Chinese Shadows

The Ta'ang or Palaung people, an ethnic minority living in the mountainous area between Myanmar's Kokang region and China's Yunnan province, have historically suffered many forced migrations due to war. When their survival is threatened again in 2015, thousands of them flee across the border. Filmmaker Wang Bing accompanies them and becomes a privileged witness to a human story that is both a modern reportage and a mythical epic.

A coming-of-age story set during China's Cultural Revolution. 11 year old Wang Han finds himself entangled with a fugitive and struggles to understand the adult world.

Shot over the course of ten years on both film and video, the film consists of a series of carefully composed tableaux of people and environments. Pedestrians shuffle across a bustling Beijing street, steelworkers linger outside a deserted factory, tourists laugh and scamper across a crowded beach, worshippers kneel to pray in a remote village. With a painterly eye for composition, Wang captures China as he sees it, calling to a temporary halt a land in a constant state of change.

In a fast growing city of East China, migrants have been arriving and living for a dream of a better life. But what they find there is little opportunities and poor living conditions that push people, even couples, into violent and oppressive relations. Xiao Min, Ling Ling and Lao Yeh are some of the characters of this bitter chronicle of today China.

The masterful new documentary from Wang Bing is an intimate, observational portrait of a peasant family who eke out a humble existence in a small village set against the stunning mountain landscapes of China's Yunnan province.

Mr. An is almost 90 years old. He loves life, dance and the smiling young Xiao Wei, his daily life companion. His wife, secluded at home, is quite unhappy about this friendly and love relationship. Xiao Wei’s husband doesn’t seem to care. One morning Mr. An get sick and has to be hospitalized. Xiao Wei start to wonder if she shouldn’t end the relationship.

“Our family is special”, says filmmaker Lei Lei’s father Lei Jiaqi. On the audio track of this inventive, poignant essay film he starts to talk about the struggles of his family, amid China’s troubled times of the 1960s. When his own father, Lei Ting, is sent to the countryside, he stays behind with his sister and his ill mother. When Mum passes away, and the system forbids Ting to come back to live with his children, the kids are kept in an orphanage.

Since the start of the 1990s, a period during which the Chinese government criticised the Western media for biased reporting, Chinese orphanages have strictly controlled access by the media. Because of the difficulty of gaining entrance, it is extremely difficult to know what the situation has been like there for many years. Accompanied by a mother living close to the Qingdao centre, it was thus nevertheless possible for me to film this delicate subject in privileged conditions. It was there that, in 1995, I discovered for the first time dozens of children abandoned by their parents. Over the following 10 years, I came back to visit them every year, and I became their friend. As I listened to them relating their dreams of glory, I filmed their evolution over a decade...

The elderly are interviewed on the memories they have on the Japanese soldiers who occupied China in the late ‘30s. Some remembered, some didn’t, but the result is an endearing chronicle of what we choose to live with in the old age.

When a pandemic breaks out, Li You is given a long vacation while Xiao Xiao is forced to remain in a city that she does not know well. A strange atmosphere hangs over the urban landscape. The two of them wander the streets in search of fun things to do. Meanwhile, their emotions, state of mind, ethical values, and physical instincts gradually become tools of desire. Once they have indulged in their pleasures and their euphoria reaches a climax, what else is left for them to set their hearts on, apart from the marks they have left on the city?

"What did you dream about and what was your daily life as a teenager?” An older woman recalls her youthful memories in China during the 1970’s while unfolding in front of our eyes the recreation of the modern times from the past. Until one day, the first breathless animal appears, a White horse…