Director: Qu Youjia Lin Po-Yu Song Siqi Zhou Xiaolin Lei Lei Yao Fei | | | |
Observing and exploring subtle personal relations is one of the crucial topics for young filmmakers. In the corner of private memory, artists devote themselves to the portrayal of emotional connections between father and son, sisters and brothers, mother and daughter, with touching warmth as well as bitter sorrows. Regardless of the storytelling techniques they use, these films generate the power strong enough to penetrate the silver screen and to arouse our most intuitive memories and senses, echoing with each other. Besides these compelling sentiments, we can also detect greater bindings and thinking above the individual and family level. By looking at our family space in retrospect, we are also examining our homeland and the society in which we stand.
Together with Lexus, FIRST presents [FIRST x Lexus Special Screening · Lexus Short Film Premiere] which unites five short film competition finalists with the Lexus Short Film. Within such concentrated space and relations, we invite our audience to experience the most truthful emotions and to witness the ripples of this interaction through cinema. ”
Director: Cao Fei | China/France | Color | 110min | Fiction
A computer engineering company in the city of Nova, with the support of foreign experts, undertakes a secret mission – turning humans into a large-scale digitally intercepting and message collecting medium. A scientist who is part of the project, tries to make a great leap forward in this advanced technology. He experiments on his son but fails. The son turns into a digital soul whom exists in a computerized world, moving between the past and future, dreams and reality…
Director: Gao Ming | China | Color | 107min | Fiction
Young couple Dong and Juan live in an ‘urban village’ (agglomerations of migrant workers and their family) in Shenzhen. They have a turbulent relationship. In order to reestablish the Outdoor Stage, Dong stays on and works temporarily as a guard at the lake. While working there, he meets Yuan who regularly sets fish free in the lake. Juan works in a flower shop and often goes to her client, Mr. Long’s establishment to arrange flowers. Dong returns home and helps Juan set up the Clown Flower Shop. Juan asks him to dress up as a clown when he delivers flowers. On one of his deliveries, Dong visits Yuan at her home. Yuan was once a performer but she left the stage after a rocky relationship. The relationship between these four people becomes gradually displaced. Beneath the ambiguity, there is a side to each character that no one else knows about. As light is slowly cast upon the characters, the darkness of the muggy and wet weather creeps upon them.
Director: Xie Shuchang | Germany/China | Color | 140min | Documentary
Eighteen years ago, the Three Gorges Dam was in the building process. The Zhang family, who lived in the old town of Yunyang had to move elsewhere. One day, the grandfather suffered a stroke and lost his memory. The children returned to look after him. The eldest daughter even bought an apartment and new furniture for her old man. Years later, Grandpa Zhang turned better. It is time to consider how the family should go on. The topic is now focused on the eldest grandson. The relatives ought to worry about his marriage, for he is already 28 years old. Facing this urge, the grandson has then considered pretending to marry his best friend to comfort the family, while living a completely different life in Europe.
Director: Guo Shuang | China | Color | 94min | Documentary
Guo Jiang is a person who has participated in the art test and he graduated from college and chose to enter the industry of “art training”. He positions his role as both an educator and a businessman, but most of the time, he likes to appear as ” Teacher Guo”. Guo’s stage of showing his fists is a small county in central Henan, which is also his hometown. This documentary film is Guo Jiang’s career and life, including how he handles his students (clients), how to deal with his relationship with partners, how to deal with competitors, how to deal with marriage matters. How to respond to the parents, as for the ex-girlfriend who has already entered the stage of marriage, let him rack his brains and even exhausted his body… Everything is like a game, only the one playing can understand the feeling. In short, between desire and the “ideal”, stick to it or let it go, he needs to make a choice.
Director: Gao Jian | China | Color | 85min | Fiction
Based on the concept of samsara, the film is divided into four different stories, time settings for these stories are following the changes of the seasons: A kid in the pastoral area in spring, a young man in the village in summer, a man in the county in autumn, an old man in the city in winter. Each story seems to be independent, but actually all of them are unified as one, telling us the true meaning about life.
Director: Xu Huijing | China | Color | 110min | Documentary
In the suburbs of Beijing, a group of troubled teenagers learn to play baseball with a famous baseball coach, while struggling through their internal conflicts and the inability to play baseball games like professionals. When an accident took place in the winter of 2017, countless local residents got evacuated in Beijing, the baseball team, as well as their playfield were facing the unexpected obstacle—the relocation of their headquarter. With the World Series of the Little Pony League waiting around the corner, the whole team will have to pull themselves together and face the competition on the international stage.
