1. The Road (大路朝天)
A highway is waiting to go through a quiet village in Hunan, a province in central China where Mao was from. Due to the high cost of construction, construction companies and migrant workers who live on road work rush to here like the tide. In the following four years, they root in this strange place for interests, paying sweat and blood, even their lives. With their arrival, local village and peasants are forced to change their lives. Many hidden interest lines and hidden rules about road construction of the nation are unveiled, together with the shocking truth and emerging secrets.
It has an average vote of 8.5 on TMDB.
2. News Feed on My... (动态消息)
I just watch the news of war in a distant country on my mobile. My fingers go back day by day to the day the war broke out and pose to see comments posted on the Facebook News Feed that I follow. Outside, I have friends who participated in anti-war rallies.
3. Talking Unknown, Ending Unknown: Li Hongqi And His Cinema World (不知所云,不知所终——李红旗及其影像世界)
In this talk, Li Hongqi reviewed his transition from fine art to cinema, and his aesthetic and philosophical exploration from his early 'So Much Rice' to recent 'The The'. Dir. Li Hongqi also shared his strong anxiety of his existence, his thought on cinema art , his epistemology, his religious view, his consideration on contemporary cinema, and what he learned about living in seclusion.
4. Disappearance (黑潮)
Yu Tian is a senior this year. He hasn't returned home for a few years while studying in a big city. The estrangement between him and his mother is somehow getting bigger and bigger. He is immersed in his artistic dreams and is not practical, but his mother, who has always been conservative, does not understand. His friends remained the same, still the same young people in the small town. Friends booed that he would be the most promising one among them, but he himself was convinced. He told his sister that he would go to the big city to make a fortune.
5. The Other Side (對岸異鄉人)
After 30 years of cold war, Taiwan and China finally opened cross-strait trade and tourism in 1980. However, through decades of political and educational vilification of their counterparts by the KMT and CCP, and despite close economic and cultural ties, what lies beneath the diplomatic relations is a disconnect and mistrust that cannot be denied. KE is a failed business in Taiwan who hopes to start over as a 'Taiwanese Expat' in Shenzheng, China with a Taiwanese company. Lili, a laborer from China, meets her Taiwanese husband online and moves to Taiwan in hopes of a better life. Both KE and Lili cross the straits in hope of achieving what they cannot find in their homeland. But how much do they really know about that country across the straits?
It has an average vote of 10 on TMDB.
6. We Sit In Silence At The Memorial Table
A silent film by Vietnamese director Truong Minh Quy in collaboration with Belgian director Nicolas Graux, was shot on the set of a film by Graux. We Sit in Silence at the Memorial Table is inspired by Educational Objectives, a poem written by Aleksey Garipov and translated to English by Nicolas Graux.
7. Goatee (山羊胡子)
Li Songshan, a disabled poet in Lilou Village, Henan Province He lived with sheep every day and gave himself a pen name -- Goateed. Film explores the wonderful intertext between the poetic world of goatee and real life through an award-winning journey and the people around him.
8. OLD VETERANS NEVER DIE (战魂)
Different veterans, different memories of the Anti-Japanese War, and different lives. The oral narratives of 7 veterans show you the pictures of the Anti-Japanese War in that year, and take you to understand the current situation of the veterans of the Anti-Japanese War in Guangdong.
It has an average vote of 9 on TMDB.
9. Heidi in China
In 1946, Heidi is entrusted to a Swiss family by her father. He will never come back for her. Today, François Yang questions his mother about her past. What follows is a journey to China, a quest to reconstruct memory. Through contact with her brothers and sister, Heidi measures the extent of the drama experienced by her family that remained in China, persecuted by the Communist Party.
It has an average vote of 8 on TMDB.
10. Lost in the Mountain (空山軼)
The film is director Gao Zipeng’s first fiction film which takes three years to complete. It premieres on March 27, 2001 in UCCA and stars the poet A Jian, Xiao Zhao and the writer Gou Zi. The film is based on a true crime of disappearance. It creates an atmosphere of what Ma Zhiyuan, a celebrated poet and playwright of Yuan Dynasty, portrays in his famous poem “Autumn Thoughts”: Over old trees wreathed with rotten vines fly evening crows/ Under a small bridge near a cottage a stream flows/ On ancient road in the west wind a lean horse goes/ Westward declines the sun/ Far, far from home is the heartbroken one.
