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During the Spring Festival travel rush in 2011, the documentary crew went back to the police station near Guangzhou Train Station.

A documentary on the police station near the Guangzhou Train Station.

Once the thriving capital of Imperial China, the city of Datong now lies in near ruins. Not only is it the most polluted city in the country, it is also crippled by decrepit infrastructure and even shakier economic prospects. But Mayor Geng Yanbo plans to change all that, announcing a bold, new plan to return Datong to its former glory, the cultural haven it was some 1,600 years ago. Such declarations, however, come at a devastatingly high cost. Thousands of homes are to be bulldozed, and a half-million of its residents (30 percent of Datong’s total population) will be relocated under his watch. Whether he succeeds depends entirely on his ability to calm swarms of furious workers and an increasingly perturbed ruling elite. The Chinese Mayor captures, with remarkable access, a man and, by extension, a country leaping frantically into an increasingly unstable future.

A movie about the cotton’s workers in Xinjiang Province, North-West of China.

As Chinese Communist Party secretary, Guo Yongchang was the most powerful man in his county, located in the rural inland province of Henan. Guo invited acclaimed documentary filmmaker Zhou Hao to record his final months in office. Through Zhou’s lens, we see Guo work tirelessly to achieve his greatest desire: for Henan to match the affluence of booming coastal areas. Zhou also captures the sordid details of local-level politics in pursuit of growth: lavish parties with foreign investors, threats to local workers protesting unpaid wages, and offers of bribes and kickbacks. (dGenerate Films)

An in-depth portrayal of the university exam preparation that Chinese students undergo during their senior year of high school. For many students this exam is a ticket to a better life, so the stakes are high.

The township of Houjie, near Guangzhou, has been transformed from a rural village into an industrialized township following the massive influx of Taiwanese and Hong Kong capital during the 1980’s. This film relates the precarious position of the migrant workers who built Houjie, but who were also the first victims of the post-September 11th economic slowdown, forever at risk of being laid-off.

Acclaimed director Hao Zhou journeys into one of China’s vast factories around the time of the pandemic to detail the impact of global supply chains and coercive business practices on workers’ lives.

The film crew spent ten months in the emergency room of a hospital in Guangzhou, the largest city in southern China, where they followed the 120 emergency vehicles around the city day and night, encountering a wide range of emergency stories on camera.

TONG Meimei, a psychotherapist, her father committed suicide when she was 3 years old, and lost her husband in a car accident when she was 40. Sunteck Yao, a mime actor, was raped by a strange elder after he went to school in the wrong bus when he was 12. As time goes by, how do they bring their pasts to live peacefully in the present? With the deepening of their relationships with the film crew, the influence of past experience began to emerge in the interaction, and the director was forced to show up from behind the camera and get involved in this unavoidable conversation.

Zhou Hao's documentary about a boy and his dog.

A record of the life of an old couple in winter in rural Sichuan

In a vast expanse of desert sands two men exchange health tips: “Wild boar meat is good for your lungs,” says one. “Wild boars and groundhogs,” replies the other. They press bunches of straw into the sand to combat the desertification and sandstorms here in the Tengger Desert of northwest China. A little later we see other people, men and women, doing the same work. In this immense swathe of sand—the Tengger is about the size of the Netherlands— their labor looks like a Sisyphean task. Perhaps it is due to the resulting sense of pointlessness that the conversations start to take on a more serious tone. One of the two men tells of how his wife left him, and how he had to raise his child alone. He once envisioned a different kind of life, but things go as they go. “Our fate is like an unbreakable wall,” he observes, with a resigned tone.