, with little contact from the outside world, anything goes.

    The facility's inmates have been committed for different reasons: perhaps they have a developmental disability; perhaps they committed murder; perhaps they angered local officials. But once inside, they all share the same life and cramped living quarters, staring at a barren, iron-fenced courtyard and seeking comfort and human warmth wherever they can find it.

    Compared to films including Frederick Wiseman's TITICUT FOLLIES (1967) and Milos Forman's ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST (1975), the immersive 'TIL MADNESS DO US PART uses handheld camerawork and digital video to interrogate mental illness and criminality, therapy and incarceration, and the relationship between individuals and society. The film is a riveting, terrifying, surprising and tender documentary portrait that viewers will not soon forget.

    DVD (Color, Mandarin and Yunnan dialect with English Subtitles) / 2013 / 228 minutes

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    CHINA CONCERTO

    By Bo Wang

    An observational essay shot in the southwestern city of Chongqing, CHINA CONCERTO probes the uses of public spectacle in contemporary China.

    Born and raised in Chongqing, filmmaker Bo Wang visited his hometown at the height of now-disgraced politician Bo Xilai's campaign to revive Mao-era "red culture", promoting among other things the public singing and dancing of Communist songs.

    Alongside these participatory street performances, CHINA CONCERTO looks at images from the media, including Michelangelo Antonioni's Chung Kuo-China, and news media and advertising that address the capitalist present in forms reminiscent of the communist past.

    The situation is explored in a narration modeled on Chris Marker's Sans Soleil, which is delivered by a woman with an ambiguous accent. Perched between an insider and outsider perspective, CHINA CONCERTO considers the persistence of totalitarian ideologies and images.

    DVD (Color) / 2012 / 50 minutes

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    EGG AND STONE

    By Huang Ji

    Huang Ji's brave personal film is one of the most auspicious debuts in recent Chinese cinema. 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. Since her parents moved to the city to work, she has been forced to live with her uncle and aunt for seven years. Alone with her own inchoate fears and desires, she grapples with a terrifying world of sexual awakening and danger. Huang Ji's visual sophistication, narrative fluency, and technical polish belie her youth. Cinematographer Ryuji Otsuka (also the film's producer and editor) contributes beautifully crafted cinematic images, fearfully intimate, softly pulsing with light, saturated with complex emotional power.

    DVD (Color, Hunan with English Subtitles) / 2012 / 98 minutes

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    FEMALE DIRECTORS (NU DAOYAN)

    By Yang Mingming

    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.

    On the surface, FEMALE DIRECTORS is the ultimate documentary for the age of oversharing. Two young women love the camera and record the minutiae of their lives: meals, nasty fights, phone calls. Soon after the camera starts rolling, they discover that both are seeing the same sugar daddy. Recriminations and profane accusations follow. Eventually, the pair, make up, break up with the man they call "short stuff" and go traveling together.

    But there is much more to this film. Is it a documentary, mockumentary, or a sly piece of drama? Ah-Ming herself is a fiction-the on-screen persona of Yang Ming Ming, the film's actual director. Deliberately unpolished, FEMALE DIRECTORS highlights rather than obscures the presence of the the camera, as it is dropped on a bed, Ah-Ming and Yueyue jostle over it, or as one or the other implores her counterpart to turn it off.

    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 that bears repeated viewing.

    DVD (Color, Chinese with English Subtitles) / 2012 / 43 minutes

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    THREE SISTERS (SAN ZIMEI)

    By Wang Bing

    One of his generation's most important documentary filmmakers, director Wang Bing is at the height of his powers in THREE SISTERS. The film introduces viewers to 10-year-old YingYing, 6-year-old Zhenzhen and 4-year-old Fenfen, who live alone in Xiyangtang, a tiny rural village in the high mountains of China's Yunnan province. Their father is away working in the city; their mother left the family long ago.

    The girls help their grandfather or aunt in exchange for meals. They spend their days at grueling tasks: herding sheep, goats and pigs, searching for firewood, collecting dung. Games are few and far between. The eldest, Yingying, is her sisters' primary caretaker, shouldering responsibilities far beyond her years.

    Wang's hand-held footage beautifully captures the region's dramatic landscapes and plunging, mountainous scenery in THREE SISTERS, an essential part of the international film canon.