Director: Zhou Zhou | China | Color | 90min | Fiction
Chi Li, an epilepsy sufferer, floats between love, affection and dreams, and struggles through despair for a new life.
Director: Wang Xiaozhen | Hon Kong, China | Color | 114min | Fiction
In China, a young couple and their baby leave the city to pay a visit to their sick grandfather in the countryside. The husband, who is also the director of this movie, transformed the husband-wife relationship into a film set in the suffocating space of a car. The relationship shatters into a thousand pieces. Love and filmmaking are interwoven here to provide us the account of a moving ‘echo’.
Director: Xiao Yifan | China | Color | 112min | Fiction
An extremely decayed body was discovered in a dry well in a wasteland. The police quickly spotted the main suspect and used phone records to arrest the accomplices thinking that the case would be closed in a short time. However, the main suspect vanished. After a long period of strict investigation, the police finally discovered that the main suspect had already been cremated by his victim. In the face of conclusive evidence, the murderer eventually confessed his crime.
Director: Li Jifeng | China | Color | 119min | Fiction
When her husband and son died, Fang Zhi, an old lady living alone in the countryside, found out about her own terminal disease and was afraid that no one will take care of their graveyard after her death. She resolutely dug up her old grave and took the ashes to the city to buy a joint grave with a life-long service. It was her last wish in life, but it made her last life wonderful. Guo Daping, a cemetery agent, dedicated to raising money to cure his father; Ding Rui, a young and stubborn urban drifter, and his girlfriend Nana, independent but kind and honest; they had been ignorant of Fang Zhi, but they were unexpectedly intertwined with each other and could not be separated thereafter.
Director: Huang Shasha Fu Xiaoyu Cheng Yu Xu Yujie | | | 79min |
[White Horse]
The bystanders are whispering and they say an accordion could never talk to a white horse.
[The Water Will Carry Us]
In a village in southern China, a solitary and old carpenter made a wooden framed mirror by hand, but the person who ordered the mirror had been lost. Therefore, the old carpenter started to look for the person, carrying the mirror. On his way, the changes of villages and towns were reflected in the mirror, indicating something unusual was happening…
[Pomegranate]
Boy got a call from a girl he hasn’t seen for a long while. It made him remember that afternoon when he went to buy pomegranates with his father when he was young. That day, they met the women with the red scarf. Then he remembered the day he went walking in the snow with the girl.
[Ornithophobia]
A quiet girl tries to avoid the trauma brought up during her childhood, while she doesn’t know an unexpected gift is in exchange for a more brutal lesson.
Director: Zhou Shengwei | China | Color | 84min | Fiction
After shooting ‘SHe’,‘I’ fell into the bottleneck of creation. While interviewing some artists about how to break through the bottleneck period, I stumbled upon an artist’s body with a strange posture in his studio. Driven by curiosity and creative desire, ‘I’ began to investigate this dead artist with a camera. What happened next became more and more strange and uncontrollable…
Director: Li Baojiu | China | Color/B&W | 74min | Documentary
THIS TOO SHALL PASS fully documented a week-long ‘uprooting’ of one’s ancestral grave, with over three hundred years of history, so the forefathers ‘live to see another day’ at their new resting place.
Director: Zhao Xu | China | Color | 69min | Documentary
This film was shot in 8 different countries based on the paths of both a physical and a spiritual journey. Through the journey, the director explores the relationship between desire and freedom, and war and faith. 24 long shots in the film construct a self-discovery journey that wanders between the reality and the imagined.
Director: Xu Weichao | China/Taiwan, China | Color | 90min | Documentary
Leading towards a teenage life, a group of Uighur elementary students, being both the pride and the headache of their teachers, started their last soccer season. The story focused on a forward, a back, and a goalkeeper of this soccer team, portraying their ups on the filed and downs in real life. Their initial success in school games and the city tournaments boosted their ambition of a professional career. What awaited them in the all Xinjiang tournament, however, was a lesson that went beyond their imagination.
