This is a video diary of the surreal lockdown made by the filmmaker couple who were trapped in a small, rented apartment in Shanghai. In the face of endless madness, the camera gradually breaks free from the window and observes a vast social isolation unprecedented in the country’s history.
“Hawfwen”, a traditional gathering that once popular where the Zhuang people sing folk songs. It often takes place around the clan temples or under the old trees. Singers are divided into male and female groups. They improvised their lyrics to sing in correspondence with one another.
Traveling along the songs in antiphonal style, the camera has found different singers and gatherings, lingered in the rural areas and urban cities, trying to find the broken echo of “hawfwen”.
We Were SMART tells the stories of China’s Sha-ma-te (referred to as SMART) subculture. Based on in-depth interviews with migrant workers born in the 1990s and 2000s, this documentary film explores why younger migrant workers began expressing themselves through punk hairstyles. The film focuses on their hometowns, educational backgrounds, destination cities, factory lives and spiritual world.
The Dulong River is located in the northwest of China’s Yunnan Province,Every winter, the traffic between the Dulong River and the outside world is blocked by the heavy snow on Gaoligong Mountain,This situation will continue for half a year,During this half year, the Dulong River valley becomes an isolated island.
The Dulong people have lived here for generations,The Dulong are only about 7,000 people,Before 1949, they were still in the primitive state of slash-and-burn farming.In 2012, the Chinese government invested heavily to open a road tunnel on the Dulong River,After the tunnel opened in April 2014, the Dulong River basin is no longer isolated from the rest of the world,In the years that followed, great changes took place in the life of the Dulong.
We recorded this change on camera for eight years.
In 2017, we went to Gutian county, where the story of The Golden Wing (Lin Yueh-hwa 1944) took place, in Fujian Province, China, to produce a film about the Chinese customs of eating tangyuan (rice dumpling in English) and filial piety on Winter Solstice. This film is based on a myth that one dutiful son guided his ape mother to go home by this delicious food (tangyuan). The rural troupe performed this legend on the stage at first and then off the stage, and the scenes could be all places, such as the forest, the stream, the railway, the road, the courtyard and the ancestral hall. The filial piety and great reunion of family were fulfilled at length. What you could see in the film is that the descendants of The Golden Wing and their neighbors cook festive dishes, expressing filial piety in extended families, making tangyuan together and performing Big Dipper ritual of Daoism. All these in the film represent the historical connectivity and continuity of Confucianism and Daoism and farmers’ daily practice in the past time and the present day.
By adopting new media, this film The Winter Solstice in the Valley of the Golden Wing tried to pursue the three-dimension interaction through time and space on the web and apply new technique in the film to interpret the local knowledge, which might be not possible in the traditional documentary.
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