China’s rapid modernization literally traps the village of San Yuan Li within the surrounding skyscrapers of Guangzhou, a city of 12 million people. The villagers move to a different rhythm, thriving on subsistence farming and traditional crafts. They resourcefully reinvent their traditional lifestyle by tending rice paddies on empty city lots and raising chickens on makeshift rooftop coops.

Directed by acclaimed visual artists Ou Ning and Cao Fei and commissioned by the Venice Biennale, SAN YUAN LI explores the modern paradox of China’s economic growth and social marginalization.

Director Bios:
Ou Ning, Cao Fei

Select Film Festivals:

Venice Biennale
Taiwan International Documentary Festival

Film Clip:

Visit Reframe for more information on San Yuan Li

“The most celebrated Chinese debut since Jia Zhang-ke’s Xiao Wu” – Mubarak Ali, The Lumiere Reader

Daily life in an impossibly cramped Beijing apartment takes on epic proportions in this, intimate portrait, with unprecedented access, of a working-class Chinese family.

Boldly transforming documentary into fiction, Liu Jiayin cast her parents and herself as fictionalized versions of themselves.  Her father, Liu Zaiping, sells leather bags but is slowly going bankrupt.  He argues with his wife, Jia Huifen, and his daughter over methods to boost business in the shop.  A cloud of anxiety follows them into sleepless nights shared in the same bed.  But through the thousand daily travails of city life, a genuine and deeply moving picture of Chinese familial solidarity emerges from the screen.

With virtually no budget and boundless ingenuity, Liu Jiayin’s eye-opening debut, shot when she was 23 years old, consists of twenty-three static, one-scene shots within her family’s fifty square meter home.  Liu keeps her small DV camera in claustrophobic closeness to her subjects, often showing only parts of their bodies as their voices dominate the soundtrack.  OXHIDE takes the microscopic physical and emotional details of a family and magnifies them on a widescreen canvas.  “Liu takes the film language of “realism” into an entirely new dimension.” (Tony Rayns, Vancouver International Film Festival).

Director’s Bio:

Liu Jiayin

Reviews:

Cinema Scope
Variety

Select Film Festivals:

• Hong Kong International Film Festival
• Vancouver International Film Festival
• Berlin Film Festival

Film Clip:

Visit Reframe for more information on Oxhide

Join dGenerate Films on a month-long trip to post-Olympics China. We traveled from Shanghai to Nanjing to Beijing, and kept the cameras rolling. The result is unprecedented access into China’s other film community, where writing, filming, and distribution don’t always wait for government approval.

The series starts at the largest underground film festival in China, explores the spirit of independence in Beijing, tours art-film compounds, and discusses the future of Chinese cinema. Along the way, the series features the most important filmmakers, critics, producers, curators, and underground scenesters making films, their way, in China today.

Watch Digital Underground in the People’s Republic now in your browser (Streaming Media)