Wang Hongwei

In a small county in Shandong Province in 2008, single mother Wei lives alone with her daughter Miao. A mother's desperate efforts to get her daughter into China's top universities through "college entrance exam immigration" change both of their destinies. However, this has put them into an even more precarious situation than when they started.

In the 1990s, a group of students on the campus of the Chinese Southern Academy of Arts are pursuing their studies and preparing to face the world. China is opening up to the West and the students’ lives are a tangle of love stories and friendships, artistic research, ideals and ambitions brought about by new influences. Caught between tradition and modernity, they have to decide who they want to become.

Divorced food critic Gu Wentong finds out where the father he had lost contact with as a child is now living. Meanwhile, he begins a relationship with a younger colleague. People come close and move away, but the images and sounds remain to bear witness.

Zuo Shouquan is the director of the morning paper in a north-eastern city. He has a daughter, Zuo Mingming, who lives with his ex-wife. The girl is neglecting her studies. She is not particularly interested in her education. Her father wants her to move and start working at his newspaper. Zuo Mingming won’t have it; she plays in a band and her only dream is to pursue a musical career in the south. Father versus daughter, north versus south – a deeply rooted conflict between different systems of values in a contemporary Chinese comedy.

When the Sun begins to expand in such a way that it will inevitably engulf and destroy the Earth in a hundred years, united mankind finds a way to avoid extinction by propelling the planet out of the Solar System using gigantic engines, moving it to a new home located four light years away, an epic journey that will last thousands of years.

Shanghai Bund in years of isolation. Zhou Qifang, president of the Sea Breeze Chamber of Commerce, and his protégé, Lu Nansheng, fight to the death against Saito, a Japanese young general, in a life-and-death battle.

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.

Mysterious, sublime and elegiac, director Yang Chao’s odyssey blends breathtaking images with fantasy, poetry and history to create a complex magical universe. From the Shanghai metropolis to the snow-capped Tibet mountain, Gao Chun steers his cargo up the Yangtze, a river that has nurtured a centuries-old civilization. He comes across An Lu, a beautiful woman who appears in a different identity at every port recorded by a poetry book. Longing for her company, he realizes she gradually turns younger as he journeys upstream. He starts to wonder whether An Lu is supernatural or he is traveling not only in space but also in time. After passing a pagoda that reverberates Buddha’s voice, a flooded town reappeared elsewhere, the grandiose Three Gorges Dam and many other places where lives have been transformed, he finally arrives at the start of the Yangtze, where he unveils the secret of his past and An Lu.

When a drunk passenger distracts him, cabbie Lao Shi collides with a motorist on a scooter. Amid concern that the young man will die before the ambulance arrives, Shi transports him to the hospital. But when insurance information is not located for the victim, now in a coma, Shi gets stuck with the hospital bills. So begins a sequence of personal hardship, as Shi is pushed to the brink of destitution by a system of bureaucratic indifference. Soon, he's forced to make an unthinkable decision. The outcome will be life or death.

Five shorts reveal a fictional Hong Kong in 2025, depicting a dystopian city where residents and activists face crackdowns under iron-fisted rule.

Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke returns to the shooting locations of his films, along with his actors, friends and close collaborators. Jia recalls the inspiration sources for his movies, such as Platform, Still Life and A Touch of Sin. The film is the memory of a filmmaker and of a country in convulsion, China, which reveals itself little by little.

Four independent stories set in modern China about random acts of violence.

The film tells the story of a group of Chinese youths who robbed a bank of the “Manchuguo”, a puppet regime formed in China’s northeastern provinces by Japanese invaders in the 1930s and ’40s.

An ancestral city; through its delicious botanical garden and its branched canals, we observe the clues and traces of its ancient culture. Two couples of men and women, former lovers, meet again one year later. The yesterday's breath of youth is still perceptible in their conversations. Is it still possible for us to love? Does youth really have an end? Like the networks linking the old city, what type of ecological existence does their culture require? Written by Venice Film Festival

Modern China. On a bright sunny day, in a building site, an industrial complex is being deconstructed. Night falls. The ruins of the factory are empty and silent. Phantoms appear, voices are heard, telling their stories…. From the anthology The State of the World.

A town in Fengjie county is gradually being demolished and flooded to make way for the Three Gorges Dam. A man and woman visit the town to locate their estranged spouses, and become witness to the societal changes.

A young dancer, her security-guard boyfriend and others work at World Park, a bizarre cross-pollination of Las Vegas and Epcot Center where visitors can interact with famous international monuments without ever leaving the Beijing suburbs.

Three disaffected youths live in Datong in 2001, part of the new "Birth Control" generation. Fed on a steady diet of popular culture, both Western and Chinese, the characters of Unknown Pleasures represent a new breed in the People's Republic of China, one detached from reality through the screen of media and the internet.

During the Cultural Revolution, two young men are sent to a remote mining village where they fall in love with the local tailor’s beautiful granddaughter and discover a suitcase full of forbidden Western novels.

China's rapid changes from the late-1970s to the early 1990s, as seen through the lives of four performers in a theater troupe.

A small town pickpocket whose friends have moved on to higher trades finds himself bitter and unable to adapt.

A small town pickpocket whose friends have moved on to higher trades finds himself bitter and unable to adapt.

Xiao Shan, a temporary worker at the Hongyuan Restaurant, has just been fired by his boss Zhao Guoqing. Deciding to leave Beijing and returns to his home in Anyang, he goes to see a series of people from his hometown who have also been living in Beijing-construction workers, train ticket scalpers, university students, attendant, prostitutes-but no one wants to go back with him. Dispirited and confused, he searches out one after another of his old friends who are still in Beijing. Finally he leaves his wild long hair, the symbol of his life in the city, at a roadside barber stand as his offering to Beijing.

Second chapter of Shanshui Painting series from Gu. A story of mother and son in Hangzhou.

Non-narrative series of shots: in factory, sex workers etc.