REVIVE (2012)

철도 위에서 3년 이상 촬영하면서 빛과 어둠, 언어와 제스처가 교차하며 변화하는 중국의 내면을 담았다. 추상회화를 연상케 하는 프레임을 통해 인간과 기계의 만남을 묘사한다. 기차의 일상과 인간을 추상적 이미지로 조형한 에세이 필름. (2015년 제16회 전주국제영화제) 리뷰 3년의 시간 동안 중국의 원근각지를 이동하는 철도의 이모저모를 편집하여 만든 에세이 다큐멘터리이다. 철로, 곤히 잠자는 사람들, 콩나물시루 같은 기차의 낭하, 좁은 통로에서 담배를 피우는 사람들은 중국 사회의 빛과 그림자를 무연히 은유한다. J. P 스니아데키 감독은 추상회화를 연상케 하는 회화적인 프레임 구성을 즐겨 사용한다. 순간순간 카메라의 존재를 드러나거나 카메라 뒤에 있는 자신을 드러내기도 한다. 육중한 철의 질감, 비곗덩어리, 핏물이 흐르는 내장 등의 오브제들을 활용하면서 그는 빈 라덴이나 카다피와 모택동을 비교하는 중국 사람들의 이야기를 슬쩍 끼워 넣음으로써 사회학과 문화인류학을 오간다. 슬금슬금 옆걸음질 치며 잠행하는 카메라는 영화의 말미에 쾌적한 상 등급 고속열차로 점핑한다. 철도, 기차의 일상, 인간을 추상적인 이미지로 조형해낸 이 에세이 필름은 사물을 응시하는 밝은 눈을 지닌 예술가의 노력에 의해 탄생했다. 2014년 「필름코멘트」가 선정한 10대 영화에 이름을 올렸다. (2015년 제16회 전주국제영화제/장병원)

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.

"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.

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

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.

One long tracking shot through a park in Chengdu.

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.

Three scenes about three couples with each portraying maybe the turning point of their relationship. First scene, Lim & Amelia are a couple who had been together for almost five years. While he works as a salesman and trying to save up for marriage, the girl are not sure if he’s the one she wants to marry. One day he confronts her about a letter from her admirer. Second scene, Pete & Bernice are a couple who had been together almost ten years. They’re not married because he doesn’t believe in marriage. While she tags along, one day she might realizes this may not be the man she wants to end up with. Third scene, we see Amy & Lai are a pair of secret lovers. This maybe their last meeting or maybe not. They may had loved each other in the past they may not now in this scene. This is the third and final part of James Lee's Love Trilogy which takes offers a glimpse of the life of three lovers.

A documentary about government machinations and family conflict as development raises its head in an isolated country enclave of China.

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.

A short documentary that captures the longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century, The Yellow Bank takes you on a contemplative boat ride across the Huangpu River in Shanghai, China. Filmmaker J.P. Sniadecki, who lived and worked in Shanghai nine years earlier, uses the eclipse as a catalyst to explore the way weather, light, and sound affect the urban architectural environment during this extremely rare phenomenon.

"Huangyangchuan, Gansu province, China. It's an arid mountain area with poor roads. Ma Bingcheng is well-respected local doctor, so many patients (most of them farmers) come to see him every day. In his small clinic, people chat with each other about their lives, local conditions, or the people they know. The clinic seems to open up like a microcosm, the information and experiences of different people intertwine, revealing the conditions of typical Chinese farmers, and the typical fates of both young and old--"

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.

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.

Documentary about a tribe of indigenous people in northern China.

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.

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.

On a rainy day, Zhang Xin, a filmmaker who suffers from obsession deeply, comes across a strange girl, carrying a durian. He can’t help but walk towards her. This beautiful bubble breaks once the girl turns out to be the reflection of the obsession.

The film is director Gao Zipeng’s first fiction film which takes three years to complete. It premieres on March 27, 2001 in UCCA and stars the poet A Jian, Xiao Zhao and the writer Gou Zi. The film is based on a true crime of disappearance. It creates an atmosphere of what Ma Zhiyuan, a celebrated poet and playwright of Yuan Dynasty, portrays in his famous poem “Autumn Thoughts”: Over old trees wreathed with rotten vines fly evening crows/ Under a small bridge near a cottage a stream flows/ On ancient road in the west wind a lean horse goes/ Westward declines the sun/ Far, far from home is the heartbroken one.

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?