#chinese documentary

Wang Bing

- Youth (Spring)

Up the Yangtze dir. Yung Chang (张侨勇). 2007.

Up the Yangtze is a 2007 documentary film directed by Chinese-Canadian director Yung Chang. The film focuses on people affected by the building of the Three Gorges Dam across the Yangtze river in Hubei, China. The theme of the film is the transition towards consumer capitalism from a farming, peasant-based economy as China develops its rural areas

The setting of the film is a riverboat cruise ship floating up the Yangtze river. Two young people are the focus of the film as they work aboard the ship. One is a sixteen-year-old girl from a particularly poor family living on the banks of the Yangtze near Fengdu, named "Cindy" Yu Shui. She is followed as she leaves her family to work on one of the cruise ships serving wealthy western tourists at the same time as her family is being forced from their home due to the flooding that accompanied the building of the dam. The film shows her acclimatization to the consumer economy of tourism as well as modern technology of the cruise ships, juxtaposed with her family and other older citizens who are displaced from a rural lifestyle to cities where they must pay for the vegetables they used to grow on their own.

The film is rich in detail about ways of life, dreams, and aspirations, and seeks to provide a view into the reality of modern Chinese life.

Wang Bing

- Youth (Spring)

The Posterist (海报师), dir. Hui See-Wai (许思维). 2017. 

Yuen Tai-Yung is a Chinese artist known for his creation of iconic Hong Kong movie posters that include notable films of Bruce Lee, the Hui Brothers, Karl Maka, Stephen Chow, Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung.

Born in Zhejiang in 1941 and raised in Shanghai, Yuen moved to Hong Kong as a teenager. He was working in advertising agencies when, in 1975, he chanced upon a commission to design the poster for The Last Message, the second film of the Hui Brothers (Michael, along with Sam and Ricky).

Yuen would go on to create posters for more than 200 films, including 17 by the Hui Brothers, before he retired and migrated to New Zealand in 1992. The self-taught painter is revered for his cartoonish illustrations, which manage to both portray an uncanny likeness of the film’s stars and an ingenious ability to distill a movie’s plot down to its essence.

The Posterist is a passion project of first-time documentary filmmaker Hui See-Wai, who is the son of comedy legend Michael Hui Koon-Man. Many of the film posters for Michael Hui Koon- Man’s biggest hits were painted by Yuen Tai-Yung.

In Search of Lin Zhao’s Soul (尋找林昭的靈魂). Dir. Hu Jie (胡杰). 2004.

Chinese documentary filmmaker Hu Jie (b. 1958) is known for his series of controversial documentaries on Maoist China. In Search of Lin Zhao’s Soul brings to light the story of Lin Zhao (林昭) (1932-1968), a Peking University student who became an outspoken dissident against Mao Zedong’s Anti-Rightist Movement in the late 1950s. After being imprisoned for her criticism against the Communist Party, Lin Zhao famously composed hundreds of pages of poems and political commentaries on Mao from her jail cell, using hairpins as her writing utensil and her own blood as the ink. Lin was executed in 1968, and her family was not informed of her death until a Party official approached them to collect a five-cent fee to pay for the bullet used in her execution.

Hu Jie’s documentary is an investigation into the life of Lin Zhao, featuring interviews with Lin Zhao’s peers who witnessed her persecution, rare photographs and footage of her writings. In Search of Lin Zhao’s Soul recovers a whirlwind of suppressed memories from Maoist China and reflects the political terror inflicted upon many at the time.

Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dreamers (流浪北京). Dir. Wu Wenguang (吴文光). 1990.