Every year, hundreds of thousands of Chinese migrants are drawn to the allure of Shanghai, one of the world’s most vibrant cities, with hopes of earning a decent living. Some end up in the dark alleys of Nanjing Road, Shanghai’s largest shopping street, where they learn to hustle and scrape together any kind of living they can. One migrant, known as Black Skin, faces numerous pressures in his daily existence, including police violence. Black Skin’s story intersects with those of fellow bottle collectors, enterprising thieves and even a young boy who was abandoned. Eventually Black Skin goes mad, dancing wildly through the crowds of Nanjing Road and in the doorways of luxury shops.

Director Zhao Dayong (GHOST TOWN, 2009 New York Film Festival) arrived in Shanghai in 2004 and began documenting the lives of itinerant Chinese using digital video. He saw their stories as overlooked portraits of the deep social impact caused by China’s rapid economic growth. Zhao uses bold, exaggerated compositions in order to emphasize the relationship between his vagrant subjects and the city streets they inhabit. The result is a raw, vivid portrait of physical and psychological rootlessness. STREET LIFE reflects the way of life for thousands of forgotten people in one of the world’s largest cities.

Director’s Bio:
Zhao Dayong

Reviews:

Select Film Festivals:

Jury Prize, Beijing Documentary Film Festival
City of Rome Prize, Rome Asiatica Film Mediale
Vienna Film Festival
Berlin Blobale Film Festival
Yunnan Multi Culture Visual Festival, China
Filming East Festival, UK

Film Clip:

Amidst the barren wintry landscape of Northeast China, Chinese military police officers rigidly enforce law and order in an impoverished mountain town. They raid a private residence to bust an illegal mahjong game, casually abuse a pickpocket accused of throwing away evidence, and berate a confession out of a scrap collector working without a permit. The police switch between precise investigative procedure, explosions of violent fury, and moments of comic ineptitude, all captured incredibly before the camera.

A prime example of how independent documentaries are on the vanguard of Chinese cinema, Crime and Punishment is an unprecedented look at the everyday workings of law enforcement in the world’s largest authoritarian society. With penetrating camerawork, Zhao Liang (Petition, 2009 Cannes Film Festival) patiently reveals the police methods used to interrogate and coerce suspects to confess crimes – and the consequences when such techniques backfire. With a cold, objective eye, Zhao’s artistry withholds judgement in this cinematic slice of reality.

Director’s Bio:
Zhao Liang

Reviews:

• Variety

• Cinema Svetozor

Select Film Festivals:

• Hong Kong International Film Festival

• Locarno Film Festival

• Rome International Film Festival

• Festival des Trois Continents, France — Best Documentary

• One World International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, Czech Republic — Best Director

• Nuremberg Film Festival — International Human Rights Award

Film Clip:

Visit Reframe for more information on Crime and Punishment

“Compelling… You won’t be able to shut it off” – Jim Hoberman, Village Voice

A remote village in southwest China is haunted by traces of its cultural past while its residents piece together their existence.

Zhiziluo is a town barely clinging to life. Tucked away in a rugged corner of Yunnan Province, Lisu and Nu minority villagers squat in the abandoned halls of this remote former Community county seat. Divided into three parts, this epic documentary takes an intimate look at its varied cast of characters, bringing audiences face to face with people left behind by China’s new economy. A father-son duo of elderly preachers argue over the future of their village church. Two young lovers face a break-up over harsh financial realities. A twelve year-old boy, abandoned by his family, scavenges the hillside to feed himself.

“Directed with scrupulous attention to detail by Zhao Dayong” (Manohla Dargis, The New York Times), GHOST TOWN is “one of the most important films to have emerged from the booming (but still underexplored) field of Chinese independent documentaries” (Dennis Lim, Moving Image Source). GHOST TOWN “has a strong sense of historical consciousness, an eye for unique material, and a real sympathy for the people in the film and their tough lives” (Chris Berry, Goldsmiths University). “I do not expect to soon find scenes to match GHOST TOWN’s mountaintop funeral, the running along after a rowdy exorcism, or the scanning of faces at the town Christmas chorale. His back to prosperity, Dayong finds hallowed ground” (Nick Pinkerton, Village Voice).

Reviews:

• New York Times
• Time Out NY
• Village Voice
• Chicago Tribune
• New City Film
• Real Time Arts
• Slant Magazine
• Reverse Shot
• Hammer to Nail

Director’s Bio: ZHAO Dayong

Film Website: Ghost Town – Lantern Films

Articles:

• “A New Chapter for Chinese Cinema at NYFF“, New York Times
• “Getting Back to Roots“, Lu Chen
• “The Selling of Culture in China“, Toronto Star
• “Chris Berry on Ghost Town“, Chris Berry

Select Film Festivals & Exhibitions:

• New York Film Festival
• Turino Film Festival
• Museum of Modern Art (NYC)
• Facets Cinematheque (Chicago)

Contact us to book a screening of this film at your festival, museum, or school.

Trailer:

Downloads: Press Kit (4.6 MB Zip file includes all publicity stills)

Publicity Stills:

For three years, filmmaker Zhou Hao chronicled the lives of Long and Jun, a couple struggling with heroin addiction in Guangzhou. Zhou captures Chinese junkie subculture, its members languishing in a slum flophouse, the equivalent of a modern day opium den. When Long is hospitalized after a failed robbery, Zhou speaks out from behind the camera to intervene. Still, Long and Jun persist, soon dealing drugs full-time to make ends meet. As the couple increasingly offers lies for answers, Zhou must confront his ethical responsibilities to them, as a friend and a documentarian.

