Above the Dust

Three short films from South Korea, Japan, and China grapple with the aftermath of conflict and personal trauma.

A boy living with his grandmother in the mountains refuses to migrate in the new village. Everyday he prowls the cornfields and waits for his mother to come back.

In the northern Chinese city of Manzhouli, they say there is an elephant that simply sits and ignores the world. Manzhouli becomes an obsession for the protagonists of this film, a longed-for escape from the downward spiral in which they find themselves.

Two married couples adjust to the vast social and economic changes taking place in China from the 1980s to the present.

300 years of a remarkable musical instrument. Crafted by the Italian master Bussotti (Cecchi) in 1681, the red violin has traveled through Austria, England, China, and Canada, leaving both beauty and tragedy in its wake. In Montreal, Samuel L Jackson plays an appraiser going over its complex history.

At Beijing World Park, a bizarre cross-pollination of Las Vegas and Epcot Center where visitors can interact with famous international monuments without ever leaving the city’s suburbs, a security guard betrays his dancer girlfriend by pursuing another woman.

Shot over the course of ten years on both film and video, the film consists of a series of carefully composed tableaux of people and environments. Pedestrians shuffle across a bustling Beijing street, steelworkers linger outside a deserted factory, tourists laugh and scamper across a crowded beach, worshippers kneel to pray in a remote village. With a painterly eye for composition, Wang captures China as he sees it, calling to a temporary halt a land in a constant state of change.

A seventeen-year-old country boy working in Beijing as a courier has his bicycle stolen, and finds it with a schoolboy his age.

Lin, a sea captain, returns from a 6 month journey when he is told that his 25-year-old son Lin Bo has been gunned down by the police. In his quest to understand what happened, he realizes he knew very little about his own son. He starts a journey back to Chongqin, a city he once lived. He will understand the impact of his paternal repeated absence on the life of his child.

Lao Yang is not "a good father" in Chinese traditional way although he's already in his 60s. His wealth has been through ups and downs ferociously. His business went bankrupt years ago. Luckily, his three children are all grown up and have their own family. Lao Yang spends his days between taking care of his bedridden wife, keeping a mistress, collecting debts and gambling with mahjong. Conflicts between Lao Yang and his children escalate.

A portrait of urban anomie focusing on two bohemian artists who drift through the miasma of old Beijing in the 1980s.

A divorced couple learns that the only way to possibly save their daughter, who is suffering from blood cancer, is to have another child. The problem is they've both already remarried.

A coming-of-age story set during China's Cultural Revolution. 11 year old Wang Han finds himself entangled with a fugitive and struggles to understand the adult world.

In 1980s China, the country is beginning to reform and workers who had been moved with their families to the provinces in the 60s now long to return to Shanghai. For one displaced family a conflict arises when their 19-year-old daughter finds love with a local boy, threatening their chance of a return to the city.

The young adult life of Hong Yunsheng, nicknamed Little Brother, is seen as somewhat of a failure by those that know him. A Chinese national, he stowed away on a boat to the United States, where he worked as a dishwasher in the restaurant of a family from his hometown back in Fujian province. After two years in the States and after fathering an illegitimate child there named Fusheng, the child's mother Xuhui who is the restaurateur's daughter, he was deported back to China. Since, he has been floundering in life, which has caused a rift between himself and his older brother, who, with his wife, operate a street front diner and can't have children of their own. Little Brother relies on his new girlfriend, a woman he barely knows named Wu Ruifang who is a performer in a touring opera troupe, for emotional support. Despite Little Brother being the local poster boy for not stowing away, his friend named Monkey tried to do the same, but died on the voyage over due to exposure to toxic ..

A retired widow has her daily routine derailed when she starts receiving mysterious, anonymous phone calls.