Best Director (2019)

One long tracking shot through a park in Chengdu.

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.

17 riders with avarage age 81 decide to follow the dream of their youth and start their journey to ride around Taiwan island.

A policeman investigates an introverted signal-station manager suspected of raping a hotel clerk.

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.

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.

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)

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...

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".

Xiao-Li is a devoted housewife and an active member of her local Catholic church in the farmlands of southern China. Her faith is put to the test when her husband is hospitalized with respiratory illness caused by unsafe working conditions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"China Gate" tells the story of young Chinese fight to change their fate through studying. Right before dawn, students in Huining have already started their self-studying session; hard working youngsters have filled up the space of school ground. This is one of the most poverty-stricken Counties in Western China; here people's only hope is in education, as the way to change their social status. Therefore all their effort point towards the College Entrance Examination, the process is like going through a gate, those who pass can study at urban Universities, and have the chance to build a better life. During the same winter season in Beijing, a graduate student faces a big decision. Should he keep trying to survive in the big city or get back to his countryside home? The exhausted faces at the Beijing underground seem to be revealing the truth about their distance in between. The student comes to see the flag ceremony at Tiananmen Square, where the pulsing symbol of the nation lies.

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.

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

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.