Last Train Home director Lixin Fan joins other filmmakers, film curators and writers in recommending more documentaries about China and by Chinese filmmakers.
Five Recommended Documentaries from the Director of 'Last Train Home'
Lixin Fan
Manufactured Landscapes Jennifer Baichwal, 2006
"Stunning images of civilization's materials and debris. Perhaps China is not just central to the photos shown in the film, but also to the world we all live in today."
View/Hide Description
Petition Zhao Liang, 2009
"Twelve years in the making, the film examines the shocking injustice that an average citizen could face when living in a state that puts economic development above everything else, hoping growth will prove its legitimacy."
View/Hide Description
Up The Yangtze Yung Chang, 2007
"A touching story of the life and fate of average Chinese people who are caught between the traditional way of life and the new ambitions of a rapidly industrializing nation."
View/Hide Description
Disorder Huang Weikai, 2009
"A powerful and utterly honest mishmash of the most bizarre images from contemporary Chinese society, with an almost cynical sarcasm. I've never seen anything quite like it!"
View/Hide Description
China from the Inside (TV Series) Jonathan Lewis, 2006
"A comprehensive and in-depth look at different aspects of this changing nation (which is still viewed by the world with many misconceptions), while racing on a fast track, determined to become the world's next superpower."
View/Hide Description
Lixin Fan is a Canada-based documentary film director for EyeSteelFilm and is the director of the award-winning feature-length documentary Last Train Home, which had its U.S. broadcast premiere on POV in 2011. Find out more about the film at http://www.pbs.org/pov/lasttrainhome.
Five Essential Documentaries About Contemporary Life and Phenomena in China
La Frances Hui (Film Curator, Asia Society)
Beijing Besieged by Waste WANG Jiuliang, 2011
"A painstakingly made documentary that investigates the treatment of waste in the ever-growing Beijing, this film is an informative and distressing portrait of urban ecology that finds much alarming resonance in other parts of the world as well."
View/Hide Description
Disorder HUANG Weikai, 2009
"Filmmaker Huang Weikai meticulously assembles footage taken by amateur videographers documenting chaos, violence and absurd happenings on the streets of China to create this pointed symphony of urban mayhem."
View/Hide Description
Once Upon a Time Proletarian GUO Xiaolu, 2009
"Unconnected chapters provide poignant snapshots across social classes in contemporary China. This film takes an existentialist look at the common experience of disillusionment and disorientation in a China that is far removed from the bygone days of Mao."
View/Hide Description
Please Vote For Me CHEN Weijun, 2007
"A fun-filled film documents third graders in Wuhan as they select a class monitor through an election. Children employ aggressive tactics including bribing, backstabbing and making fancy speeches to win votes. This film makes you ask if democracy is destined for exploitation."
View/Hide Description
Umbrella DU Haibin, 2008
"Documenting regular citizens navigating a vast changing China — from college graduates competing for coveted jobs to small business owners trying to ride the wave of the economic boom to elderly peasants being left behind in the countryside — this film highlights the daily struggles and despair."
View/Hide Description
La Frances Hui is film curator of Asia Society in New York. She has curated major filmmaker retrospectives and series featuring cinemas of China, Thailand, Iran, among others. A seasoned interviewer, she has led on-stage conversations with filmmakers including Jia Zhangke, Ang Lee, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and John Woo.
Chinese Documentary Recommendations
Chi-hui Yang (Film Programmer, Cinema Asian America)
Still Life Jia Zhangke, 2006
"Jia Zhangke is perhaps the most well-known and influential filmmaker working in China today. While he alternates between documentary and fiction, all of his films fall into the blurry line between. In this, his finest film to date, the still lives of individuals displaced by the flooding of the Yangtze River are explored. It's a narrative film shot with documentary veracity and context."
View/Hide Description
Beijing Bastards Zhang Yuan, 1993
"An early independent Chinese film made by Sixth Generation filmmaker Zhang Yuan, Bastards is a brave, seething portrait of rebellious youth subculture in the uncertain and seemingly hopeless wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre. More of a free-form tone poem, it stars musician Cui Jian as himself, an underground musician trying to make sense of the collapsing world around him, and offers a vital look at a generation-defining period in Chinese history."
View/Hide Description
Karamay Xu Xin, 2010
"This nearly six-hour masterwork is one of the most important Chinese documentaries to be made in recent years. Through testimonies from many of the hundreds of parents whose children were killed in a theater fire in the far western city of Karamay, Xu chronicles the devastating collapse of faith in the Chinese state and Communist party and decay of social structure in wake of the still unanswered questions of why their children died while many party officials and oil cadres were able to escape."
View/Hide Description
Chi-hui Yang is a film programmer, lecturer and writer based in New York. As a guest curator, Yang has presented film and video series at film festivals and events internationally, including the MOMA Documentary Fortnight and the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar ("The Age of Migration"). From 2000-2010, he was the director and programmer of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival and is currently the programmer of Cinema Asian America, a new on-demand service offered by Comcast and a visiting scholar at New York University's Asian/Pacific/American Institute.
Essential Documentaries from the Digital Generation of Chinese Independent Filmmakers
"Awarded best documentary at Venice, Du Haibin's documentary of the earthquake that devastated China's Sichuan province in 2008 explores how victims, citizens and government respond to a national tragedy. Du depicts a world in chaos, both material and moral. "
"A landmark in activist filmmaking in China, Meishi Street shows ordinary citizens taking a stand against the planned destruction of their homes for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The subjects were given cameras to film their firsthand confrontations with the authorities."
"Huang Weikai's one-of-a-kind news documentary captures, with remarkable freedom, the anarchy, violence, and seething anxiety animating China's major cities today. Made from more than 1000 hours of amateur footage, Disorder reveals an emerging underground media, one that has the potential to truly capture the ground-level upheaval of Chinese society."
"A remote village in southwest China is haunted by traces of its cultural past while its residents piece together their existence. The first Chinese independent documentary to screen at the New York Film Festival, Ghost Town elevated the Chinese digital documentary movement to new levels of poetry."
"Hu Jie is considered the most fearless documentarian working in China. Searching for Lin Zhao's Soul stands as a landmark in the Chinese independent documentary movement, an unprecedented work of investigation and recovery of modern China's suppressed memories. Director Hu Jie digs through artifacts and interviews firsthand witnesses to Lin's persecution, illuminating an era of political terror that sent millions to their deaths. The result is a lasting testament to a young woman's legacy of courage and conviction."
View/Hide Description
Kevin Lee is vice president of programming and education for dGenerate Films, a distributor of independent films from mainland China, and an editor at the video-on-demand site Fandor. His writing has appeared in Time Out New York, Cinema Scope, Cineaste and Senses of Cinema.
Five Film Recommendations from the Director of 'Up The Yangtze'
Yung Chang
West of the Tracks Wang Bing, 2003
"A three-part, nine-hour epic documentary follows, in cinéma vérité, the demise of an industrial district in northern China, a microcosm of China's transition to "capitalism with Chinese characteristics.""
View/Hide Description
Useless Jia Zhang Ke, 2007
"A hybrid, lyrical documentary begins by following Ma Ke, an haute couture fashion designer, and concludes in the shop of a local tailor."