Director: Boyanhkeshig | China | Color | 123min | Fiction
This film tells the story of an old herdsman who saved a newborn black horse and raised it to be a vigorous one. The black horse was sold due to an incident, and it started an extraordinary life journey. After many hardships, he finally returned to the old herdsman’s side…
Director: Khashem Gyal | China | Color | 100min | Documentary
13-year-old Metok Karpo lives in a Tibetan boarding school for orphans. Her divorced parents are alive, but have left her to be raised by her maternal grandparents. Her mother remarries but the new husband passes away shortly afterwards. Despite all odds, Metok embarks on a journey to find her father in her native grassland. Discovering his happy life with a new family, she is troubled by complex feelings she can only express through her imaginative drawings. As new waves of dating on smart phones sweeping through the area, traditional life and nomadic family values start to collapse. In Tibet, divorce is becoming a social problem, affecting more and more families. The film documents this adolescent’s quest for father and belonging, spotlighting a young girl living tenaciously in a society of radical transformation.
Director: Gao Jian | China | Color | 85min | Fiction
Based on the concept of samsara, the film is divided into four different stories, time settings for these stories are following the changes of the seasons: A kid in the pastoral area in spring, a young man in the village in summer, a man in the county in autumn, an old man in the city in winter. Each story seems to be independent, but actually all of them are unified as one, telling us the true meaning about life.
Director: Guo Shuang | China | Color | 94min | Documentary
Guo Jiang is a person who has participated in the art test and he graduated from college and chose to enter the industry of “art training”. He positions his role as both an educator and a businessman, but most of the time, he likes to appear as ” Teacher Guo”. Guo’s stage of showing his fists is a small county in central Henan, which is also his hometown. This documentary film is Guo Jiang’s career and life, including how he handles his students (clients), how to deal with his relationship with partners, how to deal with competitors, how to deal with marriage matters. How to respond to the parents, as for the ex-girlfriend who has already entered the stage of marriage, let him rack his brains and even exhausted his body… Everything is like a game, only the one playing can understand the feeling. In short, between desire and the “ideal”, stick to it or let it go, he needs to make a choice.
Director: Layla Zhuqing Ji | Malaysia | Color | 108min | Fiction
A severe high school murder case happened in Kuala Lumpur, resulting in one fatality and the other two seriously injured. The murder case gains a lot of public attention. Single mom MEI (36), as the mother of a ruthless murderer, becomes the public enemy. While GU (46), as the mother of the deceased victim, receives all the sympathy. However, as the truth reveals in this ‘We Media Era’ both mothers have to make some tough decisions for their younger generation in this surveillance society. We see the facts, but not always the truth.
Director: Wang Kai | China | Color/B&W | 127min | Documentary
The film is a story based on a son, who is with a sense of guilt, tries to explore himself and reflect the relationship with his mother after his father passed away. With the help of the camera, the son attempts to build a type of dialogical mode with his mother, which is different from the one occurred beyond their general mother-son relationship. Indeed, finding a common sense with his mother, in terms of their real life, was triggered by their generational gap embodied in their conflicts. And he wished to establish a multi-angle understanding with each other and life with his mother through reflecting the past and creating productive argument. If camera could strengthen each of their perspectives more independently during their time, to what extent did they acquire empathy?
Director: Zhou Zhou | China | Color | 90min | Fiction
Chi Li, an epilepsy sufferer, floats between love, affection and dreams, and struggles through despair for a new life.
Director: Huang Shasha Fu Xiaoyu Cheng Yu Xu Yujie | | | 79min |
[White Horse]
The bystanders are whispering and they say an accordion could never talk to a white horse.
[The Water Will Carry Us]
In a village in southern China, a solitary and old carpenter made a wooden framed mirror by hand, but the person who ordered the mirror had been lost. Therefore, the old carpenter started to look for the person, carrying the mirror. On his way, the changes of villages and towns were reflected in the mirror, indicating something unusual was happening…
[Pomegranate]
Boy got a call from a girl he hasn’t seen for a long while. It made him remember that afternoon when he went to buy pomegranates with his father when he was young. That day, they met the women with the red scarf. Then he remembered the day he went walking in the snow with the girl.
[Ornithophobia]
A quiet girl tries to avoid the trauma brought up during her childhood, while she doesn’t know an unexpected gift is in exchange for a more brutal lesson.
