YAN Yu

Yan Yu (left), Li Yifan (right). Photo courtesy of Berlin International Film Festival

 Born in 1971 in Chongquing, Yan Yu worked as a journalist in local television before leaving for Beijing where he became a photographer and assistant director on various films. In 1997 he made his first documentary, Dragon Artist, and then Mother (2000). In collaboration with Li Yifan, he made BEFORE THE FLOOD in 2005, which won awards at the Berlin Festival and the Cinéma du réel Festival in Paris.

Since then he has continued to investigate the construction of the Three Gorges dam: he worked on Jia Zhangke’s Sanxia haoren (Still Life, 2006), a fiction film about the impact of the building site, which won awards at the Berlin, Fribourg, Los Angeles, and Pusan festivals, and made the second part of his documentary BEFORE THE FLOOD II (2008), a portrait of the inhabitants of Gongtan – a village that is 1700 years old – that was selected for the Hong Kong International Film Festival in 2009.

FILMOGRAPHY