View/Hide Description
Circus School Ke Ding Ding and Guo Jing, 2007
"Shanghai filmmaking team observes with raw intensity and cinéma-vérité acumen, the daily life of students at the renowned Shanghai circus school."
View/Hide Description
Petition Zhao Liang, 2009
"Over a decade in the making, master filmmaker Zhao reveals the Kafkaesque Chinese petitioning process, where citizens wait years in "Petition City" for results of their grievances against the government."
View/Hide Description
This Happy Life Jiang Yue, 2005
"An intimate, moving portrait that follows Mr. Fu, a single father and railway station worker, as he deals with life's tragedies in changing China."
View/Hide Description
Yung Chang is the director of the award-winning documentary, Up The Yangtze, which was broadcast on POV in 2008. Chang is currently in post-production on China Heavyweight, a feature documentary about Chinese country-side boys and girls in the up-and-coming world of amateur and professional boxing. More information at http://yungfilms.ca.
Opening the Aperture on Human Rights in China
Sharon Hom (Executive Director, Human Rights in China)
"Produced from more than 30 hours of interviews shot by the Tiananmen Mothers, a group of family members of June Fourth victims and survivors, Portraits of Loss and the Quest for Justice presents the stories of ordinary citizens who became military targets as the army swept through Beijing in June 1989. The video is a powerful testament to the group's courageous effort to demand that the Chinese government account for its actions against its own people. (Produced by Human Rights in China.)"
"China's Unnatural Disaster follows parents from several schools that collapsed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake — nearly 10,000 children died in the quake, many in shoddily-constructed classrooms — whose grief turned to outrage as they demanded explanations from local government officials. It is a powerful reminder of the devastating consequences of corruption in China and an intimate portrait of parents determined to hold officials accountable."
"Blind Shaft, an unblinking look at the underside of China's economic reforms in terms of human suffering and costs, is a feature film by Li Yang, a documentary filmmaker. Powerful art such as Blind Shaft provides not only a critical social mirror, but also a glimpse of the redemptive power of simple human decency that survives against all odds, a hope ?ickering in the darkness."
View/Hide Description
Sharon Hom is the executive director of Human Rights in China and a professor of law emerita at the City University of New York School of Law. Hom has taught law for 18 years, including training judges, lawyers and law teachers at eight law schools in China over a 14-year period in the 1980s and 1990s. Human Rights in China, a nongovernmental organization based in New York and Hong Kong, supports those pressing for democratic reforms and social justice in China.
Five Film Recommendations from the Director of 'China Blue'
Micha X. Peled
The Gate of Heavenly Peace Richard Gordon and Carma Hinton, 1995
Up the Yangtze Yung Chang, 2007
Please Vote For Me Chen Weijun, 2007
Senior Year Zhou Hao, 2005
Blind Shaft Li Yang, 2003
Micha X. Peled emigrated to the United States from Israel by hitchhiking. He is the director of the widely acclaimed documentary China Blue, which aired on PBS, and is founder of the nonprofit documentary production company, Teddy Bear Films. Find out more about China Blue, which takes viewers inside a blue jeans factory in southern China, at http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/chinablue/film.html.
Five Films as Traces of the Great Erasure
David Redmon (Director, Mardi Gras: Made in China)
David Redmon, with filmmaking partner Ashley Sabin, has produced, directed, edited and photographed five films, including the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize-nominated Mardi Gras: Made in China and Girl Model, which is scheduled to air on POV in 2012. Redmon received a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Albany.
"Sixth Generation" Chinese Films: A Poignant and Entertaining Way for Westerners to Learn About the "Real" China
Michael A. Santoro (Author, China 2020)
The World Jia Zhang-Ke, 2004
"I first encountered Jia Zhang-Ke through his 2004 film The World, set in the surreal, bemusing and ultimately ironic setting of Beijing's World Park, complete with a scaled version of the Eiffel Tower, Tower of London, Statue of Liberty, Pyramids, etc. By that point in his career, Jia was working with official approval from the government. The setting of The World was amusing and the main characters in many ways were typical and thoroughly modern Chinese youth, but it made me curious about Jia's earlier work as an underground filmmaker."
View/Hide Description
Pickpocket Jia Zhang-Ke, 1997
"Two of Jia Zhang-Ke's films in particular are extraordinary depictions of the social and psychological upheaval caused by China's transformation from Communism to a market-driven economy — Pickpocket (1997) and the masterful Platform (2000). Both are set in Jia's native Shanxi province in Northern China, far from the Tiananmen Square–Great Wall–Shanghai shopping trail that constitutes the experience of most Westerners in China. Both offer gripping accounts of how the reform era has brought on disturbing and dramatic changes even into the far reaches of provincial China. Platform, which takes its title from a popular Chinese song about waiting on a train, follows a troupe of young performers trying to navigate their personal growth and find their place in the new China."
View/Hide Description
Platform Jia Zhang-Ke, 2000
Shanghai Dreams Wang Xiaoshuai, 2005
"Wang Xiaoshuai's Shanghai Dreams (2005) is actually set in the southwestern province of Guizhou and offers a more disturbing vision of modern China. Set in the transitional time of the 1980s, the film centers around the discords of the Wu family, divided over the merits of rural life or moving back to Shanghai, and the love interests of 19-year-old daughter Qinghong, heartbreakingly played by Gao Yuanyuan."
View/Hide Description
Blind Shaft Li Yang, 2003
"Li Yang's Blind Shaft (2003) has been banned in China and it is easy to see why. As a Westerner, this quirky story of miners defrauding mine operators in northern China by filing false insurance claims on fellow miners they murder can sometimes seem like a Coen brothers dark comedy about greed and moral anomie. However, this account of the hard lives and dangers facing Chinese miners is actually more akin to Italian neorealist films like Luchino Visconti's sympathetic portrait of Sicilian fishermen in La Terra Trema (1948). Blind Shaft is a chilling glimpse into the exploitation of workers that makes possible the rapid economic "miracle" of economic development in China."
View/Hide Description
Michael A. Santoro is a professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School and author of China 2020: How Western Business Can — and Should — Influence Social and Political Change in the Coming Decade.
"
["post_title"]=>
string(52) "Last Train Home: Essential Documentaries About China"
["post_excerpt"]=>
string(146) "Last Train Home director Lixin Fan joins other filmmakers, film curators in recommending more documentaries about China and by Chinese filmmakers."