It has an average vote of 4 on TMDB.
11. LIVE OF ROTTEN LIFE (我还在——细菌战后的溃烂人生)
On August 21, 1942, while the Japanese "Expeditionary Team" immediately retreated with ground troops, they scattered anthrax on fields, grasses, and crops in urban residential areas along the Zhejiang-Jiangxi traffic. People along the route mostly depend on farming for their livelihoods, so at the same time, many people crippled and died with rotten feet. According to incomplete statistics, there are only more than 160 suspected germ warfare survivors in Quzhou, Zhejiang. This film focuses on these surviving elderly people. When 70 years have passed since the war and a new chapter of history opened, what kind of lives are the old people who are victims? What kind of mental state are you in? Will the wounds left over from the war heal? What is the attitude towards war?
12. First Vote
A soon-to-be first-time voter, the filmmaker’s thought-provoking journey into the Rust Belt and South captures four Asian American voters’ ardent first time grassroots political participation ignited by the 2016 rise of “Chinese Americans for Trump.” FIRST VOTE is a character driven cinema verité style film chronicling the democratic participation of four Asian American voters from 2016 through the 2018 midterm elections.
13. The Rocking Sky (冲天)
To commemorate the 70th anniversary of the victory of WWII, this documentary film describes the eight years of dauntless air-force fighting of the republic of China during the Anti-Japanese War, with only 300 combat-capable aircraft from China while Japan had over 2000.
It has an average vote of 8.7 on TMDB.
14. Bazaar Jumpers (跑酷少年)
Two Uigur brothers and a friend are in love with parkour, a kind of extreme sport. Regardless of opposition from their worried mothers, the boys train themselves to be the best in an upcoming parkour event in Beijing while managing to iron out additional difficulties. They lose the game, but eventually they learn much more about their true selves.
15. Buried (掩埋)
July 27th, 1976 - a day the people of Tangshan will never forget. When that fateful day ended, tens of thousands had been killed, and the lives of the survivors would be changed forever. No public official, no expert, nor anyone among the seismological personnel - regardless of what they were doing that day - should ever forget. History will always remember the twilight of that day.
It has an average vote of 9 on TMDB.
16. The Vachina Monologues (来自阴道)
The Chinese Department of Sun Yat-sen University staged the Chinese debut of "The Vagina Monologues" in December 2003. Since then, this feminist play, which came from the US and has been committed to the elimination of gender-based violence, has incited a vagina hurricane that blew all over mainland China.
It has an average vote of 10 on TMDB.
17. Pathway (道路)
Xu Xin’s film “Dao Lu” offers an exclusive “in camera” encounter with Zheng Yan, an 83 year-old veteran of the Chinese Red Army, who calmly relates how he has navigated his country’s turbulent history over three-quarters of a century.Born to a wealthy family in a foreign concession, Yan joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1941 because he sincerely believed in the socialist project, and in its immediate capacity to free China from the Japanese yoke and eradicate deep-rooted corruption.
It has an average vote of 3 on TMDB.
18. Before the Flood (淹没)
Before the Flood is a study of the final weeks of a dying city, as thousand-year-old Fengjie on the Yangtze River is reduced to rubble and its inhabitants uprooted to make way for the new Three Gorges Dam that will flood the entire valley.
It has an average vote of 10 on TMDB.
19. Along the Railway (铁路沿线)
This important, patient documentary follows a year in the life of the sidings dwellers who eke out a living, begging, foraging, stealing and sleeping rough near the Baoji railway station in Shaanxi.
It has an average vote of 7.2 on TMDB.
20. Falling From the Sky (天降)
The little-known Hunan Suining County is an ordinary but full of magical places. As the theoretical point of the rocket wreckage launched by the Xichang Satellite Launch Center, it has greeted the rocket wreckage from the sky dozens of times in the past 20 years since 1990. This mysterious and dangerous “out-of-town visitor” broke the poor and peaceful life of the 160,000 locals in the jurisdiction. 2008 is China's "Olympic Year" and "Aerospace Year." The people of Suining, like the people of the whole country, are looking forward to the Olympics to pay attention to the Olympics and are proud of the growing strength of the comprehensive national strength including aerospace strength. They also have to bear the fate of falling from the sky.
It has an average vote of 8.8 on TMDB.