Far and Near

Literature talkshow with Jessika Gedin.

Three love stories that take place in the modern 'internet age'.

Examine the tremendous moral and human cost of creating a 'New China' for the 2008 Olympics. As traditional communities are bulldozed to make way for modern high-rise apartments and ancient traditions are cast aside, just who is benefitting?

Kwok Yun is a simple woman who leads a peasant’s life in the peaceful mountains around remote Three-Headed Bird Village. One day, after a countryside tryst with a married man, she sees a UFO – a giant glowing thing in the shape of a dumpling! The ambitious village leader Chief Chang takes advantage of the sighting, stimulating tourism with UFO tours and getting the local economy roaring with progress. Busy aspiring to strengthen relations with the USA, she is blind to the dangers such radical change can bring.

A dreamed trip between village and city, between reality and fiction in a chaotic China.

This is the story of Mei, a young woman on a trip from East to West after her escape from her provincial Chinese village. Beginning in Chongqing and a disastrous factory job, Mei soon heads out for London and a marriage to an older man where her entrapment begins anew.

Acclaimed writer and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo delivers another deeply intelligent and idiosyncratic essay, located between contemporary China and post-Brexit referendum London.

The film takes the notion of harmony in China as a site of creative manifestation, and draws from footage shot in 1993 and 1994, in Eastern and Southern China, specifically from provinces Anhui, Hubei, Zhejiang, Fujian and Guangxi—linked to the remote origins of Chinese civilisation.

Three attempts at reconnecting with often traumatic pasts, all leading to flights from home and the need for personal reinvention. A documentary triptych of many layers and emotions, whose parts connect with each other in unexpected ways.

Film shows the present state of China through twelve platforms, an old farmer, a middle aged waitress, a car washer, a weapons dealer, fish store owners, a barber, a factory owner, a park ranger, a shopping mall employee, etc. These various faces of the so-called proletarian class ask, what is a dream? Answers to this question exist in the interview with each character, but is conveyed much more clearly through the black and white image of the children putting up their future as security as shots are heard continually behind them.

A young couple has recently purchased their dream house and are expecting a baby. One day, while his wife is out, an ex-girlfriend arrives at the door drenched from rain. She had heard of his wife's pregnancy and had only come to sell the couple insurance. The husband allows her to take a shower in his home. Suddenly, his in-laws arrive at the home unexpectedly, and he must find a way to get his ex-girlfriend out of the home without his in-laws noticing and before his wife comes home.