Where there's an up, there's a down. That's how things go.
Social & External
An exploration of the Cultural Revolution that depicts both its chaotic later years – through the story of a squad of Red Army guards running amok in the countryside – and its continuing legacy in today’s China.
New Castle is a remote rural village where houses and mountains have been distorted due to excessive mining. Under the "New Village" campaign, all the villagers will be moved into the nearly completed Luxury Buildings. The documentary depicts the life of two groups of people, miners and villagers. The miners who are from all over the country, lost their jobs because of the Olympic Games in Beijing - the mine was shut down to make the air less polluted. The villagers had no better luck. Granny Fan lost two sons and two grandsons in a mining accident. Old Han and Old Wang are still farming. Some youngsters are gambling in the house of Han Bin, who was crippled in another mining accident. In the film, you can also see the village election, the service of local Christians, and people worshipping for a better year to come.
A Yangtze Landscape utilizes a non-narrative style, setting off from the Yangtze's marine port Shanghai, filming all the way to the Yangtze River's source, Qinghai/Tibet - filming a total distance of thousands of kilometers. Experimental music and noise recorded live on scene are used in post-production, painstakingly paired with relatively independent visuals, creating a magically realistic atmosphere contrasted with people seeming to be 'decorative figures' right out of traditional Chinese landscape scrolls.
Yu Tian (played by Hu Tian) is a senior this year. He hasn't returned home for a few years while studying in a big city. The estrangement between him and his mother (Lin Jiehua) is somehow getting bigger and bigger. He is immersed in his artistic dreams and is not practical, but his mother, who has always been conservative, does not understand. His friends remained the same, still the same young people in the small town. Friends booed that he would be the most promising one among them, but he himself was convinced. He told his sister (played by Sun Nan) that he would go to the big city to make a fortune.
Tian Yuan and Da Bing were brothers who had been in contact for many years. They gradually alienated but at the same time fell in love with a girl who dances like a nightclub. In the entanglement of love and brotherhood, youth ends in a group fight for their love. . Love and hatred, like smoke, silk, and thread, became the past...
Several boys who are about to graduate live in the 2006 dormitory. All-day long eating, chatting, playing cards, and playing with mobile phones, to kill their youth, just to get a high school diploma. Finally, I graduated from high school, but where is the future? Go to work or continue to join a college? Facing such students, it is difficult for teachers to show enthusiasm for teaching. Only Teacher Hou carefully wiped the bulletin board , as always. The original site of Duancun Middle School in Pingyao County was an ancient temple in the Ming Dynasty. In the summer of 2011, more than 150 students from the school merged with two other high schools and moved into the new school in the city. Grass grows on the playground, and the gatekeeper Laomi and his family continue to live in the teaching building.
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.
A small rural township called Red White was seriously devastated by the May 12th Earthquake in China 2008. A 62-year-old Taoist survived even though his temple was largely torn by the disaster. This documentary tells the story of how the Taoist practices the widely believed Chinese traditional religion and the local people’s daily life during the township’s post-quake reconstruction.
Andy is a novelist who works from home. One day, a girl mysteriously appears in his toilet. She claims to be from the future and needs his help. Her name is Pomegranate.
His father was sick, and the boy Xia Tong was always surrounded by strange dreams about girls while he was taking care of him. Grandma's answer made him disagree. To find out the truth, when the flame rose from the bottom of the river, he stepped on the train from the clouds.
I used footage from the internet and a part of historical text, their interconnection and what produced are not "scary", but some coincidences that history provided.
This is a complete video that was downloaded from the Internet. I didn't make any changes, just added a title at the beginning and a line of text at the end. The time frame on the video appears to indicate an event in the future, but this is reality, not science fiction.
A day of Xiaoyang, the curator of a village church. Xiaoyang and her husband have just registered their marriage, but they cannot hold a wedding in the church for her husband is not a Christian. Before the wedding, she is waiting for her husband’s baptism.
A boy with horns gathers a group of Cosers, each armed with the same traditional woodworking tools, from the grocery store, the old cathedral, the gatehouse, the forest, the farmyard, the electric mahjong parlour, the old castle and so on. At midnight, with clumsy labor, they made a huge cross.
In the summer of 2007, Gan Xiaoer led an independent film projection team, using projectors and self-made screens, to tour villages in Henan province to show his feature film "Raised from dust" for 8 times, and recorded the process. The 81-minute version of Church Cinema records only one stop, the Qiliying Church, where "Raised from dust" was shot.
