The Vachina Monologues

Xu Xin’s film “Dao Lu” (China 2012) 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 (CCP) 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.

Han Tao’s latest film is set in a textile factory of the 1970s. Chong Er, a worker there, is in love with newcomer Xiao Lan and pursues her. They get married, but the happy time does not last long. Chong Er was executed, allegedly for breaking the law. More than 30 years later, the textile factory is closed down. The truth behind the case is finally revealed, but time has diluted everything and changed everyone’s visage. The film attempts to reconstruct the mental state of that generation, even though the workers and everything in the factory have been forgotten. Once upon a time, there were so many energetic lives that worked and lived there. The confining space was everything they had – where life began and ended, becoming eternally trapped in memories.

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.

The Three Gorges Dam continues to cast a long shadow on Chinese society, Politics and environment. This documentary studies the project's final completion in 2012. Some of the prominent figures past and present - Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemi, are taken to task for rushing the project. The result is long-term ecological destruction, widespread elimination of local economies and forced relocation. Director WANG Li-bo lends his voice to the wave of criticisms of one of China’s most controversial projects.

Follow the lives of the elderly survivors who were forced into sex slavery as “Comfort Women” by the Japanese during World War II. At the time of filming, only 22 of these women were still alive to tell their story. Through their own personal histories and perspectives, they tell a tale that should never be forgotten to generations unaware of the brutalization that occurred.

Yuguo, from Mongolia, lost his father when he was very young. His mother Liuxia was not able to raise him as a heavy drinker. With social support, she sent Yuguo to Wuxi for free education. Liuxia is depressed all day long, and she finds sustenance of missing Yuguo in reindeer and wine. One winter holiday after many years, Yuguo returns to his hometown, the Evenki settlement deep in the Greater Khingan mountains. At that time, he is no longer the boy who just left home, but a thirteen-year-old teenager. Facing alcoholic mother, poetic uncle, pure people from the tribe, familiar yet strange forest, Yuguo, who grew up in the city, doesn’t know what to do. In the snow-laden mountains of Aoluguya, northeast of Inner Mongolia, the film chronicles their brief time together. Yuguo and His Mother is the second documentary of Gu Tao’s Evenki trilogy.

The documentary film, The Road, reveals the status of 22 students who study in a private village school in Hunan Province. Through in-depth interviews, the inner world of these “left-behind children” who are lack of parental love has been explored. We hope that through this film, we could hear the responses and actions from our society.

Class 172 is a key class for their excellent students of an ordinary secondary school in Hunan province, from which the kids’ main goal is to upgrade into one of the best province-level high school – No.1 high school of the county. In the recent few years, the school’s enrollment rate to high school was not quite satisfying, and this year, the newly promoted class in charge teacher – Mr. Xiang, who’s only graduated a few years ago, became their brightest hope to teach the students and raise the enrollment rate for school.

Several boys who are about to graduate live in the 2006 dormitory. All-day long eating, chatting, playing cards, and playing with mobile phones, to kill their youth, just to get a high school diploma. Finally, I graduated from high school, but where is the future? Go to work or continue to join a college? Facing such students, it is difficult for teachers to show enthusiasm for teaching. Only Teacher Hou carefully wiped the bulletin board , as always. The original site of Duancun Middle School in Pingyao County was an ancient temple in the Ming Dynasty. In the summer of 2011, more than 150 students from the school merged with two other high schools and moved into the new school in the city. Grass grows on the playground, and the gatekeeper Laomi and his family continue to live in the teaching building.

Li Shouwang is the leader of a blind storytellers team, learned storytelling at the age of 19. His childernare living hard in other cities. Li's money amost goes to his children's pocket every year. But with urbanisation, the storytellers have lost almost all their audience. As the conflict between the storytelling team and the village team intensified, his son, who was far away from home, became the only spiritual sustains... When he was excited that his son would be taking his family home for Chinese New Year, what's await is a sigh.

In Yuncheng County, Shandong, there is a girl born in the 90s named Han Wenjing who was paraplegic in a car accident in her childhood. As Han Wenjing gets older and older, she is worried about her future life. Marriage has become the biggest concern of parents. Han Wenjing got acquainted with a soldier online, but finally broke up under his father's opposition. The younger sister-in-law also had a dispute between the two over her marriage. When Han Wenjing was depressed, her father proposed to carry her to Liangshan. First, fulfilling Han Wenjing's wish was also compensation for Han Wenjing. Later, Han Wenjing met a dumb while studying e-commerce sales. The dumb liked her very much. Both parents were satisfied when they met. However, Han Wenjing felt that she still couldn't accept the disabled and wanted to try to combine healthy people, even if it failed. Under the pressure of her parents and sister-in-law on Han Wenjing, Han Wenjing still insists on her choice

Zhang Ming went back to his hometown Wushan to record the last images before it being changed forever by the upcoming Three Gorges Dam.

The player of Jia Zhangke's early film "Xiao Wu" and the famous independent film activist Wang Hongwei talked about Chinese independent films at the IFF Independent Film Forum.

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.

Unusually popular religions and extreme secular beliefs, unconstrained power and no authoritarian society, people work hard on the land and live thrifty but do not believe in the meaning of life at all. This is Longwang Village, an empty old farming society, the most essential reality of an ordinary western village. The film does not have a perpetual plot. The images are presented with the changing of the four seasons. There is no great joy or great sadness. Everything is recorded, and no results are produced. Strictly speaking, this is actually just a rural video file, a running account of ordinary western villages without all rhetoric.