THE LONGWANG CHRONICLES: A YEAR OF LIFES IN A CHINESE VILLAGE (2009)

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

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 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.

In his third film on life and work in the (once) heavily wooded north of China, Yu Guangyi (Survival Song) follows the lonely San Liangzi (46), who for the past ten years has been in love with a woman who doesn’t like men much. Intimate and revealing, but never rude. A moving and human portrait of a group of unemployed and above all lonely men who stayed behind when their wives moved to the city looking for work. They worked in the timber industry in the province of Heilongjiang, but deforestation has taken its toll. For instance, we see 46-year-old San Liangzi. Twelve years ago, he divorced his wife and became unemployed. For 10 years, he has had an eye on Wang Meizi, the only unmarried woman in the area. But the love is not mutual.

Six life stories of German, Austrian and Russian Jews which intersect in exile in Shanghai.

This film documents the 11th Beijing Independent Film Festival in 2014, from the preparations before the opening ceremony to the process of its forced cancellation, the event which spurred the Cinema on the Edge series. The footage used for the film was captured by audience members, local artists, invited directors and special guests, festival volunteers and workers, as well as journalists and members of the media. It is a film produced by the collective.

Look Love closely follows the lives of two families living in completely different environments in order to show the gap in education and in region, the biggest social issue in present day China.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

A 17 year old boy from a village in the Sechuan province leaves for the big city looking for his father, who left 6 years before and has not been heard of since. The fact that his mother still receives money his father does nothing to tame his anger. He his not looking for a warm reunion, it is unconcealed revenge that drives him. Totally lost, he roams the big city with his basket of ducks on his back...

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.

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.

Gentle, easy-going Or Kia moves from the countryside to Kuala Lumpur to work for his cousin and best friend Ah Soon, a mid-level gangster and enforcer. While Or Kia works hard to put a sister through school, Ah Soon cares for an unstable girlfriend prone to mysterious disappearances. As they both sink deeper into a nocturnal world of debts, drugs, and betrayal, Or Kia's loyalties are strained when Ah Soon falls out of favor with the bosses and tries to escape the business.

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.

On May 12, 2008 , the biggest earthquake in Chinese history occurred in the film maker's hometown of Wenchuan. According to official polls, 69,159 were killed, 374,141 were seriously injured and 17,469 are still considered to be missing. The film maker's parents, central character in the film, are survivors. In a surreal hybrid of documentary footage, experimental abstraction and fictional elements, "On the Way to the Sea" studies the human fragility and spiritual homelessness generated by such disasters.

Documentary about a tribe of indigenous people in northern China.

In northeastern China the Songhua River flows west from the border of Russia to the city of Harbin, where four million people depend on it as a source of water. Songhua is a portrait of the varying people that gather where the river meets the city, and an ethnographic study of the intimate ways in which they play and work.