Director: Liu Shu | Hongkong,China/Netherlands | Color | 82min | Fiction
A young Chinese teacher, Wu Yu, searches for the hit-and-run driver responsible for her mother’s death. As she tries to understand her mother’s faith, Buddhist principles slowly grow in Wu Yu and start appeasing her pain. But her quest for justice soon isolates her from the rest of the world: her husband wants to negotiate a cash compensation, and Buddhist beliefs require her to let go of her demand since destiny should bring justice in the next life. All Wu Yu asks for is that the driver meets her face to face. If only she could find him…
Director: Lei Lei Yu Chia-Hsuan Lin Po-Yu Zhou Xiaolin Song Siqi | | | 92mins |
[A Bright Summer Diary]
A woman is reminiscing the story behind a photograph: it was a hot summer day in the 1980s. Her family traveled to Lushan to escape the heat. As her memory unfolds, we gradually come to see the forgotten history and that very photograph being damaged by a water stain.
[No Flowers or Seasons]
Living in her grandma’s house that has been converted into a secret gambling den, the girl faces constant harassment as she struggles to earn money to pay for her upcoming graduation trip. Surrounded by sly neighbors, the girl must choose between her ethics and desires.
[Pieces of April]
You always go straight ahead, without holding my hand or even looking back. The plastic bag floating in the sky has been watching and following me all the time. I looked at it confounded, lost my eyes, and then you disappeared.
[The Coin]
In the Chinese New Year holidays, finding the coin inside the dumplings means a blessed year ahead. A young woman loses a jar on her journey to a new country, which contained the lucky coins she had been collecting growing up. Her new life begins with a search to find the coin.
Director: Dong Xingyi | China | Color | 107min | Fiction
It tells the story about the protagonist Junsheng shortly after he is released from prison. After returning home, an estrangement occurs between him and his hometown. He had left his town for only two years, but he believes that he is still the toughest young man in the village. After various sufferings, he finds that the seemingly short two-years is an unbridgeable gap.
Director: Ikram Nurmehmet Io Lou Ian Bao Yifan Yang Liang | | | 82min |
[Elephant in the Car]
An ordinary night in Beijing, Xiao got home late from work. She ordered a car-pool on the way home, and the driver picked up other carpoolers on the way: two Uyghur boys who live in Beijing. As soon as they got in the car, they started talking in a language that no one else understands, which made Xiao uncomfortable. The driver had to find a way to talk to those guys at the back: turns out they from Xinjiang. The driver started chatting with them, and had really hit it off; they even played music out loud and danced. But Xiao in the front seat couldn’t fit in with them. When the driver was about to play another song, she told the driver she wanted to get off the car before arriving at her destination.
[MaMa]
Elderly Tian Meiyun spends her final years in solitude in her old house. A young couple arrives with a baby in tow one day, looking to a rent a place. Looking at the baby in their arms, Tian Meiyun opens her doors for the first time. One day, the young couple leaves the baby alone at home. Tian Meiyun breaks into the couple’s room and picks up the baby. All the memories from the past begin to surface in her mind…
[The Town]
The quaint town is full of exquisite makeover faces, which are used as a measure of status and characters. After mother died, the older sister Ruoqing and younger brother Laiyong hang on together in the town. The sister worked hard in the makeover parlor and hopes to get everyone’s approval and the parlor’s qualifications. However, the brother hates makeover, resisting in isolation. Thus, the conflict between the brother and the sister intensifies…
[Dog Tick]
Two brothers are living in poverty, and the coming of an old city reconstruction project will affect everyone virtually. Everything around them will start to change, but to them, it seems that nothing has changed.
Director: Zhou Shengwei | China | Color | 84min | Fiction
After shooting ‘SHe’,‘I’ fell into the bottleneck of creation. While interviewing some artists about how to break through the bottleneck period, I stumbled upon an artist’s body with a strange posture in his studio. Driven by curiosity and creative desire, ‘I’ began to investigate this dead artist with a camera. What happened next became more and more strange and uncontrollable…
Director: Xu Huijing | China | Color | 110min | Documentary
In the suburbs of Beijing, a group of troubled teenagers learn to play baseball with a famous baseball coach, while struggling through their internal conflicts and the inability to play baseball games like professionals. When an accident took place in the winter of 2017, countless local residents got evacuated in Beijing, the baseball team, as well as their playfield were facing the unexpected obstacle—the relocation of their headquarter. With the World Series of the Little Pony League waiting around the corner, the whole team will have to pull themselves together and face the competition on the international stage.