["post_status"]=>
string(7) "publish"
["comment_status"]=>
string(4) "open"
["ping_status"]=>
string(6) "closed"
["post_password"]=>
string(0) ""
["post_name"]=>
string(40) "photo-gallery-essential-docs-about-china"
["to_ping"]=>
string(0) ""
["pinged"]=>
string(127) "http://dgeneratefilms.com/catalog/disorder-xianshi-shi-guoqu-de-weilai/
http://dgeneratefilms.com/catalog/ghost-town-fei-cheng/"
["post_modified"]=>
string(19) "2016-07-27 11:58:33"
["post_modified_gmt"]=>
string(19) "2016-07-27 15:58:33"
["post_content_filtered"]=>
string(0) ""
["post_parent"]=>
int(0)
["guid"]=>
string(85) "http://www.pbs.org/pov/index.php/2011/09/27/photo-gallery-essential-docs-about-china/"
["menu_order"]=>
int(0)
["post_type"]=>
string(4) "post"
["post_mime_type"]=>
string(0) ""
["comment_count"]=>
string(1) "0"
["filter"]=>
string(3) "raw"
}
["queried_object_id"]=>
int(2682)
["request"]=>
string(507) "SELECT wp_posts.* FROM wp_posts JOIN wp_term_relationships ON wp_posts.ID = wp_term_relationships.object_id JOIN wp_term_taxonomy ON wp_term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id = wp_term_taxonomy.term_taxonomy_id AND wp_term_taxonomy.taxonomy = 'pov_film' JOIN wp_terms ON wp_term_taxonomy.term_id = wp_terms.term_id WHERE 1=1 AND wp_posts.post_name = 'photo-gallery-essential-docs-about-china' AND wp_posts.post_type = 'post'
AND wp_terms.slug = 'lasttrainhome'
ORDER BY wp_posts.post_date DESC "
["posts"]=>
&array(1) {
[0]=>
object(WP_Post)#7138 (24) {
["ID"]=>
int(2682)
["post_author"]=>
string(1) "1"
["post_date"]=>
string(19) "2011-01-19 19:57:38"
["post_date_gmt"]=>
string(19) "2011-01-20 00:57:38"
["post_content"]=>
string(40844) "
Last Train Home director Lixin Fan joins other filmmakers, film curators and writers in recommending more documentaries about China and by Chinese filmmakers.
Five Recommended Documentaries from the Director of 'Last Train Home'
Lixin Fan
Manufactured Landscapes Jennifer Baichwal, 2006
"Stunning images of civilization's materials and debris. Perhaps China is not just central to the photos shown in the film, but also to the world we all live in today."
View/Hide Description
Petition Zhao Liang, 2009
"Twelve years in the making, the film examines the shocking injustice that an average citizen could face when living in a state that puts economic development above everything else, hoping growth will prove its legitimacy."
View/Hide Description
Up The Yangtze Yung Chang, 2007
"A touching story of the life and fate of average Chinese people who are caught between the traditional way of life and the new ambitions of a rapidly industrializing nation."
View/Hide Description
Disorder Huang Weikai, 2009
"A powerful and utterly honest mishmash of the most bizarre images from contemporary Chinese society, with an almost cynical sarcasm. I've never seen anything quite like it!"
View/Hide Description
China from the Inside (TV Series) Jonathan Lewis, 2006
"A comprehensive and in-depth look at different aspects of this changing nation (which is still viewed by the world with many misconceptions), while racing on a fast track, determined to become the world's next superpower."
View/Hide Description
Lixin Fan is a Canada-based documentary film director for EyeSteelFilm and is the director of the award-winning feature-length documentary Last Train Home, which had its U.S. broadcast premiere on POV in 2011. Find out more about the film at http://www.pbs.org/pov/lasttrainhome.
Five Essential Documentaries About Contemporary Life and Phenomena in China
La Frances Hui (Film Curator, Asia Society)
Beijing Besieged by Waste WANG Jiuliang, 2011
"A painstakingly made documentary that investigates the treatment of waste in the ever-growing Beijing, this film is an informative and distressing portrait of urban ecology that finds much alarming resonance in other parts of the world as well."
View/Hide Description
Disorder HUANG Weikai, 2009
"Filmmaker Huang Weikai meticulously assembles footage taken by amateur videographers documenting chaos, violence and absurd happenings on the streets of China to create this pointed symphony of urban mayhem."
View/Hide Description
Once Upon a Time Proletarian GUO Xiaolu, 2009
"Unconnected chapters provide poignant snapshots across social classes in contemporary China. This film takes an existentialist look at the common experience of disillusionment and disorientation in a China that is far removed from the bygone days of Mao."
View/Hide Description
Please Vote For Me CHEN Weijun, 2007
"A fun-filled film documents third graders in Wuhan as they select a class monitor through an election. Children employ aggressive tactics including bribing, backstabbing and making fancy speeches to win votes. This film makes you ask if democracy is destined for exploitation."
View/Hide Description
Umbrella DU Haibin, 2008
"Documenting regular citizens navigating a vast changing China — from college graduates competing for coveted jobs to small business owners trying to ride the wave of the economic boom to elderly peasants being left behind in the countryside — this film highlights the daily struggles and despair."
View/Hide Description
La Frances Hui is film curator of Asia Society in New York. She has curated major filmmaker retrospectives and series featuring cinemas of China, Thailand, Iran, among others. A seasoned interviewer, she has led on-stage conversations with filmmakers including Jia Zhangke, Ang Lee, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and John Woo.
Chinese Documentary Recommendations
Chi-hui Yang (Film Programmer, Cinema Asian America)
Still Life Jia Zhangke, 2006
"Jia Zhangke is perhaps the most well-known and influential filmmaker working in China today. While he alternates between documentary and fiction, all of his films fall into the blurry line between. In this, his finest film to date, the still lives of individuals displaced by the flooding of the Yangtze River are explored. It's a narrative film shot with documentary veracity and context."
View/Hide Description
Beijing Bastards Zhang Yuan, 1993
"An early independent Chinese film made by Sixth Generation filmmaker Zhang Yuan, Bastards is a brave, seething portrait of rebellious youth subculture in the uncertain and seemingly hopeless wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre. More of a free-form tone poem, it stars musician Cui Jian as himself, an underground musician trying to make sense of the collapsing world around him, and offers a vital look at a generation-defining period in Chinese history."
View/Hide Description
Karamay Xu Xin, 2010
"This nearly six-hour masterwork is one of the most important Chinese documentaries to be made in recent years. Through testimonies from many of the hundreds of parents whose children were killed in a theater fire in the far western city of Karamay, Xu chronicles the devastating collapse of faith in the Chinese state and Communist party and decay of social structure in wake of the still unanswered questions of why their children died while many party officials and oil cadres were able to escape."
View/Hide Description
Chi-hui Yang is a film programmer, lecturer and writer based in New York. As a guest curator, Yang has presented film and video series at film festivals and events internationally, including the MOMA Documentary Fortnight and the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar ("The Age of Migration"). From 2000-2010, he was the director and programmer of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival and is currently the programmer of Cinema Asian America, a new on-demand service offered by Comcast and a visiting scholar at New York University's Asian/Pacific/American Institute.
Essential Documentaries from the Digital Generation of Chinese Independent Filmmakers
"Awarded best documentary at Venice, Du Haibin's documentary of the earthquake that devastated China's Sichuan province in 2008 explores how victims, citizens and government respond to a national tragedy. Du depicts a world in chaos, both material and moral. "
"A landmark in activist filmmaking in China, Meishi Street shows ordinary citizens taking a stand against the planned destruction of their homes for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The subjects were given cameras to film their firsthand confrontations with the authorities."
"Huang Weikai's one-of-a-kind news documentary captures, with remarkable freedom, the anarchy, violence, and seething anxiety animating China's major cities today. Made from more than 1000 hours of amateur footage, Disorder reveals an emerging underground media, one that has the potential to truly capture the ground-level upheaval of Chinese society."
