Pearl (2018)

Li Shouwang is the leader of a blind storytellers team, learned storytelling at the age of 19. His childernare living hard in other cities. Li's money amost goes to his children's pocket every year. But with urbanisation, the storytellers have lost almost all their audience. As the conflict between the storytelling team and the village team intensified, his son, who was far away from home, became the only spiritual sustains... When he was excited that his son would be taking his family home for Chinese New Year, what's await is a sigh.

In 1946, Heidi is entrusted to a Swiss family by her father. He will never come back for her. Today, François Yang questions his mother about her past. What follows is a journey to China, a quest to reconstruct memory. Through contact with her brothers and sister, Heidi measures the extent of the drama experienced by her family that remained in China, persecuted by the Communist Party.

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.

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)

After the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, I reached out for a Ukrainian who studies in Beijing. Born in Russia, his father was Russian and his mother is Ukrainian. As the war escalates, his hometown was also bombarded, and his family breaks apart while his mom seeks for asylum in Bulgaria and his stepdad staying at home. He is about to leave China, feeling lost about his next destination. Gradually Mark and I have more resonance. And the pain caused by war started to strike me too.

Xuan is a young man working in the film industry in Beijing. To make a documentary film that he wants to present at international festivals, he decides to take advantage of the holidays of the Day of the Dead to return to Chengdu, his hometown located at the other end of the country. The documentary he is about to make is about his relationship with his own lover. He leaves for Chengdu, accompanied by another man, Bo, the cameraman of the film. The two men take the train to Chengdu where Hong, Xuan's lover, is waiting for them. From the first moment of their arrival at the station, Xuan and Bo begin to turn with their camera, Xuan having already explained to Bo what he wanted to film and that Hong would always be "playing", Bo then trusting in Xuan. But Hong is more and more opposed to this camera and the presence of Bo.

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.

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.

One long tracking shot through a park in Chengdu.

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.

Documentary about a tribe of indigenous people in northern China.

A film about death and memory. A long farewell. A killer takes the life of a poor writer in the morning. Then they go through a journey consisting of a boy, a woman, watches, oranges, roses and old bicycles. At the end of that night, he realizes that the person who was once loved will never leave ......

The "Great Sichuan Earthquake" took place at 14:28 on May 12, 2008. In the days after, ordinary people salvage destroyed pig farms in the mountains, collect cheap scrapped metals, or pillaging other victims' homes. Behind the media circus of official visits is an inconsolable grief of families searching for loved ones. As the Lunar New Year approaches, vagabonds and family tell of the ill-handling of rebuilding schemes and misuse relief funds. As they prepare for another visit from a high official, the refugees are swept out of the town and into tent cities. The promise to put a roof over their heads before winter seems impossible to keep.

A documentary chronicling the coming of age of a young chinese man.

"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--"

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.

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.

For Chinese parents, finding out that their kid is gay usually presents a major tragedy, with the big majority utterly unable to accept the homosexuality of their son or daughter. However, during recent years a fresh rainbow wind has been blowing over the Chinese mainland: a pioneer generation of Chinese parents has been stepping up and speaking out on their love for their gay kids. This documentary features 6 mothers from all over China, who talk openly and freely about their experiences with their homosexual children. With their love, they are giving a whole new definition to Chinese-style family bonds.

Over the course of 3 years, Fan Popo visited a bar called “Only-Love” in Nanning, China, getting to know the dancers and drag queens there and discovering who they really were behind their exuberant costumes and personas.