“A gentle, sympathetic look at the role of faith in a poor rural community” – Richard Kuipers, Variety
A heartbreaking story told with compassion, RAISED FROM DUST sheds light on the unexplored lives of the approximately 40 million Christians in China.
Xiao-Li (Hu Shuli) is a devoted housewife and an active member of her local Catholic church in the Henan farmlands of southern China. Her faith is put to the test as her husband (Zhang Xianmin) is hospitalized with respiratory illness due to unsafe working conditions, leaving his life clinging to an oxygen machine. Forced to work simple jobs to pay for her husband’s hospital care, Xiao-Li takes her young daughter (Lu Shengyue) out of school, unable to pay for tuition. She finds support only from fellow members of her congregation. But will her faith and devotion be enough to save her family?
Filmed with a beautiful eye for both vast rural landscapes and human intimacy, RAISED FROM DUST explores the lives of those rarely seen in modern-day China, and announces Gan Xiao’Er as a new major talent in world cinema.
Cui Zi’en. China, 2008. Documentary, 60 minutes. Mandarin w/ English subtitles.
China’s most prolific homosexual filmmaker presents a comprehensive historical account of the queer movement in modern China. QUEER CHINA, ‘COMRADE’ CHINA documents the changes and developments in Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender culture that have taken place in China over the last 80 years. Unlike any before, this film explores the historical milestones and ongoing advocacy efforts of the Chinese LGBT community. The film examines how shifting attitudes in law, media and education have transformed queer culture from being an unspeakable taboo to an accepted social identity. The film culminates with the submission of Dr. Li Yinhe’s Same-sex Marriage Bill to the Legislative Affairs Commission of the National People’s Congress in 2003, a major landmark event in the ongoing struggle for acceptance of queer identity in China.
Directed by Cui Zi’en, China’s leading queer theorist, activist and scholar, the documentary includes rarely seen footage of the first ever appearance of gays and lesbians on State television, including Cui Zi’en himself. The film features exclusive interviews with over three dozen leading queer activists, scholars and filmmakers, including Shi Tou, Li Yinhe and Zhang Yuan. The opening night film of 2009’s ShanghaiPRIDE, China’s first ever LGBT pride festival, QUEER CHINA, ‘COMRADE’ CHINA is nothing less than the most authoritative account of queer cultural history in China to date.
• Official Selection, Pusan International Film Festival
• Official Selection, Vancouver International Film Festival
• Best Documentary, 24th Turino GLBT Film Festival
• Best Documentary, Lisbon Gay and Lesbian Film Festival
• Opening Night Film, Shanghai PRIDE
• Official Selection, Beijing Queer Film Festival
• Official Selection, Pink Screens Film Festival, Brussels
• Official Selection, Calgary GlobalFest FilmFest
• Official Selection, Kosmorama Trondheim Film Festival
• Official Selection, CinemAsia Film Festival
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**This title is available in all territories except China
“The most important Chinese film of the past several years – and one of the most astonishing recent films from any country” – Shelly Kraicer, Cinema-scope
“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).
BAN Zhongyi. China, 2007. Documentary, 80 minutes.
Mandarin, Japanese, Shanxi dialect w/ English subtitles.
GAI SHANXI AND HER SISTERS tells the story of one woman’s brutal ordeal as a “comfort woman” for the Japanese Army during World War II. Hou Dong-E, known as “Gai Shanxi,” the fairest woman in China’s Shanxi province, was one of the many women abducted from their villages to be sexually enslaved by Japanese soldiers stationed nearby. Fifty years later, she joined other women throughout Asia to seek justice and reparations, but she died before her demands were answered.
Chinese filmmaker Ban Zhongyi unearths Gai Shanxi’s tragic life through the stories of the surviving women in the region. Ban also collects revelatory testimonies from former Japanese soldiers stationed in Shanxi during the war, breaking a decades-long silence over a dark chapter of China’s history. Following one woman’s heroic journey, GAI SHANXI AND HER SISTERS tells a universal story of female solidarity and survival.
Six documentary shorts chronicle the changing state of China’s independent, and underground, film scene.
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.
Top 10 Films of 2008: “A fierce and harrowing cry of political rage.” – The New Yorker
“Subtly subversive” – The New York Times
“One hell of a beautiful film… Endlessly haunting… with serene, even joyous consciousness that is the opposite of despair.” –Variety
Xiaofen (Zeng Xiaofei) spends all day listening to everything that’s wrong with China, opening her eyes to the chaos that threatens her own life.
Working as a secretary for a legal office, Xiaofen records clients detailing the sordid aspects of their lives: divorce cases, medical malpractice suits, financial corruption and old-fashioned personal revenge. Xiaofen starts to question her own relationship with her boyfriend (Deng Gang), fresh out of prison and looking to get into trouble again with his gambling habit. While Xiaofen deals with the overwhelming social malaise surrounding her, rumors spread of a disaster at the local chemical plant, threatening to poison the entire city.
Indie director Ying Liang follows up his celebrated debut Taking Father Home with a brutally frank portrait of the social and environmental problems plaguing contemporary China. “A vivid angle into ordinary life in China” (David Bordwell, Film Art: An Introduction), Ying Liang’s filmmaking examines multiple facets of society with a deceptively direct filmmaking style “that has few parallels in modern cinema.” (Richard Brody, The New Yorker)
dGenerate Films is the leading distributor of contemporary independent film from mainland China to audiences worldwide. We are dedicated to procuring and promoting visionary content, fueled by transformative social change and digital innovation.