"A remote village in southwest China is haunted by traces of its cultural past while its residents piece together their existence. The first Chinese independent documentary to screen at the New York Film Festival, Ghost Town elevated the Chinese digital documentary movement to new levels of poetry."
"Hu Jie is considered the most fearless documentarian working in China. Searching for Lin Zhao's Soul stands as a landmark in the Chinese independent documentary movement, an unprecedented work of investigation and recovery of modern China's suppressed memories. Director Hu Jie digs through artifacts and interviews firsthand witnesses to Lin's persecution, illuminating an era of political terror that sent millions to their deaths. The result is a lasting testament to a young woman's legacy of courage and conviction."
View/Hide Description
Kevin Lee is vice president of programming and education for dGenerate Films, a distributor of independent films from mainland China, and an editor at the video-on-demand site Fandor. His writing has appeared in Time Out New York, Cinema Scope, Cineaste and Senses of Cinema.
Five Film Recommendations from the Director of 'Up The Yangtze'
Yung Chang
West of the Tracks Wang Bing, 2003
"A three-part, nine-hour epic documentary follows, in cinéma vérité, the demise of an industrial district in northern China, a microcosm of China's transition to "capitalism with Chinese characteristics.""
View/Hide Description
Useless Jia Zhang Ke, 2007
"A hybrid, lyrical documentary begins by following Ma Ke, an haute couture fashion designer, and concludes in the shop of a local tailor."
View/Hide Description
Circus School Ke Ding Ding and Guo Jing, 2007
"Shanghai filmmaking team observes with raw intensity and cinéma-vérité acumen, the daily life of students at the renowned Shanghai circus school."
View/Hide Description
Petition Zhao Liang, 2009
"Over a decade in the making, master filmmaker Zhao reveals the Kafkaesque Chinese petitioning process, where citizens wait years in "Petition City" for results of their grievances against the government."
View/Hide Description
This Happy Life Jiang Yue, 2005
"An intimate, moving portrait that follows Mr. Fu, a single father and railway station worker, as he deals with life's tragedies in changing China."
View/Hide Description
Yung Chang is the director of the award-winning documentary, Up The Yangtze, which was broadcast on POV in 2008. Chang is currently in post-production on China Heavyweight, a feature documentary about Chinese country-side boys and girls in the up-and-coming world of amateur and professional boxing. More information at http://yungfilms.ca.
Opening the Aperture on Human Rights in China
Sharon Hom (Executive Director, Human Rights in China)
"Produced from more than 30 hours of interviews shot by the Tiananmen Mothers, a group of family members of June Fourth victims and survivors, Portraits of Loss and the Quest for Justice presents the stories of ordinary citizens who became military targets as the army swept through Beijing in June 1989. The video is a powerful testament to the group's courageous effort to demand that the Chinese government account for its actions against its own people. (Produced by Human Rights in China.)"
"China's Unnatural Disaster follows parents from several schools that collapsed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake — nearly 10,000 children died in the quake, many in shoddily-constructed classrooms — whose grief turned to outrage as they demanded explanations from local government officials. It is a powerful reminder of the devastating consequences of corruption in China and an intimate portrait of parents determined to hold officials accountable."
"Blind Shaft, an unblinking look at the underside of China's economic reforms in terms of human suffering and costs, is a feature film by Li Yang, a documentary filmmaker. Powerful art such as Blind Shaft provides not only a critical social mirror, but also a glimpse of the redemptive power of simple human decency that survives against all odds, a hope ?ickering in the darkness."
View/Hide Description
Sharon Hom is the executive director of Human Rights in China and a professor of law emerita at the City University of New York School of Law. Hom has taught law for 18 years, including training judges, lawyers and law teachers at eight law schools in China over a 14-year period in the 1980s and 1990s. Human Rights in China, a nongovernmental organization based in New York and Hong Kong, supports those pressing for democratic reforms and social justice in China.
Five Film Recommendations from the Director of 'China Blue'
Micha X. Peled
The Gate of Heavenly Peace Richard Gordon and Carma Hinton, 1995
Up the Yangtze Yung Chang, 2007
Please Vote For Me Chen Weijun, 2007
Senior Year Zhou Hao, 2005
Blind Shaft Li Yang, 2003
Micha X. Peled emigrated to the United States from Israel by hitchhiking. He is the director of the widely acclaimed documentary China Blue, which aired on PBS, and is founder of the nonprofit documentary production company, Teddy Bear Films. Find out more about China Blue, which takes viewers inside a blue jeans factory in southern China, at http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/chinablue/film.html.
Five Films as Traces of the Great Erasure
David Redmon (Director, Mardi Gras: Made in China)
David Redmon, with filmmaking partner Ashley Sabin, has produced, directed, edited and photographed five films, including the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize-nominated Mardi Gras: Made in China and Girl Model, which is scheduled to air on POV in 2012. Redmon received a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Albany.
"Sixth Generation" Chinese Films: A Poignant and Entertaining Way for Westerners to Learn About the "Real" China
Michael A. Santoro (Author, China 2020)
The World Jia Zhang-Ke, 2004
"I first encountered Jia Zhang-Ke through his 2004 film The World, set in the surreal, bemusing and ultimately ironic setting of Beijing's World Park, complete with a scaled version of the Eiffel Tower, Tower of London, Statue of Liberty, Pyramids, etc. By that point in his career, Jia was working with official approval from the government. The setting of The World was amusing and the main characters in many ways were typical and thoroughly modern Chinese youth, but it made me curious about Jia's earlier work as an underground filmmaker."
View/Hide Description
Pickpocket Jia Zhang-Ke, 1997
"Two of Jia Zhang-Ke's films in particular are extraordinary depictions of the social and psychological upheaval caused by China's transformation from Communism to a market-driven economy — Pickpocket (1997) and the masterful Platform (2000). Both are set in Jia's native Shanxi province in Northern China, far from the Tiananmen Square–Great Wall–Shanghai shopping trail that constitutes the experience of most Westerners in China. Both offer gripping accounts of how the reform era has brought on disturbing and dramatic changes even into the far reaches of provincial China. Platform, which takes its title from a popular Chinese song about waiting on a train, follows a troupe of young performers trying to navigate their personal growth and find their place in the new China."
View/Hide Description
Platform Jia Zhang-Ke, 2000
Shanghai Dreams Wang Xiaoshuai, 2005
"Wang Xiaoshuai's Shanghai Dreams (2005) is actually set in the southwestern province of Guizhou and offers a more disturbing vision of modern China. Set in the transitional time of the 1980s, the film centers around the discords of the Wu family, divided over the merits of rural life or moving back to Shanghai, and the love interests of 19-year-old daughter Qinghong, heartbreakingly played by Gao Yuanyuan."
View/Hide Description
Blind Shaft Li Yang, 2003
"Li Yang's Blind Shaft (2003) has been banned in China and it is easy to see why. As a Westerner, this quirky story of miners defrauding mine operators in northern China by filing false insurance claims on fellow miners they murder can sometimes seem like a Coen brothers dark comedy about greed and moral anomie. However, this account of the hard lives and dangers facing Chinese miners is actually more akin to Italian neorealist films like Luchino Visconti's sympathetic portrait of Sicilian fishermen in La Terra Trema (1948). Blind Shaft is a chilling glimpse into the exploitation of workers that makes possible the rapid economic "miracle" of economic development in China."
