Ode to the Goose

People have varying perceptions and definitions of love and movies. One must overcome differing opinions and disregard insignificant factors in order to achieve the end product in each aspect. However, it is these trivial features that matter in the end and leave their imprint on our souls. Whether it is for love or for movies, we must continue to question and attend to the subtle inscriptions upon our emotions.

A Beijing professor returns to his stomping grounds for a friend's funeral. Reflecting on the past, he meets a tea shop owner who sparks feelings of love in a time of pain.

Cui, a young Korean mother living on the outskirts of Chinese society, has a husband in jail and a son to support. She barely makes a living selling kimchi to workers along the side of a bleak, industrial road. A love affair with a fellow Chinese-Korean leads to tragic consequences as Cui struggles against the vulnerability of her position.

A bookseller from Seoul travels with a young woman to Fukuoka in Japan to meet a former friend from university. While their reunion is haunted by the conflicts of the past, his travel companion floats through the plot as if moving through a dream.

At a Japanese restaurant nestled within the busy streets of Beijing, Li Dong convinces his older brother Li Chun to travel together to the Japanese city of Yanagawa to find and catch up with their childhood sweetheart Liu Chuan.

An ordinary village in Northern China, the last day of the winter vacation. Four idle, aimless adolescents gather at Zhou Zhixin's home, a friend who lives with his father, brother and nephew. Like most contemporary teenagers, these youths want to enjoy their last day of holiday and simply hang out in this place where nothing ever seems likely to happen. Their conversations are desultory and they sometimes seem to argue for argument's sake. One of them, Laowu, talks frankly with his girlfriend about how teenage love might affect their studies, while Laobao questions school's value and relevance to real life.

Gu Wentong learns the whereabouts of his father, who lost contact with him more than 40 years ago. Encouraged by new friend, photographer Ouyang Wenhui, Gu Wentong decides to face his father and rebuild the long-lost father-son relationship.

After a decade as a Beijing drifter, Fang Chunshu returns to Chengdu, grappling with urban alienation from her single mother, until a local youth helps her rediscover familial bonds through emerging cultural spaces and find renewed purpose amid the city's transformation.

Eleven, which played at the 2001 Venice Film Festival, is the first short film of director Zhang Lu. He is a forty-year-old writer whose works engage with issues of cultural difference stemming from his own background as a member of the Korean cultural minority in China. Eleven is a fourteen-minute long vignette, virtually silent, of an eleven-year-old boy's encounter with a group of soccer players his own age.

Chang-ho, 12, becomes friends with a North-Korean immigrant about the same age who just crossed the Dooman river, border between North-Korea and China. His mute sister and his wise grandfather accompany him through a series of misfortunes.

A father takes his son to observe an empty field, and then to visit a neighbour, who is soon visited by other reticent characters, including a man who is a little violent, and another next-door neighbour who has fallen ill.

Their separate worlds converge when a restaurant owner suggests they "share a table" during overlapping lunch breaks. What starts as awkward silence evolves into tacit understanding over shared noodles, leading them to explore Shanghai's culinary scene together .

While preparing to shut down the photo studio business that he has been running, a man hears that someone named Chulsu has died.

30 years after the explosion at Iri station (Iksan, South Korea) the city has changed its name, rebuilt itself, but the people still carry the scars. Jin-seo is one of them. She is mentally impaired due to the explosion her mother experienced while giving birth to Jin-seo. She lives with her cab-driver brother, Tae-woong. The men in the town takes advantage of Jin-Seo's mental impairment and her mild manner nature. Tragedy soon strikes Jin-seo again...

A muggy summer of 2009, reality and memory tangled together, water from the canal soaked everyone in those vanishing days.