    DVD (Color, Mandarin and Yunnan dialect with English Subtitles) / 2012 / 153 minutes

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    TIMBER GANG (AKA LAST LUMBERJACKS) (MU BANG)

    Directed by YU Guangyi

    Yu Guangyi's stunning debut explores a grueling winter amongst loggers in Northeast China as they employ traditional practices through one last, fateful expedition. A lasting testament to disappearing traditions, Last Lumberjacks "is a fascinating glimpse at a rare way of life that few will ever witness" (Ain't It Cool News)

    For generations, the lumberjacks of Heilongjiang, China have made their living harvesting timber amidst a barren, wintry landscape. These woodcutters confront the elements, living in makeshift cabins surrounded by snow and ice. hand tools, sleds and horses are the only technology they employ to drag massive trees down the perilous slopes of Black Bear Valley. At constant risk of injury and death, they attempt to appease the mountain gods with ancient rituals and sacrifices. Despite their heroic efforts to subsist, the deforestation caused by their decades-long customs my lead to their ultimate demise.

    DVD (Color, Northeastern Chinese dialect with English Subtitles) / 2012 / 90 minutes

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    WHEN THE BOUGH BREAKS (WEI CHAO)

    By JI Dan

    On the outskirts of Beijing, two teenage girls from a migrant family struggle to earn the money to pay for their brother's schooling with little help from their troubled and eccentric parents.

    Growing up in a rickety hut on a garbage-filled lot, Xia, Ling, and Gang recognize that a good education is their only possible ticket to a better life. Their older sister, who left school to begin working, has disappeared, likely kidnapped and sold into prostitution.

    As migrants, they are prevented by China's hukou (residence permit) system from attending a free public school, and when the school that had provided them with scholarships closes, they are forced to look for new options. With very little money to their name, they place all their hopes in Gang, the older brother.

    Their complicated home life doesn't make things any easier. Their alcoholic father and their mother are frequently at one another's throats, and do not seem to understand the gravity of their children's situation.

    Director Ji Dan, one of China's preeminent female filmmakers, first met Xia, Ling, and Gang in 2004, while making a film about education in China, This intimate, patient portrait grew out of their close relationship over many years.

    WHEN THE BOUGH BREAKS at once explores the particular dynamics of one family and exposes the widespread difficulties faced by migrants living at the margins of Chinese society.

    DVD (Color) / 2012 / 144 minutes

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    BEIJING BESIEGED BY WASTE (WEI CHENG LA JI)

    Directed by WANG Jiuliang

    Photographer Wang Jiu-liang travels to more than 500 landfills, fearlessly documenting Beijing's unholy cycle of consumption through poignant observational visits with the scavengers who live and work in the dumps.

    While China's economic ascent commands global attention, less light has been shed upon the monumental problem of waste spawned by a burgeoning population, booming industry, and insatiable urban growth.

    Award-winning photographer Wang Jiuliang focuses his lens upon the grim spectacle of waste, excrement, detritus, and rubble unceremoniously piled upon the land surrounding the China's Olympic city, capital, and megalopolis, Beijing.

    Eking out a dangerous living within are the scavengers, mostly migrant workers from the countryside, who struggle to uphold familial and cultural systems amid their occupation's Dickensian bleakness.

    Wang renders the decimation of once-essential rivers and farmlands in the backdrop of gleaming high-speed trains, stadiums, and skyscrapers; the sinister cyclical pattern of construction's consumption and garbage, and moving images of the daily lives of scavengers who labor at their own risk.

    DVD (Color, Mandarin with English Subtitles) / 2011 / 72 minutes

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    MY FATHER'S HOUSE (JIAO TANG)

    Directed by ZHAO Dayong

    The troubled story of an underground church founded by Nigerian missionaries offers a rare glimpse inside an immigrant African community in China.

    In Nigeria, Pastor Daniel Michael Enyeribe has a revelation to bring the word of God to China. He joins a booming community of African merchants who have settled in the southern city of Guangzhou and established the Royal Victory Church for both Africans and Chinese to worship. The church functions as the spiritual center for the ever-growing African trader community, who struggle with cultural, personal and financial challenges. After being raided by police enforcing strict laws regulating religious practice, Pastor Daniel flees to Hong Kong, where he uses video conferencing to lead his congregation from afar. His colleague Pastor Ignatius assumes daily management of the church, while struggling to support his Chinese wife and their young child.

    With My Father's House, documentary filmmakers Zhao Dayong (Ghost Town, New York Film Festival) and David Bandurski capture a complex subculture thriving within a seemingly homogeneous society where immigrants and evangelical religion are kept from view.

    DVD (Color) / 2011 / 77 minutes

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    OLD DOG (LAO GOU/KHYI RGAN)

    By PEMA Tseden

    A family on the Himalayan plains discovers their dog is worth a fortune, but selling it comes at a terrible price.

    The Tibetan nomad mastiff is an exotic prize dog in China, fetching as much as millions of dollars from wealthy Chinese. When a young man notices several thefts of mastiffs from Tibetan farm families, he decides to sell his family's dog before it is stolen and sold on the black market. His father, an aging Tibetan herder, is furious when he discovers their dog missing. When the father seeks to buy the dog back, it leads to a series of tragicomic events that threaten to tear the family apart, while showing the erosion of Tibetan culture under the pressures of contemporary society.

