Aunt (2004)
Genre : Documentary
Runtime : 1H 0M
Director : Zhang Ming
Synopsis
Zhang Ming went back to hometown to visit his aunt.
Working as a secretary for a legal office, Xiaofen records clients detailing the sordid aspects of their lives: divorce cases, medical malpractice suits, financial corruption and old-fashioned personal revenge. Xiaofen starts to question her own relationship with her boyfriend (Deng Gang), fresh out of prison and looking to get into trouble again with his gambling habit. While Xiaofen deals with the overwhelming social malaise surrounding her, rumors spread of a disaster at the local chemical plant, threatening to poison the entire city.
If It’s Not Now, Then When? mostly takes place in an apartment inhabited by three members of a family (though never at the same time): mother Pearlly Chua (from Tsai Ming-liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone), daughter Tan Bee Hung and young son Kenny Gan. Their father seems recently to have died. The mother leaves early and returns late, out on long walks in the park with a lover whom the daughter and her best friend try to spy on. The daughter pecks away at a computer at work and has a desultory affair with her married boss, which he carries on between his business and family phone calls. And the son breaks into cars and “recycles” the electronics he finds.
KJ is a biography of a HK musical genius. At the age of 11, KJ won the Best Pianist price and went to Czech to perform with a professional orchestra. Touching on subjects such as the meaning of life, God and the artistic process, the director’s 6-year-conversations with KJ reveal how a young man inspires by his music teacher, Nancy Loo and how he conflicts with his peers and parents. KJ is not about the victory of a genius, but how he learns to be a "human being".
In rural China, the job of enforcing the Communist Party's one-child policy falls on government bureaucrats tasked with imposing fines, birth control, and forced sterilizations. Xu Huijing documents this process in his native village of Ma, following the tenacious efforts of the local birth control chief during an increased sterilization quota period, revealing the absurd and tragic local consequences of high-level government policy. (Chicago International Film Festival)
Yu Guangyi's stunning debut explores a grueling winter amongst loggers in Northeast China as they employ traditional practices through one last, fateful expedition. 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 may lead to their ultimate demise.
The mother of a murderer awaits and prepares to meet her son. The true story of a man who killed six Shanghai policemen after suffering police beatings as a punishment for riding an unlicensed bicycle. This film was produced as a part of the Jeonju Digital Project.
A policeman investigates an introverted signal-station manager suspected of raping a hotel clerk.
One long tracking shot through a park in Chengdu.
This short film shows a quest of two homosexual couples for understanding from the people in their surroundings, through meetings and exchanges on a square in the heart of Beijing.
Wang Wo’s experimental documentary takes the direct cinema approach to the realm of avantgardism, immersing the viewer in a non-narrative, highly sensory experience of urban China in its visual and aural splendor.
To commemorate the 70th anniversary of the victory of WWII, this documentary film describes the eight years of dauntless air-force fighting of the republic of China during the Anti-Japanese War, with only 300 combat-capable aircraft from China while Japan had over 2000.
Six life stories of German, Austrian and Russian Jews which intersect in exile in Shanghai.
After 30 years of cold war, Taiwan and China finally opened cross-strait trade and tourism in 1980. However, through decades of political and educational vilification of their counterparts by the KMT and CCP, and despite close economic and cultural ties, what lies beneath the diplomatic relations is a disconnect and mistrust that cannot be denied. KE is a failed business in Taiwan who hopes to start over as a 'Taiwanese Expat' in Shenzheng, China with a Taiwanese company. Lili, a laborer from China, meets her Taiwanese husband online and moves to Taiwan in hopes of a better life. Both KE and Lili cross the straits in hope of achieving what they cannot find in their homeland. But how much do they really know about that country across the straits?
A highway is waiting to go through a quiet village in Hunan, a province in central China where Mao was from. Due to the high cost of construction, construction companies and migrant workers who live on road work rush to here like the tide. In the following four years, they root in this strange place for interests, paying sweat and blood, even their lives. With their arrival, local village and peasants are forced to change their lives. Many hidden interest lines and hidden rules about road construction of the nation are unveiled, together with the shocking truth and emerging secrets.
The movie follows two unfortunate secret lovers who are constantly looking for a solution to their situation. Both of them are always arguing over their relationship. One day they went to a trip out of the city, into the outskirt. They hope they can solve their problems or at least escape them temporarily. They don’t have a solution, and they don’t understand why they are together. One thing that keeps them together is their love and care for each other. This is the second part of James Lee’s Love Trilogy which takes another look at unfaithfulness or rather faithlessness.
It has been a month Chang's wife Ling Yue has been missing. With no reasons one fine day she went to work as usual and then never returns. No one knows where she went or what had happened to her. Chang could not figure out why she disappears out of the sudden. She left no message of whatever kind or clues. One day a man named Tong shows up and claims to be Ling Yues lover. Apparently Tong is looking for Ling Yue too. In a turn of event both men formed an uneasy alliance in order to find Ling Yue
17 riders with avarage age 81 decide to follow the dream of their youth and start their journey to ride around Taiwan island.
Set in a quasi-ghost town that once thrived with oil in China's arid northwest, Yumen is a haunting, fragmented tale of hungry souls, restless youth, a wandering artist and a lonely woman, all searching for human connection among the town's crumbling landscape. One part "ruin porn", one part "ghost story”, and entirely shot on 16mm, the film brings together performance art, narrative gesture, and social realism not only to play with convention and defy genre, but also to pay homage to a disappearing life-world and a fading medium.
"If the old doesn't go, the new never comes" recites a teenager hanging out near a demolition site in the center of Chengdu, the Sichuan capital in western China. In Demolition, filmmaker J.P. Sniadecki deconstructs the transforming cityscape by befriending the migrant laborers on the site and documenting the honest, often unobserved, human interactions, yielding a wonderfully patient and revealing portrait of work and life in the shadow of progress and economic development.
A documentary chronicling the coming of age of a young chinese man.