Wang Bing
Wang Bing is one of the greatest documentary-makers alive today, and his films offer a very insightful overview of the transformations occurring in Chinese society. Here, Dominique Auvray conducts an interview that, in addition to the biographical information, focuses above all on the relationship with things unsaid: Wang Bing attempts to do justice to his theme and the testimonies he’s gathered, but he stumbles over the words, struggling to keep his emotions in check. The pain of tackling history shows through the awkward speech.
In a quiet village in southern China, Fang Xiuying is sixty-seven years old. Having suffered from Alzheimer's for several years, with advanced symptoms and ineffective treatment, she was sent back home. Now, bedridden, she is surrounded by her relatives and neighbors, as they witness and accompany her through her last days.
In Gansu Province, northwest China, lie the remains of countless prisoners abandoned in the Gobi Desert sixty years ago. Designated as ultra-rightists in the Communist Party’s Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957, they starved to death in the reeducation camps. The film invites us to meet the survivors of the camps to find out firsthand who these persons were, the hardships they were forced to endure and what became their destiny.
Gao Ertai (1931) is an artist, teacher, philosopher who, in the 1950s, was imprisoned in the Jiabiangou Labour Camp. The film works as a diptych with Fengming, the confessional story of another victim of reprisals, and closes a vast film series on those who disappeared.
The town of Zhili accounts for 80 percent of China's output of children's clothes. 15 Hours was shot in August 2016. Zhili, part of the city of Huzhou in the province of Zhejiang, is home to around 18,000 small factories for children's clothing, manned throughout the year by over 200,000 migrant workers. In the 1980s, Zhejiang saw the emergence of a private capital-based garment industry open to any and all operators prepared to invest in flexible business models based on mutual credit or leasing. This film documents one day in the lives of the workers of 68 Xisheng Road in Zhili.
The Ta'ang or Palaung people, an ethnic minority living in the mountainous area between Myanmar's Kokang region and China's Yunnan province, have historically suffered many forced migrations due to war. When their survival is threatened again in 2015, thousands of them flee across the border. Filmmaker Wang Bing accompanies them and becomes a privileged witness to a human story that is both a modern reportage and a mythical epic.
In a fast growing city of East China, migrants have been arriving and living for a dream of a better life. But what they find there is little opportunities and poor living conditions that push people, even couples, into violent and oppressive relations. Xiao Min, Ling Ling and Lao Yeh are some of the characters of this bitter chronicle of today China.
With Taiwan remaining in the grip of martial law in 1982, a group of filmmakers from that country set out to establish a cultural identity through cinema and to share it with the world. This engaging documentary looks at the movement's legacy.
Father & Sons, which is both a cinematic and a photographic work, follows the miserable day-to-day existence of Cai, who left the Chinese countryside in order to work in a factory in Yunnan, and his two sons. While Cai works nights in the factory, the boys share the only bed in the four-square-metre room where they live. - Agenda Magazine
Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.
Director Wang Bing casts an understanding and non-judgmental eye on the inmates of a decrepit Chinese mental hospital in this eloquent and emotionally impactful documentary.
The masterful new documentary from Wang Bing (West of the Tracks) is an intimate, observational portrait of a peasant family who eke out a humble existence in a small village set against the stunning mountain landscapes of China's Yunnan province. (TIFF)
The film focuses on the suffering of Chinese who were imprisoned in a forced labor camp called Jiabiangou in the Gobi Desert in winter 1960 under Mao Zedong on the grounds that they were "rightist elements". The film tells of the harsh life of these men, who coped with physical exhaustion, extreme cold, starvation and death on a daily basis.
The character of this story lives far from the worlds of the material and the spirit. He has built his own subsistence conditions. He often goes to the neighboring villages, although he doesn’t communicate with other people. He collects some waste but doesn’t beg. He prowls about the ruins of deserted villages, as an animal or as a ghost. Under double political and economical pressure, most of people are depriving of their last dignity into a world where it exists a lack of material and spirit. But a human being stays a human being. He is looking for reasons to continue to live. —Wang Bing
This correspondence between Spanish auteur Jaime Rosales and critical chronicler of contemporary China Wang Bing is divided into three short films each consisting of documentary observations.
About the Chinese drivers who transport coal from the coal fields to the buyers.
Happy Valley is a village in the mountains of north-western Yunnan Province, altitude 10,000 feet. A few dozen Han families live there, mainly from potatoes and livestock.
Modern China. On a bright sunny day, in a building site, an industrial complex is being deconstructed. Night falls. The ruins of the factory are empty and silent. Phantoms appear, voices are heard, telling their stories…. From the anthology The State of the World.
The film consists almost entirely of an interview with the elderly He Fengming, recounting her experiences in post-1949 China.
Liming is a worker district close to Shanghai – the richest city in China. Every year, many young people leave their villages and move there. They are between 17 and 20, all from rural Yunnan Province, 2,500 km west, where the Yangtze River has its source. These young Yunnanese often live at their place of work, in dormitories, unsanitary rooms, or sometimes in small studios. Time and space to meet is missing them. So they communicate through QQ, MSN China. They live as adults but they are teenagers, and the unstable situation, economic pressures, geographical dispersion, burn their innocence and youth. Wang Bing will spend a year with them in Liming: at work, at home, on the Internet, every day of their professional, romantic, and friendly relations. At the end of the year he will follow them in the opposite direction to their province of origin, to be with their family and celebrate Chinese New Year.
Four years ago, Kingsley arrived from Nigeria in Guangzhou, China and shared a small room with other Africans in the basement of a commercial building. He converted this modest space into a barber’s shop. Kingsley is keen to start an import and export company and to register it officially in Guangzhou. He works every day until 11 pm then goes to sleep in a chair at McDonald’s. He must also send money to his wife, so despite all his efforts, he is still unable to put aside enough money to register his business. In mid-November 2019, he goes back to Lagos to renew his visa. There, he and his wife rent a small stall in the Ikotun Market in the suburbs. But business is hard. Early in 2020, Kingsley is due to head back to China to continue his quest, but with all travel blocked by the Covid-19 epidemic, he remains stuck in Nigeria. Meanwhile, in Guangzhou, the director meets Evelyn, a Nigerian woman, trying to survive with her 6-year-old daughter and with another one on the way.