View/Hide Description
Michael A. Santoro is a professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School and author of China 2020: How Western Business Can — and Should — Influence Social and Political Change in the Coming Decade.
"
["post_title"]=>
string(52) "Last Train Home: Essential Documentaries About China"
["post_excerpt"]=>
string(146) "Last Train Home director Lixin Fan joins other filmmakers, film curators in recommending more documentaries about China and by Chinese filmmakers."
["post_status"]=>
string(7) "publish"
["comment_status"]=>
string(4) "open"
["ping_status"]=>
string(6) "closed"
["post_password"]=>
string(0) ""
["post_name"]=>
string(40) "photo-gallery-essential-docs-about-china"
["to_ping"]=>
string(0) ""
["pinged"]=>
string(127) "http://dgeneratefilms.com/catalog/disorder-xianshi-shi-guoqu-de-weilai/
http://dgeneratefilms.com/catalog/ghost-town-fei-cheng/"
["post_modified"]=>
string(19) "2016-07-27 11:58:33"
["post_modified_gmt"]=>
string(19) "2016-07-27 15:58:33"
["post_content_filtered"]=>
string(0) ""
["post_parent"]=>
int(0)
["guid"]=>
string(85) "http://www.pbs.org/pov/index.php/2011/09/27/photo-gallery-essential-docs-about-china/"
["menu_order"]=>
int(0)
["post_type"]=>
string(4) "post"
["post_mime_type"]=>
string(0) ""
["comment_count"]=>
string(1) "0"
["filter"]=>
string(3) "raw"
}
}
["post_count"]=>
int(1)
["current_post"]=>
int(-1)
["in_the_loop"]=>
bool(false)
["post"]=>
object(WP_Post)#7138 (24) {
["ID"]=>
int(2682)
["post_author"]=>
string(1) "1"
["post_date"]=>
string(19) "2011-01-19 19:57:38"
["post_date_gmt"]=>
string(19) "2011-01-20 00:57:38"
["post_content"]=>
string(40844) "
Last Train Home director Lixin Fan joins other filmmakers, film curators and writers in recommending more documentaries about China and by Chinese filmmakers.
Five Recommended Documentaries from the Director of 'Last Train Home'
Lixin Fan
Manufactured Landscapes Jennifer Baichwal, 2006
"Stunning images of civilization's materials and debris. Perhaps China is not just central to the photos shown in the film, but also to the world we all live in today."
View/Hide Description
Petition Zhao Liang, 2009
"Twelve years in the making, the film examines the shocking injustice that an average citizen could face when living in a state that puts economic development above everything else, hoping growth will prove its legitimacy."
View/Hide Description
Up The Yangtze Yung Chang, 2007
"A touching story of the life and fate of average Chinese people who are caught between the traditional way of life and the new ambitions of a rapidly industrializing nation."
View/Hide Description
Disorder Huang Weikai, 2009
"A powerful and utterly honest mishmash of the most bizarre images from contemporary Chinese society, with an almost cynical sarcasm. I've never seen anything quite like it!"
View/Hide Description
China from the Inside (TV Series) Jonathan Lewis, 2006
"A comprehensive and in-depth look at different aspects of this changing nation (which is still viewed by the world with many misconceptions), while racing on a fast track, determined to become the world's next superpower."
View/Hide Description
Lixin Fan is a Canada-based documentary film director for EyeSteelFilm and is the director of the award-winning feature-length documentary Last Train Home, which had its U.S. broadcast premiere on POV in 2011. Find out more about the film at http://www.pbs.org/pov/lasttrainhome.
Five Essential Documentaries About Contemporary Life and Phenomena in China
La Frances Hui (Film Curator, Asia Society)
Beijing Besieged by Waste WANG Jiuliang, 2011
"A painstakingly made documentary that investigates the treatment of waste in the ever-growing Beijing, this film is an informative and distressing portrait of urban ecology that finds much alarming resonance in other parts of the world as well."
View/Hide Description
Disorder HUANG Weikai, 2009
"Filmmaker Huang Weikai meticulously assembles footage taken by amateur videographers documenting chaos, violence and absurd happenings on the streets of China to create this pointed symphony of urban mayhem."
View/Hide Description
Once Upon a Time Proletarian GUO Xiaolu, 2009
"Unconnected chapters provide poignant snapshots across social classes in contemporary China. This film takes an existentialist look at the common experience of disillusionment and disorientation in a China that is far removed from the bygone days of Mao."
View/Hide Description
Please Vote For Me CHEN Weijun, 2007
"A fun-filled film documents third graders in Wuhan as they select a class monitor through an election. Children employ aggressive tactics including bribing, backstabbing and making fancy speeches to win votes. This film makes you ask if democracy is destined for exploitation."
View/Hide Description
Umbrella DU Haibin, 2008
"Documenting regular citizens navigating a vast changing China — from college graduates competing for coveted jobs to small business owners trying to ride the wave of the economic boom to elderly peasants being left behind in the countryside — this film highlights the daily struggles and despair."
View/Hide Description
La Frances Hui is film curator of Asia Society in New York. She has curated major filmmaker retrospectives and series featuring cinemas of China, Thailand, Iran, among others. A seasoned interviewer, she has led on-stage conversations with filmmakers including Jia Zhangke, Ang Lee, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and John Woo.
Chinese Documentary Recommendations
Chi-hui Yang (Film Programmer, Cinema Asian America)
Still Life Jia Zhangke, 2006
"Jia Zhangke is perhaps the most well-known and influential filmmaker working in China today. While he alternates between documentary and fiction, all of his films fall into the blurry line between. In this, his finest film to date, the still lives of individuals displaced by the flooding of the Yangtze River are explored. It's a narrative film shot with documentary veracity and context."
View/Hide Description
Beijing Bastards Zhang Yuan, 1993
"An early independent Chinese film made by Sixth Generation filmmaker Zhang Yuan, Bastards is a brave, seething portrait of rebellious youth subculture in the uncertain and seemingly hopeless wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre. More of a free-form tone poem, it stars musician Cui Jian as himself, an underground musician trying to make sense of the collapsing world around him, and offers a vital look at a generation-defining period in Chinese history."
View/Hide Description
Karamay Xu Xin, 2010
"This nearly six-hour masterwork is one of the most important Chinese documentaries to be made in recent years. Through testimonies from many of the hundreds of parents whose children were killed in a theater fire in the far western city of Karamay, Xu chronicles the devastating collapse of faith in the Chinese state and Communist party and decay of social structure in wake of the still unanswered questions of why their children died while many party officials and oil cadres were able to escape."
View/Hide Description
Chi-hui Yang is a film programmer, lecturer and writer based in New York. As a guest curator, Yang has presented film and video series at film festivals and events internationally, including the MOMA Documentary Fortnight and the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar ("The Age of Migration"). From 2000-2010, he was the director and programmer of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival and is currently the programmer of Cinema Asian America, a new on-demand service offered by Comcast and a visiting scholar at New York University's Asian/Pacific/American Institute.