One boy, one girl. One close space, one silent night. What is the relation between them? The great works in art history structure, influence their relations, and show us something. At the same time, the boy and the girl convey their experience and taste on these works. Usually, a boy and a girl will make love to end a scene or a film, but it didn’t happen. It seems that they spend the night clearly, but the tomorrow is still unknown.
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.
Follow the lives of the elderly survivors who were forced into sex slavery as “Comfort Women” by the Japanese during World War II. At the time of filming, only 22 of these women were still alive to tell their story. Through their own personal histories and perspectives, they tell a tale that should never be forgotten to generations unaware of the brutalization that occurred.
The documentary Building Archeology (jiànzhú kǎo) (2011) considers the more recent past. It’s made up of three vignettes about different buildings in Beijing: a museum, an abandoned hospital, and a detention center. The latter two vignettes are especially interesting. In the second, a woman wanders around the ruins of a hospital built in a week to deal with the 2003 SARS outbreak. The third concerns a former prisoner, tracing out a map of the detention center where he was held in 2011.
Four siblings' lives change drastically when their ailing mother takes a turn for the worse over the holiday season.
Ip Man’s promising career as a Policeman is ruined after he is framed for murder and targeted by a mob boss’s daughter.
A cranky middle-aged dad and his two best friends find themselves out of step in a changing world of millennial CEOs and powerful preschool principals.
A young monk must face the Extended Iron Claw technique of a powerful warlord seeking to destroy Shaolin.
A brother and sister escape from Japanese-occupied Shanghai to Japanese-occupied Taiwan, to stay with their grandfather who runs a Kung-Fu school there. However, the master of a Japanese Kung- Fu school in Taiwan has plans to bringing all other schools on the island under his domination, and part of his plan involves the murder of the grandfather.
A young Indigenous game warden arrests an infamous poacher only to discover that the poacher knows the location of a plane carrying millions of dollars that has crashed in a frozen lake. When a group of criminals and dirty cops are alerted to the poacher’s whereabouts, the warden and the poacher team up to fight back and escape across the treacherous lake before the ice melts.
Calvin Campbell is a former professional baseball player sent to an early retirement due to his panic attacks at the plate. Even though he had all the talent for the big leagues, he struggles with the curveballs life has thrown him. Today, he mindlessly sleepwalks through his days and the challenge of raising his teenager daughter. His life is in a slow downward spiral when it is suddenly awakened and invigorated by the most unlikely person – Produce, a young-man with Down syndrome who works at the local grocery store.
A young girl struggles to maintain her school grades while competing as a gymnast.
A poor, struggling South Carolinian mother and daughter face painful choices with their resolve and pride. Bone, the eldest daughter, and Anney her tired mother, grow both closer and farther apart: Anney sees Glen as her last chance.
After NBA star Kevin Durant switches talent with 16 year old Brian, the teenager becomes the star of his high school team, but Durant starts struggling and eventually learns an important lesson.
Over the course of a few days, the paths of a group of young friends, lovers, and acquaintances in Taipei intersect, prompting them to arrive at realizations about their lives.
Parent and child journey through the outskirts of society a decade after a pandemic has wiped out half the world's population. As a father struggles to protect his child, their bond—and the character of humanity—is tested.
An uptight advertising exec has his entire life in a filofax organizer which mistakenly ends up in the hands of a friendly convict who poses as him.
When the ongoing rivalry between farmers Michael and Jack suddenly escalates, it triggers a chain of events that take increasingly violent and devastating turns, leaving both families permanently altered.
When teenager Ren and his family move from big-city Chicago to a small town in the West, he's in for a real case of culture shock after discovering he's living in a place where music and dancing are illegal.
A unique friendship develops when a little girl and her dying mother inherit a cook - Mr. Church. What begins as an arrangement that should only last six months, instead spans fifteen years.
When a celebrated TV show host returns to his hometown in the South, his family is there to remind him that going home is no vacation!
Buddy is a young boy on the cusp of adolescence, whose life is filled with familial love, childhood hijinks, and a blossoming romance. Yet, with his beloved hometown caught up in increasing turmoil, his family faces a momentous choice: hope the conflict will pass or leave everything they know behind for a new life.
Tom and Mae Garvey are a Tennessee farming couple battling violent floods to save their land. In addition to natural disasters, the Garveys fight to stop a selfish land developer and a local corporation from foreclosing on their farm. While Mae stays at home to care for their children and tend to the crops, Tom finds work as a scab at a steel mill to preserve his family's property.
Marc Maron wades through a swamp of vitamin hustlers, evangelicals and grown male nerd children, culminating in a gleefully filthy end-times fantasy.