Director: Li Baojiu | China | Color/B&W | 74min | Documentary
THIS TOO SHALL PASS fully documented a week-long ‘uprooting’ of one’s ancestral grave, with over three hundred years of history, so the forefathers ‘live to see another day’ at their new resting place.
Director: Wang Kai | China | Color/B&W | 127min | Documentary
The film is a story based on a son, who is with a sense of guilt, tries to explore himself and reflect the relationship with his mother after his father passed away. With the help of the camera, the son attempts to build a type of dialogical mode with his mother, which is different from the one occurred beyond their general mother-son relationship. Indeed, finding a common sense with his mother, in terms of their real life, was triggered by their generational gap embodied in their conflicts. And he wished to establish a multi-angle understanding with each other and life with his mother through reflecting the past and creating productive argument. If camera could strengthen each of their perspectives more independently during their time, to what extent did they acquire empathy?
Director: Xie Shuchang | Germany/China | Color | 140min | Documentary
Eighteen years ago, the Three Gorges Dam was in the building process. The Zhang family, who lived in the old town of Yunyang had to move elsewhere. One day, the grandfather suffered a stroke and lost his memory. The children returned to look after him. The eldest daughter even bought an apartment and new furniture for her old man. Years later, Grandpa Zhang turned better. It is time to consider how the family should go on. The topic is now focused on the eldest grandson. The relatives ought to worry about his marriage, for he is already 28 years old. Facing this urge, the grandson has then considered pretending to marry his best friend to comfort the family, while living a completely different life in Europe.
Director: Gao Han | China | Color | 104min | Fiction
A series of severe criminal cases happened in Yangguan, an industrial town in Northwest China. Chen Hanzhong, the detective on the case, commutes to the gobi, fallen villages and desolate industrial landscapes with colleagues day after day. They got some clues, and more questions as well. As time passed, they realized that to solve the case is also to solve the mysteries in their lives. Suddenly, work and life, memory and reality, all begin to interweave at a certain moment.
Director: Xu Weichao | China/Taiwan, China | Color | 90min | Documentary
Leading towards a teenage life, a group of Uighur elementary students, being both the pride and the headache of their teachers, started their last soccer season. The story focused on a forward, a back, and a goalkeeper of this soccer team, portraying their ups on the filed and downs in real life. Their initial success in school games and the city tournaments boosted their ambition of a professional career. What awaited them in the all Xinjiang tournament, however, was a lesson that went beyond their imagination.
Director: Layla Zhuqing Ji | Malaysia | Color | 108min | Fiction
A severe high school murder case happened in Kuala Lumpur, resulting in one fatality and the other two seriously injured. The murder case gains a lot of public attention. Single mom MEI (36), as the mother of a ruthless murderer, becomes the public enemy. While GU (46), as the mother of the deceased victim, receives all the sympathy. However, as the truth reveals in this ‘We Media Era’ both mothers have to make some tough decisions for their younger generation in this surveillance society. We see the facts, but not always the truth.
Director: Lei Lei Yu Chia-Hsuan Lin Po-Yu Zhou Xiaolin Song Siqi | | | 92mins |
[A Bright Summer Diary]
A woman is reminiscing the story behind a photograph: it was a hot summer day in the 1980s. Her family traveled to Lushan to escape the heat. As her memory unfolds, we gradually come to see the forgotten history and that very photograph being damaged by a water stain.
[No Flowers or Seasons]
Living in her grandma’s house that has been converted into a secret gambling den, the girl faces constant harassment as she struggles to earn money to pay for her upcoming graduation trip. Surrounded by sly neighbors, the girl must choose between her ethics and desires.
[Pieces of April]
You always go straight ahead, without holding my hand or even looking back. The plastic bag floating in the sky has been watching and following me all the time. I looked at it confounded, lost my eyes, and then you disappeared.
[The Coin]
In the Chinese New Year holidays, finding the coin inside the dumplings means a blessed year ahead. A young woman loses a jar on her journey to a new country, which contained the lucky coins she had been collecting growing up. Her new life begins with a search to find the coin.