Essential Documentaries from the Digital Generation of Chinese Independent Filmmakers
"Awarded best documentary at Venice, Du Haibin's documentary of the earthquake that devastated China's Sichuan province in 2008 explores how victims, citizens and government respond to a national tragedy. Du depicts a world in chaos, both material and moral. "
"A landmark in activist filmmaking in China, Meishi Street shows ordinary citizens taking a stand against the planned destruction of their homes for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The subjects were given cameras to film their firsthand confrontations with the authorities."
"Huang Weikai's one-of-a-kind news documentary captures, with remarkable freedom, the anarchy, violence, and seething anxiety animating China's major cities today. Made from more than 1000 hours of amateur footage, Disorder reveals an emerging underground media, one that has the potential to truly capture the ground-level upheaval of Chinese society."
"A remote village in southwest China is haunted by traces of its cultural past while its residents piece together their existence. The first Chinese independent documentary to screen at the New York Film Festival, Ghost Town elevated the Chinese digital documentary movement to new levels of poetry."
"Hu Jie is considered the most fearless documentarian working in China. Searching for Lin Zhao's Soul stands as a landmark in the Chinese independent documentary movement, an unprecedented work of investigation and recovery of modern China's suppressed memories. Director Hu Jie digs through artifacts and interviews firsthand witnesses to Lin's persecution, illuminating an era of political terror that sent millions to their deaths. The result is a lasting testament to a young woman's legacy of courage and conviction."
View/Hide Description
Kevin Lee is vice president of programming and education for dGenerate Films, a distributor of independent films from mainland China, and an editor at the video-on-demand site Fandor. His writing has appeared in Time Out New York, Cinema Scope, Cineaste and Senses of Cinema.
Five Film Recommendations from the Director of 'Up The Yangtze'
Yung Chang
West of the Tracks Wang Bing, 2003
"A three-part, nine-hour epic documentary follows, in cinéma vérité, the demise of an industrial district in northern China, a microcosm of China's transition to "capitalism with Chinese characteristics.""
View/Hide Description
Useless Jia Zhang Ke, 2007
"A hybrid, lyrical documentary begins by following Ma Ke, an haute couture fashion designer, and concludes in the shop of a local tailor."
View/Hide Description
Circus School Ke Ding Ding and Guo Jing, 2007
"Shanghai filmmaking team observes with raw intensity and cinéma-vérité acumen, the daily life of students at the renowned Shanghai circus school."
View/Hide Description
Petition Zhao Liang, 2009
"Over a decade in the making, master filmmaker Zhao reveals the Kafkaesque Chinese petitioning process, where citizens wait years in "Petition City" for results of their grievances against the government."
View/Hide Description
This Happy Life Jiang Yue, 2005
"An intimate, moving portrait that follows Mr. Fu, a single father and railway station worker, as he deals with life's tragedies in changing China."
View/Hide Description
Yung Chang is the director of the award-winning documentary, Up The Yangtze, which was broadcast on POV in 2008. Chang is currently in post-production on China Heavyweight, a feature documentary about Chinese country-side boys and girls in the up-and-coming world of amateur and professional boxing. More information at http://yungfilms.ca.
Opening the Aperture on Human Rights in China
Sharon Hom (Executive Director, Human Rights in China)
"Produced from more than 30 hours of interviews shot by the Tiananmen Mothers, a group of family members of June Fourth victims and survivors, Portraits of Loss and the Quest for Justice presents the stories of ordinary citizens who became military targets as the army swept through Beijing in June 1989. The video is a powerful testament to the group's courageous effort to demand that the Chinese government account for its actions against its own people. (Produced by Human Rights in China.)"
"China's Unnatural Disaster follows parents from several schools that collapsed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake — nearly 10,000 children died in the quake, many in shoddily-constructed classrooms — whose grief turned to outrage as they demanded explanations from local government officials. It is a powerful reminder of the devastating consequences of corruption in China and an intimate portrait of parents determined to hold officials accountable."
"Blind Shaft, an unblinking look at the underside of China's economic reforms in terms of human suffering and costs, is a feature film by Li Yang, a documentary filmmaker. Powerful art such as Blind Shaft provides not only a critical social mirror, but also a glimpse of the redemptive power of simple human decency that survives against all odds, a hope ?ickering in the darkness."
View/Hide Description
Sharon Hom is the executive director of Human Rights in China and a professor of law emerita at the City University of New York School of Law. Hom has taught law for 18 years, including training judges, lawyers and law teachers at eight law schools in China over a 14-year period in the 1980s and 1990s. Human Rights in China, a nongovernmental organization based in New York and Hong Kong, supports those pressing for democratic reforms and social justice in China.
Five Film Recommendations from the Director of 'China Blue'
Micha X. Peled
The Gate of Heavenly Peace Richard Gordon and Carma Hinton, 1995
Up the Yangtze Yung Chang, 2007
Please Vote For Me Chen Weijun, 2007
Senior Year Zhou Hao, 2005
Blind Shaft Li Yang, 2003
Micha X. Peled emigrated to the United States from Israel by hitchhiking. He is the director of the widely acclaimed documentary China Blue, which aired on PBS, and is founder of the nonprofit documentary production company, Teddy Bear Films. Find out more about China Blue, which takes viewers inside a blue jeans factory in southern China, at http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/chinablue/film.html.
Five Films as Traces of the Great Erasure
David Redmon (Director, Mardi Gras: Made in China)
David Redmon, with filmmaking partner Ashley Sabin, has produced, directed, edited and photographed five films, including the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize-nominated Mardi Gras: Made in China and Girl Model, which is scheduled to air on POV in 2012. Redmon received a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Albany.
"Sixth Generation" Chinese Films: A Poignant and Entertaining Way for Westerners to Learn About the "Real" China
Michael A. Santoro (Author, China 2020)
The World Jia Zhang-Ke, 2004
"I first encountered Jia Zhang-Ke through his 2004 film The World, set in the surreal, bemusing and ultimately ironic setting of Beijing's World Park, complete with a scaled version of the Eiffel Tower, Tower of London, Statue of Liberty, Pyramids, etc. By that point in his career, Jia was working with official approval from the government. The setting of The World was amusing and the main characters in many ways were typical and thoroughly modern Chinese youth, but it made me curious about Jia's earlier work as an underground filmmaker."
View/Hide Description
Pickpocket Jia Zhang-Ke, 1997
"Two of Jia Zhang-Ke's films in particular are extraordinary depictions of the social and psychological upheaval caused by China's transformation from Communism to a market-driven economy — Pickpocket (1997) and the masterful Platform (2000). Both are set in Jia's native Shanxi province in Northern China, far from the Tiananmen Square–Great Wall–Shanghai shopping trail that constitutes the experience of most Westerners in China. Both offer gripping accounts of how the reform era has brought on disturbing and dramatic changes even into the far reaches of provincial China. Platform, which takes its title from a popular Chinese song about waiting on a train, follows a troupe of young performers trying to navigate their personal growth and find their place in the new China."
View/Hide Description
Platform Jia Zhang-Ke, 2000
Shanghai Dreams Wang Xiaoshuai, 2005
"Wang Xiaoshuai's Shanghai Dreams (2005) is actually set in the southwestern province of Guizhou and offers a more disturbing vision of modern China. Set in the transitional time of the 1980s, the film centers around the discords of the Wu family, divided over the merits of rural life or moving back to Shanghai, and the love interests of 19-year-old daughter Qinghong, heartbreakingly played by Gao Yuanyuan."