    Pema Tseden (THE SILENT HOLY STORIES, THE SEARCH) is the leading filmmaker of a newly emerging Tibetan cinema and the first director in China to film his movies entirely in the Tibetan language. His third feature OLD DOG is both a humorous and tragic allegory and a sober depiction of life among the impoverished rural Tibetan community.

    DVD (Tibetan with English Subtitles, Color) / 2011 / 88 minutes

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    FORTUNE TELLER (SUAN MING)

    Directed by XU Tong

    The colorful life of a countryside fortune teller provides a candid and deeply revelatory look at people living on the fringes of Chinese society.

    Li Baicheng is a charismatic fortune teller who services a clientele of prostitutes and shadowy 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, during which they visit their hometowns and confront old family demons. Li's humble story is punctuated with chapter headings reminiscent of Qing Dynasty popular fiction.

    In Fortune Teller, Xu Tong continues his work documenting China's underclass, whose lives have gone largely unnoticed during the country's boom years. Xu spent a year filming nearly every detail of Li's daily existence and the ancient spiritual practices he administers.

    DVD (Color, Mandarin with English Subtitles) / 2010 / 129 minutes

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    KARAMAY

    Directed by XU Xin

    In 1994, the oil-rich city of Karamay in Northwest China was the site of a horrible fire that killed nearly 300 schoolchildren. The students were performing for state officials and were told to stand by while the officials exited first. After the fire, the story was heavily censored in the Chinese state media. To this day, the families of Karamay have not been allowed to publicly mourn their children.

    In KARAMAY, filmmaker Xu Xin helps a community break the silence nearly two decades after their tragedy. The film is structured around a series of first-person accounts from families, teachers and survivors, interspersed with rare archival footage. Each narrative represents a complete and self-contained story in which the subjects recount their reaction to the carnage and how it colored their view of nation, society, education, law, party institutions and human nature. The result is "a landmark in journalistic diligence and a dedicated act of commemoration and healing" (Michael Fox, SF Weekly).

    DVD (Black & White, Mandarin with English Subtitles) / 2010 / 356 minutes

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    NO. 89 SHIMEN ROAD (HEI BAI ZHAO PIAN)

    By SHU Haolun

    16 year-old Xiaoli lives in a communal block on Shimen Road, a close-knit neighborhood that no longer exists in Shanghai. It's the late 1980s; while his teachers talk about China's recovery from the devastation of the Cultural Revolution, another wave of cultural change is already underway, as Xiaoli encounters Western businessmen, Coca Cola bottles and other foreign elements on the streets. The allure of new cultures and ideas sweeps through Xiaoli and the two young women closest to him. His best friend Lanmi carouses with foreigners, scandalizing the neighborhood. Lili, an idealistic classmate whom he loves, wants to quit school and join the student democracy demonstrations that have started in Beijing. Xiaoli must decide where his future lies in a world suddenly robbed of stability and innocence.

    Building from his acclaimed documentary NOSTALGIA, which commemorated the now-demolished neighborhoods of Shanghai, Shu Haolun's first dramatic feature vividly resurrects the experience of social and cultural awakening in China during the 1980s. Shu weaves a rich tapestry of memory using multiple devices, including still photography, richly textured cinematography, and an elaborately recreated milieu rich with characters.

    NO. 89 SHIMEN ROAD not only vividly recalls an era of China's history, but a crisis in values affecting its youth that resonates with the present.

    DVD (Mandarin and Shanghai Dialect with English Subtitles, Color) / 2010 / 85 minutes

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    TAPE (JIAO DAI)

    Directed by LI Ning

    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. Tape captures a decade's worth of artistic aspirations and failures, while breaking new ground in individual expression in China.

    DVD (Color, Mandarin with English Subtitles) / 2010 / 168 minutes

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    WINTER VACATION (HAN JIA)

    By LI Hongqi

    In this acclaimed absurdist comedy, bored teenagers and disillusioned adults rage at each other and the emptiness of life in frost-bitten northern China.

    It's the last day of winter vacation in Inner Mongolia. Four aimless adolescents enjoy their last hours of freedom drifting between the barren spaces of their small town. They make surreal visits to homes of family and friends, including an unhappy little boy who dreams of becoming an orphan to escape the tyranny of his family.

    A prevailing absurdity casts over their lives as they endure petty instances of bullying while arguing over the purpose of school, teenage love, and life in general. Eventually they return to the routines of school life, only to witness an epic meltdown from their teacher in the midst of a lesson. Winner of the Golden Leopard for Best Film at the Locarno Film Festival, the third film by poet-novelist Li Hongqi announces him as a major figure in China's independent cinema.