Director: Taylor Ni Zhang Ximing Lin Qiying Chris Yu Bi Shanyi Sha Mo Zhong Muxuan Lia Wang Chen Shuo Wu Tang Wu Jinming He Ziyuan Fan Wenhan Wang Fei Cheng Thim Kian Wang Dongjian Ying Zhaoyi Real Zhao Liu Xiaohu Gan Meiying Yi Lie | | Colour/B&W | 115min | short film
[Father, Husband, Robber]
The film DAD, HUSBAND, ROBBER is a family comedy. Luo seems like a harmless man, but is secretly planning a robbery with his colleague Fei. However, their robbery did not go smoothly: Luo’s wife, son and even his mother came to mess up his plan, and caused a farce.
[Angel of the North]
This is a story about the life and struggle of feminists Li Maizi and Xiao Meili. She brings her home to meet her father for the first time …
[Don’t Film Me!]
Two men on the street use their cellphones to ‘attack’ each other because of a ‘scam’, but it quickly escalates to something they didn’t expect…
[Ordinary Love]
From the director’s own perspective, the film tells the love story of a couple who are about to get married shooting wedding registration photos in a warehouse. There are many interesting details in the film, and the documentary shooting also makes the film full of genuineness and empathy. It is a short film full of warmth and love.
[Karma Is A Fish]
Lin Hui, an unemployed live streamer accidentally clicks into an applet named ‘The Little Genie Fish’ during a live stream. The ‘Genie Fish’ claims to be able to grant him his wishes. After being humiliated by his girlfriend, Lin makes a vicious wish on her, only to realize there’s no turningback…
[Guest]
One day, a young man received an unexpected package, which made his day pleasant. But he knew from the moment he turned on the magic switch, the time to farewell with her was counting down…
[Mechanic]
As the epidemic strikes the world, people wear masks and ‘free breathing’ becomes extravagant hope. In the eyes of robots, human beings always regard the lost as the most precious, and “free breathing” is regarded as the highest pursuit of human whether in spirit or body. Maybe we can fight for the right of ‘free breathing’, so that we can live up to this moment…
[Carnival]
A young, visually impaired woman — accompanied only by her guide dog – sits in a café, reading a novel as she waits for the next bus. Suddenly, a pay phone begins to ring loudly outside. Led by her trusted friend, the young woman then experiences something that can only be described as magical.
[Slow Train Coming]
This film is about the mental and emotional states of a man unde quarantine. Isolated from his wife and daughter in a different hotel room, a man has a chance to face his true self and examine the loneliness in his marriage. During quarantine, the depression and anxiety caused by the environment and self-struggles are somehow relieved through the “abnormal” communications with the family. The sudden fever that happens to the daughter makes the man feel the power of love and the courage to overcome the crisis of his daily life.
[How Bad Is Your Nearsightedness?]
It was nighttime in the city, two passengers encountered through a carpooling service. The short journey lighted up a moment of exhaustion as the summer fireworks glitter by the water that only ends too soon. In such a metropolis, they would never meet again. Like NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft which spent 9 years to just whoosh past Pluto and have a brief glance, the real mystery of the universe is to say ‘Hi’ and ‘Goodbye’ at the same time.
[The Museum in March]
THE MUSEUM IN MARCH is an stop motion animation made by a family of three during quarentine. All of the properties and characters are made with toys by the daughter. The father was in charge of screenwriting, post-production and sound, while the mother was in charge of cinematography and grip. The production took three weeks, using family-owned digital camera, and the lighting support in slow-mostion was supportd by flashlights and bath heaters.
[From Soccer to Summer]
In the last soccer game in school, Xia, waiting for her best friend Jun who was late, tried her best to play a draw and get the game into overtime. They kept the promise of playing the last game together in the injury time, which became a memory of the last time the childhood friends met in their lives.
[Before the Storm Arrives]
Two men, a misunderstanding, and some jokes.
[Mr.Six]
One man, one phone, one night. Staying in the dark, brightness is in his heart.
[When the Cricket Sounds]
Professional sound recordist Soon, and his assistant, Maz, go to the park to record the sound of crickets. However, their different working styles lead to a conflict…
[Ashamed]
The Chinese characters are broad and profound. The word “Xu” is both wasteful and a sense of timidity. But the film’s purpose is to choose the latter. A vain girl picks up a mobile phone. Driven by greed, she is attracted by bargaining with the owner. Returning the lost items is a traditional virtue. I hope that everyone can live up to it at any time.
