Er Dong (China, 2008)
Fatherless urban youth growing up in China’s seismic 20th century economic transformation is a common theme for many Sixth-Generation directors who started making films in the...
Lost Course (Hong Kong, 2019)
The time for action has passed. I’m older now. The time for reflection has started. — Bruno in Le petit soldat (1960/1963) Early in Jill...
The Observer (Italy, 2019)
The Beijing Independent Film Festival has been in trouble for some years, and recently downright banned with their office materials, DVDs and computers confiscated, and...
Spark (China, 2019)
Hu Jie’s documentary Spark tells the story of its namesake, an underground magazine published during the 1960s by university students in Mao’s China. The magazine...
The East State Wind Farm (China, 2009)
The East State Wind Farm, a documentary using interviews as primary sources, interspersed with animated sequence, continues Hu Jie’s mission to expose the horrors and...
Though I Am Gone (China, 2006)
At the start of his documentary Though I Am Gone, Hu Jie asks his interviewing subject, Mr. Wang Jungyao, whether it was painful to photograph...
Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul (China, 2004)
Hu Jie’s documentary Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul is about the persecution of anti-socialist Chinese activist Lin Zhao under Mao Tse Tung’s period of reform...
The Iron Ministry (China/USA, 2015)
The train has been a favoured narrative element of copious directors from Josef von Sternberg to Alfred Hitchcock to Wes Anderson, but in The Iron...
Three Sisters (China, 2012)
The documentary films of Wang Bing present a veritable mosaic of peripheral, alienated perspectives across the various regions of China, from the northeast and northwest...
Female Directors (China, 2012)
Yang Mingming’s multi-faceted mockumentary Female Directors starts with some playful taboo breaking as twenty-something art school graduates Ah-ming (Mingming) and Yueyue (Guo Yue) fake orgasms for...