Demolition Workers

By following the case of Huang Jing, a woman teacher who died of date rape, this documentary captures changes in China between 2003 and 2005, before and after the injunction to respect and protect human rights was incorporated into the constitution. By highlighting grassroots activity by women, the film illustrates awareness of human rights, women’s struggle against judicial corruption, and women taking action against domestic violence in China.

In 1957, two hundred teachers, students, and cadres were labeled as "Rightists" for voicing criticism of the Communist Party and sent to the East Wind State Farm in southwest China. As part of China's disastrous Great Leap Forward, these inmates were forced to take part in ill-conceived deforestation, agricultural and industrial projects that led to wide-scale famine. Later they endured the Cultural Revolution when their camp was visited by large groups of "sent-down" youth from the cities. After 21 years of "remolding," the "Rightists" were finally "rehabilitated" in 1978 and allowed to leave in 1978. THE EAST WIND STATE FARM re-examines the tragic events of Chinese modern history during the height of Maoist rule. Director Hu Jie collects dozens of extensive interviews with both inmates and staff who served through three decades of the camp's existence.

This landmark documentary reveals the tragic life of a gifted young woman who was executed for speaking out during the height of Chairman Mao’s rule.

Spark was an underground publication that emerged in Gansu province in 1960, and was centered on the ongoing famine and the Great Leap Forward. Ultimately, 43 people, including the Rightist teachers and students who were connected with the publication, the peasants and the rural cadres who sympathized with them, were arrested and given long prison terms. Among them, three key figures were executed during the Cultural Revolution.

The launch and development of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution not only has a series of CCP Central Committee documents that have promoted wave after wave of movements, but also has various propaganda methods. A large number of different types of literary and artistic products have been produced in a collective form and with the input of the State. As a weapon of revolutionary struggle, works of art are important representatives of this period. Art was a tool for the Cultural Revolution; it fully embodies its aesthetic characteristics, actively cooperating with the development of various movements and the popularization of ideas. It has cultivated the values ​​and visual experience of a generation of Chinese people — the paintings of the Cultural Revolution have been regarded as treasures by Chinese collectors. This film shows the characteristics of the Cultural Revolution paintings through a large number of paintings, as well as the bloody violence and despotism behind them.

Filmmaker Hu Jie uncovers the tragic story of a teacher beaten to death by her students during the Cultural Revoution. In 1966, the Cultural Revolution exploded throughout China, as Mao's Red Guards persecuted suspected Rightists. Bian Zhongyun, the vice principal of a prestigious school in Beijing, was beaten to death by her own students, becoming one of the first victims of the revolutionary violence that would engulf the entire nation.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, in an attempt to stop the spread of AIDS, the Chinese government sought a “purer” blood supply from its rural population. Burdened by agricultural taxes and rising costs of education and health care, many peasants sold blood to state and private blood-collectors. Due to lack of sanitary control, a large number of blood-sellers were infected with HIV. Starting from the mid-1990s, AIDS villages multiplied.

In order to find such a fittingly inspiring matchmaker, the director visited nearly 10 matchmakers and finally selected the matchmaker in the film. The director then followed the matchmaker and witnessed the vicissitudes of life. In addition to the land, there is no form of art that can describe the heaviness of life and emotion. (Shot August 1995)

With the opening up of the economy, grassroots democracy has come. But since the land is owned by the state, the local government actually has absolute control. The so-called democratically elected village chief quickly learns that his role is to cooperate with the government in using land to develop the economy. Power-to-money transactions are open secrets. Due to the uneven economic development in the villages, each has a different story, but the use of land for profit is a constant theme. The filming location is a rural village in the outside Beijing. Less of focus is how villages elect than the mutation after. Faced with huge land assets and overseeing relationships between land, power, economics, social systems, how does a hard-working, upright peasant conduct himself? This film documents the pain: the experience of soul sublimation and degeneration. We see 'birth defects' in this "democracy" — one without checks and balances, grafted onto autocracy.

Tayuan is the location of the first museum of the Cultural Revolution in China. However, this important Cultural Revolution museum was established with private funds. The reason for its construction here is that there is a tomb of the victims of the Cultural Revolution. This film documents the little-known massacre and the construction of the Cultural Revolution Museum in Shantou, Guangdong during the Cultural Revolution. However, a few years later, this museum was banned by the government.

This documentary records the journey of Zhang Xianchi from a communist Chinese soldier to a prisoner and a writer of independent mind, in some ways just like Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian writer. Mr. Zhang’s book, The Anecdotes of Gelagu, takes us to China’s gulag---a Sichuan laogai camp. The book details an unknown and atrocious episode of history, allowing us to witness human nature under extreme circumstances.

Because of difficulties where they live in the north east of China, a husband and wife go back to their hometown in Shandong Province and settle in their hometown by the sea with three children. With no land of their own, they have to face the sea, and start their life again.

This is a documentary about coal miners. In the Qilian mountains of Qinghai Province, where the altitude is over 3,600 meters and the air thin, there are numerous small coal mines in which work around 200 miners aged 17 to 50. Every day, they must crawl through pits 60 to 70 metres deep just to carry out 30 loads of coal. Each load weighs 50 kilograms. The miners earn 500 yuan a month, without insurance. Miners normally suffer from pneumoconiosis after working four or five years in the mine and cannot work thereafter. They usually spend their wages on building houses, marriage, and tuition fees for their children. If they die in an accident, their family receives a 5,000 yuan pension. This film is a record of these working conditions, and of human labour. (Shot June 1995.)

Contemporary art has become a trend for young people in China. Young artists often organize activities in the form of art groups or small groups — but this is not only looked down on by the government, but is also subject to punishments and restrictions. This film documents a gathering of more than 200 artists in Nanjing, all from different regions of China, who to engage in a modern art activity titled "Bask in the sunshine."

Hu County, in suburban Xi’an, is famous for its peasant paintings, produced in 1958 during the Great Leap Forward. It became particularly famous during the Cultural Revolution, when these works were hailed as model paintings. In 2005, the directors visited the county and interviewed both the painters and their teachers. Comparing different political languages and artistic imaginings across the ages, the film draws on diverse sources: old documentary film clips, new propaganda paintings, Beijing Opera in the local “Qin” accent, and traces of the old amongst the new. All these elements are engaged to help us better understand the painters and the phenomenon of propaganda paintings

A folk song echoed on the Shandong Plain. This is the song of Luo Xiaojia, a Yunnan Yi girl who was trafficked to the Shandong Plain at the age of 17, and now she has lived in rural Shandong for seven years. After coming to Shandong, she was forced to marry a young farmer and received a marriage certificate. The film documents her family life in the unfamiliar Shandong countryside, her thoughts about her hometown and her views on destiny. Luo Xiaojia's tenth year in Shandong Province, she finally won the right to go home. After a journey of 4,000 kilometers, she returned to her hometown of Yunnan and saw her mother who she missed day and night. But she was caught in a contradiction. Finally, she asked her mother to sing a lot of folk songs for her, and she returned to Shandong with those sad folk songs.