[A Normal Afternoon]
A young girl uses studying as an excuse to visit her friend. She feels nervous, though she doesn’t know why. Things she sees in her friend’s house becomes vivid in her mind, and the visit also turns out of control.
[Yi Qing Duan Pian]
An intense gamble happened between two guys during the COVID-19 pandemic.
[Wish Tank]
During his lunch break, Stanley, a concession stand worker at the local cinema decides to present his own passion project on the big screen. The film is filled with all kinds of desire. Theses desire sometimes can be mundane, sometimes bizarre. These moments of magic and spice unfold as the scene changes, and end unexpectedly.
[Fictional Truth]
Our objective view is always monitoring out subjective imagination. One can never tell when fictional truth fades into hallucination.
Director: Zhao Xu | China | Color | 69min | Documentary
This film was shot in 8 different countries based on the paths of both a physical and a spiritual journey. Through the journey, the director explores the relationship between desire and freedom, and war and faith. 24 long shots in the film construct a self-discovery journey that wanders between the reality and the imagined.
Director: Ikram Nurmehmet Io Lou Ian Bao Yifan Yang Liang | | | 82min |
[Elephant in the Car]
An ordinary night in Beijing, Xiao got home late from work. She ordered a car-pool on the way home, and the driver picked up other carpoolers on the way: two Uyghur boys who live in Beijing. As soon as they got in the car, they started talking in a language that no one else understands, which made Xiao uncomfortable. The driver had to find a way to talk to those guys at the back: turns out they from Xinjiang. The driver started chatting with them, and had really hit it off; they even played music out loud and danced. But Xiao in the front seat couldn’t fit in with them. When the driver was about to play another song, she told the driver she wanted to get off the car before arriving at her destination.
[MaMa]
Elderly Tian Meiyun spends her final years in solitude in her old house. A young couple arrives with a baby in tow one day, looking to a rent a place. Looking at the baby in their arms, Tian Meiyun opens her doors for the first time. One day, the young couple leaves the baby alone at home. Tian Meiyun breaks into the couple’s room and picks up the baby. All the memories from the past begin to surface in her mind…
[The Town]
The quaint town is full of exquisite makeover faces, which are used as a measure of status and characters. After mother died, the older sister Ruoqing and younger brother Laiyong hang on together in the town. The sister worked hard in the makeover parlor and hopes to get everyone’s approval and the parlor’s qualifications. However, the brother hates makeover, resisting in isolation. Thus, the conflict between the brother and the sister intensifies…
[Dog Tick]
Two brothers are living in poverty, and the coming of an old city reconstruction project will affect everyone virtually. Everything around them will start to change, but to them, it seems that nothing has changed.
Director: Liu Shu | Hongkong,China/Netherlands | Color | 82min | Fiction
A young Chinese teacher, Wu Yu, searches for the hit-and-run driver responsible for her mother’s death. As she tries to understand her mother’s faith, Buddhist principles slowly grow in Wu Yu and start appeasing her pain. But her quest for justice soon isolates her from the rest of the world: her husband wants to negotiate a cash compensation, and Buddhist beliefs require her to let go of her demand since destiny should bring justice in the next life. All Wu Yu asks for is that the driver meets her face to face. If only she could find him…
Director: Gao Ming | China | Color | 107min | Fiction
Young couple Dong and Juan live in an ‘urban village’ (agglomerations of migrant workers and their family) in Shenzhen. They have a turbulent relationship. In order to reestablish the Outdoor Stage, Dong stays on and works temporarily as a guard at the lake. While working there, he meets Yuan who regularly sets fish free in the lake. Juan works in a flower shop and often goes to her client, Mr. Long’s establishment to arrange flowers. Dong returns home and helps Juan set up the Clown Flower Shop. Juan asks him to dress up as a clown when he delivers flowers. On one of his deliveries, Dong visits Yuan at her home. Yuan was once a performer but she left the stage after a rocky relationship. The relationship between these four people becomes gradually displaced. Beneath the ambiguity, there is a side to each character that no one else knows about. As light is slowly cast upon the characters, the darkness of the muggy and wet weather creeps upon them.
