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.
Six life stories of German, Austrian and Ashkenazi Jews which intersect in exile in Shanghai. Out of narratives, photographs, documents and new images of the biggest and most contradictory metropolis of the Far East an entity develops in which the historic exile takes and turns on a completely current power and appeal.
In Luxi, a county in southeastern Yunnan Province, someone’s corpse was burned. The parents of the murdered man don’t know the truth and have been waiting for their son to return home.
A lively community of Christians inhabit Fangshan, a remote rural town in Jiangsu Province. At the start of the millennium, a church was built there with support of local inhabitants' relatives from Taiwan.
This film documents the 11th Beijing Independent Film Festival in 2014, from the preparations before the opening ceremony to the process of its forced cancellation, the event which spurred the Cinema on the Edge series.
Video essay ‘Rock and Cliff' investigates the creation of Horn Town, a new model village and centre of large scale tourist development, and the experiences of rural residents moved there through government-led displacement.
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.
The Cold Winter was shot from the end of 2009 to early 2010, and focuses on the struggle of artists near Beijing’s famous Chaoyang District 798 Art Zone to protect their land and studios from demolition by developers.
In his third film on life and work in the (once) heavily wooded north of China, Yu Guangyi (Survival Song) follows the lonely San Liangzi (46), who for the past ten years has been in love with a woman who doesn’t like men much.
Legendary Peking Opera master, Yuling Fang, emigrates to New York where he works in a nail salon. Realizing there is no one to inherit his legendary skills, he decides to mount an amateur production in order to keep alive the vanishing world he loves.
A Mexican boy bound for Chicago tries to cross the border, but is the crowded wagon he rides in going the right way? An offbeat, allegorical odyssey that blends absurd humor with pastoral imagery.
It's official; class is back! Riots on the street, old-Etonians in government, a workforce on strike, "Downton Abbey", "The King's Speech", the royal wedding and vajazzling.
A young Russian woman, smuggled into America by human traffickers, and a notorious Egyptian transporter hired to drive her from the Mexican border to New York City, form an unlikely bond that transforms them and threatens to derail the traffickers' plans.
Captured by smugglers when he was just a hatchling, a macaw named Blu never learned to fly and lives a happily domesticated life in Minnesota with his human friend, Linda.
A young aspiring rock guitarist is forced to become the musical director of the local marching band when his father is hit by a bus just four weeks before a major competition.
When Rango, a lost family pet, accidentally winds up in the gritty, gun-slinging Western town of Dirt, the theater-loving lizard suddenly finds himself the newly appointed sheriff.