View/Hide Description
Blind Shaft Li Yang, 2003
"Li Yang's Blind Shaft (2003) has been banned in China and it is easy to see why. As a Westerner, this quirky story of miners defrauding mine operators in northern China by filing false insurance claims on fellow miners they murder can sometimes seem like a Coen brothers dark comedy about greed and moral anomie. However, this account of the hard lives and dangers facing Chinese miners is actually more akin to Italian neorealist films like Luchino Visconti's sympathetic portrait of Sicilian fishermen in La Terra Trema (1948). Blind Shaft is a chilling glimpse into the exploitation of workers that makes possible the rapid economic "miracle" of economic development in China."
View/Hide Description
Michael A. Santoro is a professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School and author of China 2020: How Western Business Can — and Should — Influence Social and Political Change in the Coming Decade.
Last Train Home: Essential Documentaries About China
POV
Last Train Home director Lixin Fan joins other filmmakers, film curators and writers in recommending more documentaries about China and by Chinese filmmakers.
Five Recommended Documentaries from the Director of 'Last Train Home'
Lixin Fan
Manufactured Landscapes Jennifer Baichwal, 2006
"Stunning images of civilization's materials and debris. Perhaps China is not just central to the photos shown in the film, but also to the world we all live in today."
View/Hide Description
Petition Zhao Liang, 2009
"Twelve years in the making, the film examines the shocking injustice that an average citizen could face when living in a state that puts economic development above everything else, hoping growth will prove its legitimacy."
View/Hide Description
Up The Yangtze Yung Chang, 2007
"A touching story of the life and fate of average Chinese people who are caught between the traditional way of life and the new ambitions of a rapidly industrializing nation."
View/Hide Description
Disorder Huang Weikai, 2009
"A powerful and utterly honest mishmash of the most bizarre images from contemporary Chinese society, with an almost cynical sarcasm. I've never seen anything quite like it!"
View/Hide Description
China from the Inside (TV Series) Jonathan Lewis, 2006
"A comprehensive and in-depth look at different aspects of this changing nation (which is still viewed by the world with many misconceptions), while racing on a fast track, determined to become the world's next superpower."
View/Hide Description
Lixin Fan is a Canada-based documentary film director for EyeSteelFilm and is the director of the award-winning feature-length documentary Last Train Home, which had its U.S. broadcast premiere on POV in 2011. Find out more about the film at http://www.pbs.org/pov/lasttrainhome.
Five Essential Documentaries About Contemporary Life and Phenomena in China
La Frances Hui (Film Curator, Asia Society)
Beijing Besieged by Waste WANG Jiuliang, 2011
"A painstakingly made documentary that investigates the treatment of waste in the ever-growing Beijing, this film is an informative and distressing portrait of urban ecology that finds much alarming resonance in other parts of the world as well."
View/Hide Description
Disorder HUANG Weikai, 2009
"Filmmaker Huang Weikai meticulously assembles footage taken by amateur videographers documenting chaos, violence and absurd happenings on the streets of China to create this pointed symphony of urban mayhem."
View/Hide Description
Once Upon a Time Proletarian GUO Xiaolu, 2009
"Unconnected chapters provide poignant snapshots across social classes in contemporary China. This film takes an existentialist look at the common experience of disillusionment and disorientation in a China that is far removed from the bygone days of Mao."
View/Hide Description
Please Vote For Me CHEN Weijun, 2007
"A fun-filled film documents third graders in Wuhan as they select a class monitor through an election. Children employ aggressive tactics including bribing, backstabbing and making fancy speeches to win votes. This film makes you ask if democracy is destined for exploitation."
View/Hide Description
Umbrella DU Haibin, 2008
"Documenting regular citizens navigating a vast changing China — from college graduates competing for coveted jobs to small business owners trying to ride the wave of the economic boom to elderly peasants being left behind in the countryside — this film highlights the daily struggles and despair."
View/Hide Description
La Frances Hui is film curator of Asia Society in New York. She has curated major filmmaker retrospectives and series featuring cinemas of China, Thailand, Iran, among others. A seasoned interviewer, she has led on-stage conversations with filmmakers including Jia Zhangke, Ang Lee, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and John Woo.
Chinese Documentary Recommendations
Chi-hui Yang (Film Programmer, Cinema Asian America)
Still Life Jia Zhangke, 2006
"Jia Zhangke is perhaps the most well-known and influential filmmaker working in China today. While he alternates between documentary and fiction, all of his films fall into the blurry line between. In this, his finest film to date, the still lives of individuals displaced by the flooding of the Yangtze River are explored. It's a narrative film shot with documentary veracity and context."
View/Hide Description
Beijing Bastards Zhang Yuan, 1993
"An early independent Chinese film made by Sixth Generation filmmaker Zhang Yuan, Bastards is a brave, seething portrait of rebellious youth subculture in the uncertain and seemingly hopeless wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre. More of a free-form tone poem, it stars musician Cui Jian as himself, an underground musician trying to make sense of the collapsing world around him, and offers a vital look at a generation-defining period in Chinese history."
View/Hide Description
Karamay Xu Xin, 2010
"This nearly six-hour masterwork is one of the most important Chinese documentaries to be made in recent years. Through testimonies from many of the hundreds of parents whose children were killed in a theater fire in the far western city of Karamay, Xu chronicles the devastating collapse of faith in the Chinese state and Communist party and decay of social structure in wake of the still unanswered questions of why their children died while many party officials and oil cadres were able to escape."
View/Hide Description
Chi-hui Yang is a film programmer, lecturer and writer based in New York. As a guest curator, Yang has presented film and video series at film festivals and events internationally, including the MOMA Documentary Fortnight and the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar ("The Age of Migration"). From 2000-2010, he was the director and programmer of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival and is currently the programmer of Cinema Asian America, a new on-demand service offered by Comcast and a visiting scholar at New York University's Asian/Pacific/American Institute.
Essential Documentaries from the Digital Generation of Chinese Independent Filmmakers
"Awarded best documentary at Venice, Du Haibin's documentary of the earthquake that devastated China's Sichuan province in 2008 explores how victims, citizens and government respond to a national tragedy. Du depicts a world in chaos, both material and moral. "
"A landmark in activist filmmaking in China, Meishi Street shows ordinary citizens taking a stand against the planned destruction of their homes for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The subjects were given cameras to film their firsthand confrontations with the authorities."
"Huang Weikai's one-of-a-kind news documentary captures, with remarkable freedom, the anarchy, violence, and seething anxiety animating China's major cities today. Made from more than 1000 hours of amateur footage, Disorder reveals an emerging underground media, one that has the potential to truly capture the ground-level upheaval of Chinese society."
"A remote village in southwest China is haunted by traces of its cultural past while its residents piece together their existence. The first Chinese independent documentary to screen at the New York Film Festival, Ghost Town elevated the Chinese digital documentary movement to new levels of poetry."
