No Eng­lish trans­la­tion available.

No Eng­lish trans­la­tion available.

No Eng­lish trans­la­tion available.

No Eng­lish trans­la­tion available.

No Eng­lish trans­la­tion available.

No Eng­lish trans­la­tion available.

Yi Sicheng’s film doc­u­ments a day in the life of Qing Baohua. The film starts in the morn­ing when Qing begins his day as a news­pa­per-seller, which in China is regard­ed as a very low pro­fes­sion with­out any social pres­tige what­so­ev­er. Con­ver­sa­tions with his lover, who accom­pa­nies him on his way through Kun­ming inform us about his social and per­son­al sit­u­a­tion. In the evening, Qing Baohua’s per­son­al­i­ty is slowly trans­formed. As soon as he per­forms local folk­songs on a stage and does some acting in Kun­ming operas, he changes into anoth­er person. The film is a visual depic­tion of the cur­rent prob­lems the urban pop­u­la­tion in China is facing. It also deals with the issue of folk cul­ture versus high (Con­fu­cian) culture.

The film is a por­trait of the vil­lage Xiang­shui­ba in Lulian county, of the Yunnan province. This is Chen Xueli’s home­town. The film doc­u­ments the main sea­son­al eco­nom­ic activ­i­ties such as mush­room col­lect­ing, fish­ing, sand col­lec­tion and trans­porta­tion. In order to give a more vivid por­trait of the sit­u­a­tion of younger women living in today’s rural coun­try­side of China, a wed­ding which took place in Chen Xueli’s family is filmed. By inter­view­ing the older women and jux­ta­pos­ing these parts with the mus­ings of the younger girls, they show how and why gender rela­tions and posi­tions slowly begin to change.

”If there is a life after this, I’d rather be a dog than a human” says a taxi driver from the Chi­nese town Xian. “To be a human being is very exhaust­ing. “ Indeed, the women - often spend­ing more than ten hours per day behind a steer­ing wheel - are sub­ject to very strict reg­u­la­tions. A large part of their earn­ing goes to the taxi admin­is­tra­tion, and the police 54 col­lects very high fines, if they park out­side the specif­i­cal­ly des­ig­nat­ed park­ing areas. Almost daily new fees are intro­duced such as ”bridge duties” or ”clean­ing taxes”, and the number of rob­beries has increased dra­mat­i­cal­ly. Film­mak­er Fang Yu por­trays three female taxi dri­vers, explores their life sto­ries and asks for their motives for doing this job. His film is an homage to the art of sur­vival in hard times: ”We don’t believe in God or Satan, we just believe in us.”

CITY SCENE is a series of snap­shots taken in the streets and squares of a Bei­jing prepar­ing for the Olympic Games. The film­mak­er cap­tures every­day real­i­ty in static shots: leisure activ­i­ties, street scenes, latent vio­lence. The long, con­tin­u­ous and care­ful­ly framed shots draw atten­tion to places and details, to the way the people there move and inter­act. Zhao Liang makes impres­sive use of cinema’s capac­i­ty to make real­i­ty vis­i­ble as it is.