The Second Dream

2H combines documentary and dramatic film techniques to depict the psychological passages of two Chinese expatriates in Tokyo as they attempt to accommodate their existence to the two universal events of life - birth and death. Ma Jinsan is a 95 year-old former Kuomintang general who defected to Japan nearly 50 years earlier, shortly after the Communist revolution. Bound to Ma by chance, circumstance, and emotional need, Xiong Wenyun is an avant-garde artist desperately seeking to fulfill an innate but inarticulate desire to have a child.

On the eve of the year 2000, two stories centered around money unfold in Beijing. One is the story of a merchant who was poisoned for money -- 1000 years ago. Trapped in a black bowl, the merchant's ghost encounters an old beggar, and regales him with the story of how he came to be inside a bowl. The other story begins in modern times: A debt collector handcuffs an old friend, a poet, who cannot pay back his debt. The poet, who cannot be free of his handcuffs until he returns the money to the debt collector, goes to pick up his lover, while still handcuffed to the debt collector — but the poet's lover too was a prisoner of the debt collector, who escaped, and so all three are become handcuffed together. "Flying Flying" participated in the Youth Forum of the Berlin International Film Festival in 2001, as a 'film banned after 1990.'

Japanese filmmaker Li Ying directs the documentary Aji (Dream Cuisine), a portrait of master chef Hatsue Sato. In her late seventies, Hatsue is one of the last chefs who honor the traditional cooking style of China's Shandong province. She and her husband, Koroku, run a restaurant in Tokyo, but she really wants to move back to China where she was born. The filmmakers follow her to Shandong, where she does a television interview and meets culinary college president Liu Gwangwei. When the modern chef can't seem follow her old-fashioned recipes right, she decides to stay in China and cook them herself. However, husband Koroku doesn't want to change his location.

The film looks at the history of Yasukuni Shrine in Chiyoda, Tokyo, where more than 2 million of Japan's war dead are enshrined. More than 1,000 of them are war criminals convicted at the 1946–48 Tokyo tribunal, including 14 Class-A war criminals, Hideki Tōjō among them. The film shows not only the widely reported political incidents associated with the shrine, but also takes an in-depth look at the shrine's sword-making tradition, the Yasukuni sword being the film's underlying motif.

Xiu Xiu was abducted from her hometown in Hunan and taken to rural Fujian and raised to be a bride. Twenty years later, she tracks down her biological parents and finds they have fallen on hard times.

Documentary on Tibet co-directed by Chen Zhen and Li Ying.

Zho ston ཞོ་སྟོན་, pronounced ‘shodun,’ is a festival celebrated from the end of the sixth and during the seventh month of the Tibetan calendar (August). Monks of the Gelug School དགེ་ལུགས་པ་, the most famous of which is the Dalai Lama in Lhasa, were restricted to their monasteries during the previous month, supposedly to spare the lives of insects at the height of summer and, when the interdiction on movement was lifted, they would be greeted by lay people with gifts of yoghurt (zho ston means ‘yoghurt feast’). The festivities also feature the ‘sunning of Buddha’ tapestries, theatrical performances (a lce lha mo) and picnics at various public parks, including Norbu Linka, formerly the summer residence of the Dalai Lamas.

Documentary about Li Ying's film FLYING FLYING.