Director: Dong Xingyi | China | Color | 107min | Fiction
It tells the story about the protagonist Junsheng shortly after he is released from prison. After returning home, an estrangement occurs between him and his hometown. He had left his town for only two years, but he believes that he is still the toughest young man in the village. After various sufferings, he finds that the seemingly short two-years is an unbridgeable gap.
Director: Khashem Gyal | China | Color | 100min | Documentary
13-year-old Metok Karpo lives in a Tibetan boarding school for orphans. Her divorced parents are alive, but have left her to be raised by her maternal grandparents. Her mother remarries but the new husband passes away shortly afterwards. Despite all odds, Metok embarks on a journey to find her father in her native grassland. Discovering his happy life with a new family, she is troubled by complex feelings she can only express through her imaginative drawings. As new waves of dating on smart phones sweeping through the area, traditional life and nomadic family values start to collapse. In Tibet, divorce is becoming a social problem, affecting more and more families. The film documents this adolescent’s quest for father and belonging, spotlighting a young girl living tenaciously in a society of radical transformation.
Director: Boyanhkeshig | China | Color | 123min | Fiction
This film tells the story of an old herdsman who saved a newborn black horse and raised it to be a vigorous one. The black horse was sold due to an incident, and it started an extraordinary life journey. After many hardships, he finally returned to the old herdsman’s side…
Director: Gao Han | China | Color | 104min | Fiction
A series of severe criminal cases happened in Yangguan, an industrial town in Northwest China. Chen Hanzhong, the detective on the case, commutes to the gobi, fallen villages and desolate industrial landscapes with colleagues day after day. They got some clues, and more questions as well. As time passed, they realized that to solve the case is also to solve the mysteries in their lives. Suddenly, work and life, memory and reality, all begin to interweave at a certain moment.
Director: Cao Fei | China/France | Color | 110min | Fiction
A computer engineering company in the city of Nova, with the support of foreign experts, undertakes a secret mission – turning humans into a large-scale digitally intercepting and message collecting medium. A scientist who is part of the project, tries to make a great leap forward in this advanced technology. He experiments on his son but fails. The son turns into a digital soul whom exists in a computerized world, moving between the past and future, dreams and reality…
Director: Wang Xiaozhen | Hon Kong, China | Color | 114min | Fiction
In China, a young couple and their baby leave the city to pay a visit to their sick grandfather in the countryside. The husband, who is also the director of this movie, transformed the husband-wife relationship into a film set in the suffocating space of a car. The relationship shatters into a thousand pieces. Love and filmmaking are interwoven here to provide us the account of a moving ‘echo’.
Director: Li Jifeng | China | Color | 119min | Fiction
When her husband and son died, Fang Zhi, an old lady living alone in the countryside, found out about her own terminal disease and was afraid that no one will take care of their graveyard after her death. She resolutely dug up her old grave and took the ashes to the city to buy a joint grave with a life-long service. It was her last wish in life, but it made her last life wonderful. Guo Daping, a cemetery agent, dedicated to raising money to cure his father; Ding Rui, a young and stubborn urban drifter, and his girlfriend Nana, independent but kind and honest; they had been ignorant of Fang Zhi, but they were unexpectedly intertwined with each other and could not be separated thereafter.
Director: Xiao Yifan | China | Color | 112min | Fiction
An extremely decayed body was discovered in a dry well in a wasteland. The police quickly spotted the main suspect and used phone records to arrest the accomplices thinking that the case would be closed in a short time. However, the main suspect vanished. After a long period of strict investigation, the police finally discovered that the main suspect had already been cremated by his victim. In the face of conclusive evidence, the murderer eventually confessed his crime.
Director: Ding Yinnan | China | 彩色 | 90min | Fiction
A film crew is working intensely, but not on a high note. Everyone on the production team had different opinions, and the director Gai Yu was also a mess. The script only presented an idealized image of life and not shadowing our actual life. After the edited script, will their film mimic the truth of life, and will the audience find their true self from the film?
The film crew temporarily lived in the basement of the hotel, which became the world of filmmakers where they could live unconstrained. The producer was running all over the place trying to cut their spending under the budget. The leading actress Shuhua was performing traditional small acts to help maintain the living conditions for the crew, however, was made fun of by the audience. MoMo, trying to present the truth of life through the film, discusses the script with Gai Yu endlessly. Among the chaos, the crew was able to finish the filming and everyone was able to then move on to their separate roads…