Big World

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.

China’s rapid changes from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, as seen through the lives of four performers in a theater troupe.

In this documentary film, Lina Yang gives the viewer a look into the often sad and frustrating lives of the elderly in modern China. Their sense of uselessness, and loss of hope, is vividly portrayed.

Journalist Guo lives together with her mother and daughter in the same residence. The relation of three generations looks placid but there is actually a fierce undercurrent of rebellion and resistance.

Tells the family story of an 85-year-old mother taking care of her 65-year-old daughter with Alzheimer's disease, using a delicate female perspective to show the infinite power of love and family at the end of life.

Daughter Xu Ke wants to have surgery to remove the polyp from her uterus during the vacation, while her mother Hu Chunrong also plans to run away from home to escape the long-standing problems in her marriage. As the two, who both love and hurt each other, resolve to face their respective predicaments, they unexpectedly find forgiveness for each other’s fragility and imperfection in a sudden, unforeseen moment.

Linking several genres in a surprising and successful way, Yang Lin’s fiction feature debut is an Asian ghost story in which documentary scenes show how incongruous today's reality can look in China. Protagonist Fang Lei lives in material wealth and only has to care for her daughter. One night, a young mysterious lover appears and makes passionate love to her.

Six teenage girls in China learn to ride horses, compete in matches, build friendships, and deal with loss, all seen from a mother’s eye.

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.

Yang Lina's second documentary. She films her family as a director; her father and mother divorced many years ago, when she was not present. In the film, she keeps asking her father, mother, and younger brother various questions — and there is a a gap in their memories. The second half of the film records each person's reaction when watching himself or others' onscreen.