    DVD (Mandarin with English Subtitles, Color) / 2010 / 91 minutes

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    DISORDER (XIANSHI SHI GUOQU DE WEILAI)

    Directed by HUANG Weikai

    Huang Weikai's one-of-a-kind news documentary captures, with remarkable freedom, the anarchy, violence, and seething anxiety animating China's major cities today. As urbanization in China advances at a breakneck pace, Chinese cities teeter on the brink of mayhem. One man dances in the middle of traffic while another attempts to jump from a bridge before dozens of onlookers. Pigs run wild on a highway while dignitaries swim in a polluted river. Unshowable on China's heavily controlled television networks, Disorder reveals an emerging underground media, one that has the potential to truly capture the ground-level upheaval of Chinese society.

    Huang Weikai collects footage from a dozen amateur videographers and weaves them into a unique symphony of urban social dysfunction. Huang shatters and reconstructs a world that's barely comprehensible, though with palpable energy - vibrant, dangerous, and terrifying.

    DVD (Black & White, Mandarin with English Subtitles) / 2009 / 58 minutes

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    CHINA NEW FACES

    1: A Marginal Group
    2: Marrying Into Her Family
    3: The Mosuo In The Spotlight
    4: Give Me Back The Natural Scenery
    5: Returning Support To Rural Areas
    6: Monks And The City
    7: Sorrow Behind Redevelopment
    8: Village Official As Blogger

    8 DVDs / 2008 / 240 minutes

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    DONG

    Directed by JIA Zhangke

    China's greatest living filmmaker Jia Zhangke (Platform, The World) travels with acclaimed painter Liu Xiaodong from China to Thailand as they meet everyday workers in the throes of social turmoil.

    Liu Xiaodong is well-known for his monumental canvases, particularly those inspired by Chinas Three Gorges Dam project. In DONG, Jia Zhangke visits Liu on the banks of Fengjie, a city about to be swallowed up by the Yangtze River. The area is in the process of being de-constructed by armies of shirtless male workers who form the subject of Liu's paintings. Liu and Jia next travel to Bangkok, where Liu paints Thai sex workers languishing in brothels. The two sets of paintings are united in their subjects' shared sense of malaise in the face of the dehumanizing labor afforded them.

    Jia takes Liu's work as a point of inspiration for his own cinematic innovation. Produced as a companion piece to Still Life (Golden Lion, Venice Film Festival), DONG stands on its own as an aesthetically provocative exploration of the documentary form. Blessed with the director's signature compositional beauty and humanism, Jia's vision of China is concrete and explosive (Jean-Pierre Rehm, Cahiers du Cinema).

    DVD (Color, Mandarin, Sichuan dialect & Thai) / 2008 / 70 minutes

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    UMBRELLA (SAN)

    By Du Haibin

    The program of economic reforms initiated in China in 1978 by Deng Xiaoping aimed to finance the modernization of the nation. But what Communist Party leaders called "Socialism with Chinese characteristics" looked suspiciously to many as a return to capitalism. Today, some three decades later, the results of those sweeping economic reforms have become plainly visible in a country increasingly divided between its rural and urban sectors.

    Filmed in five different regions of China, UMBRELLA provides a telling look at the vast changes that have taken place in Chinese society, including a massive migration from the countryside to the cities, the rise of a prosperous new class of businesspeople, millions of new college graduates competing for a shrinking number of jobs, and the neglect of China's largest population group, its rural peasants.

    Filmed in a purely observational style, with no narration or commentary, UMBRELLA shows the workaday life of young employees in a factory in Zhongshan, Guangdong Province, where they engage in monotonous, endlessly and rapidly repeated routines to manufacture umbrellas, for which they are paid a meager piece rate. At a massive shopping mall, the "World's Largest Small Commodity Market," in Yiwu, Zhejiang Province, those multicolored, multipatterned umbrellas are sold at much higher prices by wholesale merchants, who are among China's nouveaux riche.

    The film also shows throngs of young people filling out applications at a job fair in Shanghai or undergoing physical drills and ideological regimentation at a provincial garrison of the People's Liberation Army. Finally, on a farm in Luoyang, Henan Province, we watch a group of elderly farmers struggle to salvage a premature harvest of drought-impacted wheat.

    UMBRELLA makes sadly apparent the old adage about "the rich becoming richer and the poor becoming poorer," with China's peasant farmers, who are struggling to survive amidst the combined forces of globalization and the new Chinese economy, bearing the brunt of the country's growing pains.

    DVD (Color) / 2007 / 93 minutes

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