This is a video diary of the surreal lockdown made by the filmmaker couple who were trapped in a small, rented apartment in Shanghai. In the face of endless madness, the camera gradually breaks free from the window and observes a vast social isolation unprecedented in the country’s history.
“Hawfwen”, a traditional gathering that once popular where the Zhuang people sing folk songs. It often takes place around the clan temples or under the old trees. Singers are divided into male and female groups. They improvised their lyrics to sing in correspondence with one another.
Traveling along the songs in antiphonal style, the camera has found different singers and gatherings, lingered in the rural areas and urban cities, trying to find the broken echo of “hawfwen”.
We Were SMART tells the stories of China’s Sha-ma-te (referred to as SMART) subculture. Based on in-depth interviews with migrant workers born in the 1990s and 2000s, this documentary film explores why younger migrant workers began expressing themselves through punk hairstyles. The film focuses on their hometowns, educational backgrounds, destination cities, factory lives and spiritual world.
Hidden among the mountains north of Beijing, a Wild West-themed gated community promises to deliver the American dream to its several thousand Chinese residents. In Americaville, Annie Liu escapes China’s increasingly uninhabitable capital city to pursue happiness, freedom, romance, and spiritual fulfillment in the town; only to find the American idyll harder to attain than what was promised to her.
The Dulong River is located in the northwest of China’s Yunnan Province,Every winter, the traffic between the Dulong River and the outside world is blocked by the heavy snow on Gaoligong Mountain,This situation will continue for half a year,During this half year, the Dulong River valley becomes an isolated island.
The Dulong people have lived here for generations,The Dulong are only about 7,000 people,Before 1949, they were still in the primitive state of slash-and-burn farming.In 2012, the Chinese government invested heavily to open a road tunnel on the Dulong River,After the tunnel opened in April 2014, the Dulong River basin is no longer isolated from the rest of the world,In the years that followed, great changes took place in the life of the Dulong.
We recorded this change on camera for eight years.