"Hu Jie is considered the most fearless documentarian working in China. Searching for Lin Zhao's Soul stands as a landmark in the Chinese independent documentary movement, an unprecedented work of investigation and recovery of modern China's suppressed memories. Director Hu Jie digs through artifacts and interviews firsthand witnesses to Lin's persecution, illuminating an era of political terror that sent millions to their deaths. The result is a lasting testament to a young woman's legacy of courage and conviction."
View/Hide Description
Kevin Lee is vice president of programming and education for dGenerate Films, a distributor of independent films from mainland China, and an editor at the video-on-demand site Fandor. His writing has appeared in Time Out New York, Cinema Scope, Cineaste and Senses of Cinema.
Five Film Recommendations from the Director of 'Up The Yangtze'
Yung Chang
West of the Tracks Wang Bing, 2003
"A three-part, nine-hour epic documentary follows, in cinéma vérité, the demise of an industrial district in northern China, a microcosm of China's transition to "capitalism with Chinese characteristics.""
View/Hide Description
Useless Jia Zhang Ke, 2007
"A hybrid, lyrical documentary begins by following Ma Ke, an haute couture fashion designer, and concludes in the shop of a local tailor."
View/Hide Description
Circus School Ke Ding Ding and Guo Jing, 2007
"Shanghai filmmaking team observes with raw intensity and cinéma-vérité acumen, the daily life of students at the renowned Shanghai circus school."
View/Hide Description
Petition Zhao Liang, 2009
"Over a decade in the making, master filmmaker Zhao reveals the Kafkaesque Chinese petitioning process, where citizens wait years in "Petition City" for results of their grievances against the government."
View/Hide Description
This Happy Life Jiang Yue, 2005
"An intimate, moving portrait that follows Mr. Fu, a single father and railway station worker, as he deals with life's tragedies in changing China."
View/Hide Description
Yung Chang is the director of the award-winning documentary, Up The Yangtze, which was broadcast on POV in 2008. Chang is currently in post-production on China Heavyweight, a feature documentary about Chinese country-side boys and girls in the up-and-coming world of amateur and professional boxing. More information at http://yungfilms.ca.
Opening the Aperture on Human Rights in China
Sharon Hom (Executive Director, Human Rights in China)
"Produced from more than 30 hours of interviews shot by the Tiananmen Mothers, a group of family members of June Fourth victims and survivors, Portraits of Loss and the Quest for Justice presents the stories of ordinary citizens who became military targets as the army swept through Beijing in June 1989. The video is a powerful testament to the group's courageous effort to demand that the Chinese government account for its actions against its own people. (Produced by Human Rights in China.)"
"China's Unnatural Disaster follows parents from several schools that collapsed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake — nearly 10,000 children died in the quake, many in shoddily-constructed classrooms — whose grief turned to outrage as they demanded explanations from local government officials. It is a powerful reminder of the devastating consequences of corruption in China and an intimate portrait of parents determined to hold officials accountable."
"Blind Shaft, an unblinking look at the underside of China's economic reforms in terms of human suffering and costs, is a feature film by Li Yang, a documentary filmmaker. Powerful art such as Blind Shaft provides not only a critical social mirror, but also a glimpse of the redemptive power of simple human decency that survives against all odds, a hope ?ickering in the darkness."
View/Hide Description
Sharon Hom is the executive director of Human Rights in China and a professor of law emerita at the City University of New York School of Law. Hom has taught law for 18 years, including training judges, lawyers and law teachers at eight law schools in China over a 14-year period in the 1980s and 1990s. Human Rights in China, a nongovernmental organization based in New York and Hong Kong, supports those pressing for democratic reforms and social justice in China.
Five Film Recommendations from the Director of 'China Blue'
Micha X. Peled
The Gate of Heavenly Peace Richard Gordon and Carma Hinton, 1995
Up the Yangtze Yung Chang, 2007
Please Vote For Me Chen Weijun, 2007
Senior Year Zhou Hao, 2005
Blind Shaft Li Yang, 2003
Micha X. Peled emigrated to the United States from Israel by hitchhiking. He is the director of the widely acclaimed documentary China Blue, which aired on PBS, and is founder of the nonprofit documentary production company, Teddy Bear Films. Find out more about China Blue, which takes viewers inside a blue jeans factory in southern China, at http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/chinablue/film.html.
Five Films as Traces of the Great Erasure
David Redmon (Director, Mardi Gras: Made in China)
David Redmon, with filmmaking partner Ashley Sabin, has produced, directed, edited and photographed five films, including the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize-nominated Mardi Gras: Made in China and Girl Model, which is scheduled to air on POV in 2012. Redmon received a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Albany.
"Sixth Generation" Chinese Films: A Poignant and Entertaining Way for Westerners to Learn About the "Real" China
Michael A. Santoro (Author, China 2020)
The World Jia Zhang-Ke, 2004
"I first encountered Jia Zhang-Ke through his 2004 film The World, set in the surreal, bemusing and ultimately ironic setting of Beijing's World Park, complete with a scaled version of the Eiffel Tower, Tower of London, Statue of Liberty, Pyramids, etc. By that point in his career, Jia was working with official approval from the government. The setting of The World was amusing and the main characters in many ways were typical and thoroughly modern Chinese youth, but it made me curious about Jia's earlier work as an underground filmmaker."
View/Hide Description
Pickpocket Jia Zhang-Ke, 1997
"Two of Jia Zhang-Ke's films in particular are extraordinary depictions of the social and psychological upheaval caused by China's transformation from Communism to a market-driven economy — Pickpocket (1997) and the masterful Platform (2000). Both are set in Jia's native Shanxi province in Northern China, far from the Tiananmen Square–Great Wall–Shanghai shopping trail that constitutes the experience of most Westerners in China. Both offer gripping accounts of how the reform era has brought on disturbing and dramatic changes even into the far reaches of provincial China. Platform, which takes its title from a popular Chinese song about waiting on a train, follows a troupe of young performers trying to navigate their personal growth and find their place in the new China."
View/Hide Description
Platform Jia Zhang-Ke, 2000
Shanghai Dreams Wang Xiaoshuai, 2005
"Wang Xiaoshuai's Shanghai Dreams (2005) is actually set in the southwestern province of Guizhou and offers a more disturbing vision of modern China. Set in the transitional time of the 1980s, the film centers around the discords of the Wu family, divided over the merits of rural life or moving back to Shanghai, and the love interests of 19-year-old daughter Qinghong, heartbreakingly played by Gao Yuanyuan."
View/Hide Description
Blind Shaft Li Yang, 2003
"Li Yang's Blind Shaft (2003) has been banned in China and it is easy to see why. As a Westerner, this quirky story of miners defrauding mine operators in northern China by filing false insurance claims on fellow miners they murder can sometimes seem like a Coen brothers dark comedy about greed and moral anomie. However, this account of the hard lives and dangers facing Chinese miners is actually more akin to Italian neorealist films like Luchino Visconti's sympathetic portrait of Sicilian fishermen in La Terra Trema (1948). Blind Shaft is a chilling glimpse into the exploitation of workers that makes possible the rapid economic "miracle" of economic development in China."
View/Hide Description
Michael A. Santoro is a professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School and author of China 2020: How Western Business Can — and Should — Influence Social and Political Change in the Coming Decade.