USING probes a dark, cruel reality of contemporary Chinese society that has rarely been seen by any audience. Addicts disclose techniques for dealing with police, confronting sham suppliers and staying high throughout the day. Zhou’s unflinching depiction of his friends’ repeated attempts to quit blurs the line between filmmaker and subject, and raises provocative questions about the ways in which each uses the other.

Director’s Bio:
Zhou Hao

Select Film Festivals:

•    2007 International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam
•    2008 Hong Kong Film Festival
•    2008 The 5th China Independent Film Festival
•    2008 Taiwan International Documentary Festival

Film Clips:

“Pure cinema” – Susanna Harutyunyan, FIPRESCI – The International Federation of Film Critics

Along a sleepy Hunan riverside, two delinquent boys experience a summer of love and violence in Yang Heng’s visually stunning debut. Ali and Xiao Yu are two teenage rebels idling away their days along the banks of a river in Jishou, a quiet town in Hunan province. They steal motorbikes, bully and rob kids, sing karaoke and get into fist fights outside the local internet bar. But their rough exterior belies a deeper romanticism, and a tenderness unfolds between them and their teenage loves. As one day bleeds into the next in this impoverished rural setting, it becomes apparent that these sun-baked days of misspent youth will be the wildest, freest time of their lives. These everyday subjects are transformed by a groundbreaking digital cinematography unlike any other Chinese film. Alternating deep-focus with bold flatness, Yang explores spaces with a mastery that recalls both classical Chinese and modernist landscape painting. Filmed in a summery palette with images that give off an otherworldly glow, BETELNUT offers a one-of-a-kind vision of what it’s like to be young, poor and free in China. “Yang is a first-class visual stylist, and BETELNUT is far and away the most exciting debut film I’ve seen all year.” (Michael Sicinski, The University of Houston)

Director’s Bio:

Yang Heng

Select Film Festivals:

• Pusan International Film Festival – Winner – Best New Asian Filmmaker
• Hong Kong International Film Festival – Winner – FIPRESCI Jury Prize
• Continents Festival Nantes – Winner – New Vision Award

Film Clip:

Visit Reframe for more information on Betelnut

Acclaimed at over two dozen museums and galleries around the world, MEISHI STREET, by renowned visual artist Ou Ning, works as both art and activism, calling worldwide attention to lives being demolished in the name of progress.

Director’s Bio:
Ou Ning

Select Film Festivals:

Museum of Modern Art Documentary Fortnight
Istanbul Biennial

Film Clip:

Visit Reframe for more information on Meishi Street

Yang Jin’s second feature is a detail-rich, documentary-style portrait that builds with clear-eyed assurance through the life of a seemingly unheroic and unremarkable country boy. It’s not until the film looks backwards that one gains the full scope of Er Dong’s strangely epic journey. Quietly moving and full of authentic insight into the prospects for youth in rural China, ER DONG announces the arrival of a major new talent in filmmaker Yang Jin.

Director’s Bio:

Yang Jin

Select Film Festivals:

• Rotterdam International Film Festival – Hubert Bals Recipient
• Pusan International Film Festival – New Currents Award
• Hong Kong International Film Festival

Film Clip:

Visit Reframe for more information on Er Dong

“Cui Zi’en inaugurates a new queer Chinese cinema.” – Tony Rayns, Time Out

Straight, gay and in-between Beijingers unleash a whirlwind of transsexual mayhem in this groundbreaking, gender-bending debut by China’s preeminent queer filmmaker.

Xiao Bo (Yu Bo) lives in a world where the lines defining men from women are constantly dissolving. He kneels at the deathbed of his father (Cui Zi’en) who has become a woman, and whose dying wish is to have oral sex with his/her son. His boyfriend “Nana” has also undergone a sex change, but Xiao Bo no longer finds her attractive as a woman. A sexual chain reaction ensues that wreaks havoc on traditional Chinese roles that govern male and female, parent and child.

Filmmaker, novelist and queer activist Cui Zi’en caused an international sensation with his shockingly transgressive debut. Inspired by the likes of Andy Warhol and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, but set within a specifically Chinese context, ENTER THE CLOWNS is “a movie that says everything you know about sexual identity and gender orientation is wrong” (Tony Rayns, Time Out). “Cui may be unique as China’s first gay filmmaker, but it is… in the international pantheon of queer filmmakers that we must ultimately locate him” (Chris Berry, positions: east asia cultures critique).

Director’s Bio
Cui Zi’en

Reviews:

Variety
Time Out

Select Film Festivals:

• Jeonju International Film Festival
• Vancouver International Film Festival
• Mardi Gras Film Festival
• Rotterdam International Film Festival
• San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival

Film Clip:

Visit Reframe for more information on Enter the Clowns

SUPER, GIRLS! follows ten female teenagers on their quest to become instant superstars on China’s biggest television show.

The Chinese equivalent of “American Idol,” the “Super Girls Singing Contest” spawned an unprecedented pop culture phenomenon. Drawing over 400 million viewers, the show’s runaway popularity spurred the Chinese government to ban it after only two seasons.

The film provides unparalleled, intimate access into the contestants’ lives over several months. Through candid interviews and footage of nail-biting auditions and competitions, SUPER, GIRLS! offers a fascinating look inside what the Chinese media have dubbed “the Lost Generation” and their startling takes on sexuality and success in the new China.

Director’s Bio:
Jian Yi

Reviews:

Variety

Select Film Festivals:

Cambridge Film Festival
Minneapolis Film Festival

Film Clip:

Visit Reframe for more information on Super, Girls!

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