The Artificial Lens

A Chinese couple visits the daughter they gave up for adoption 30 years ago.

Iwatani Naofumi, a run-of-the-mill otaku, finds a book in the library that summons him to another world. He is tasked with joining the sword, spear, and bow as one of the Four Cardinal Heroes and fighting the Waves of Catastrophe as the Shield Hero. Excited by the prospect of a grand adventure, Naofumi sets off with his party. However, merely a few days later, he is betrayed and loses all his money, dignity, and respect. Unable to trust anyone anymore, he employs a slave named Raphtalia and takes on the Waves and the world. But will he really find a way to overturn this desperate situation?

A young itinerant photographer and his assistant suggest to Tibetan nomads to photograph them in front of various background.

A Chinese man who is living illegally in Japan bluffs his way into a job preparing traditional Japanese soba noodles.

Julien, a young teacher, is wrongfully accused of sexual misconduct by a teenage girl from his class. As he faces mounting pressures from the girl’s older brother and her classmates, the situation spirals out of control. Allegations spread, the entire school is thrown into turmoil, and the teacher has to fight to clear his name.

A man looking for the release of a long-time prisoner takes a police officer, his daughter, and a group of strangers hostage.

This film is based on retrospective and imagination, text and mobile images, and is also an attempt to re-materialize movies and film devices (apparatuses). During an excursion to Tehran, artists and authors revisited the cinema "street" burned during the Islamic Revolution in 1979. They used pre-revolutionary Iranian films and cinema venues as lenses for analyzing geopolitics and oil politics. Words, archives, mobile images, film materials, and sounds are interspersed with real and fictitious narrative structures, showing "silent" historical manipulation and the post-revolutionary state of Iranian society. The entanglement between war, desire, and matter points to an artificial doomsday "paradise" -- and also asks the audience from the historical level to which the radical revolution is spreading to the present.

Short film by Hu Wei and Francois Dey.

Short film by Hu Wei.

Short film by Hu Wei.

Short film by Hu Wei.