Director │ MA Zhan-dong
Producer │ Sunny SUN
In 2005, LEE Si-mei was harvesting the last season of opium poppy with her children in the field. Since poppy was banned in Wa State the livelihoods of people who have lived on the crops for generations have been seriously threatened. Unlike LEE, Grandma CHEN came to Wa State from China when she was a young girl. She buys and sells opium for living. Ever since she arrived in Wa State she has never gone back to China as she lost her citizenship. They are people who lost their nations and nationalities; they are forgotten and yet regarded guilty for the global drug trade.
Three years had passed since poppy was banned. LEE's daughter has gone to work as a maid in an official's home leaving a young daughter who was born out of the wedlock. LEE's second son was sent to prison for drug abuse and her youngest son began to take drugs as soon as he reached adulthood. Apart from that, nothing has changed in LEE's family.
The conflict between Burma and Kokang in 2009 heightened the tension in the region. Wa State which desperately wants to be recognized by the Chinese Government has no choice but relies on the paramilitary to defend itself. Neither the state nor its people know what awaits them in the future. Wa State has promised the world to crack down on opium production however it doesn't get the support it needs from the international community. As a result, Wa State is facing the cruel reality and the worsening humanity crisis.
Director │LEE Ya-ling
Cinematographer │ KUO Fu-cheng
A director with the Tourette syndrome meets a group of people from different age group and social status who have Tourette syndrome. They share similar but different life experiences. They stick together and make up their mind that they will find their own way out without relying on the medicine.
Director │Wuna WU
Producer │Ging LEE
An ordinary working mother, Wanda, has a whimsical idea – she wants to take her child to work! Beginning with fighting for her rights in her work place, she goes on to looking into the laws and regulations. She then comes to the conclusion that this is not a child-friendly society; mothers are expected to either stay at home or leave their children in the kindergartens when they choose to work.
In order to realize her "fantasy", Wanda embarks on an adventure in which she is confronted with countless difficulties. She becomes a founder of a school, persuades businesses to be more child-friendly and to participate in a documentary in the hope of promoting the idea. Being a mother makes a woman strong and determined. The journey begins with a mother's wish. Many businesses have gone through a huge amount of difficulties when they set up the kindergartens for their employees. Will their experiences make see how much the lack of support from the Government and society has contributed to the low birth rate today?
Director, Producer │Rosie DRANSFELD
Producer │ Fran YANOR, Fanfan ZHUANG
Fishing captain MIAO Hong-ju knows first-hand what scientist has been warning for decades – the world oceans are emptying. In China, the fist crisis is more evident than elsewhere. Rapid industrialization and overpopulation have exhausted surrounding seas. Cinema verite POV storytelling will offer an intimate glimpse of one man's struggle to survive a global catastrophe.
Director │ K.M. LO
Producer │ Jean-Philippe URY-PETESCH
K.M. LO consolidates his experience as tech-nomad, filmmaker, trainer into mobile cinema/training workshop on a tuk tuk. Going to developing countries to use his unique Chinese way of cinema workshop to motivate and train young folks to make film that becomes a "therapy course" to heal them from the hardship in life. Night time it's an open air cinema for cultural event and entertainment. Day time, a training center to make Hong Kong style action/low tech sci-fi film and documentary about their life with teenagers/kids.
The reason behind the concept is simple, kids have been living in such environment for long time, they have enough of hardship and there's no motivation for them to do or learn something to improve themselves. Instead of just making a documentary alone, they also create self-generated entertainment contents. Using a Hong Kong model of guerrilla film making technique to enable them to become a story teller.
"Deal with hardship in life with fun."
Director │ CHANG Ta-chung
Producer │ Kate TSAI
This is a story about how an ultramarathon champion whose legs have been amputated get back on her feet, literally and metaphorically. In 2008, CHIU Shu-jung, a Taiwanese ultramarathon runner finished an 1150-kilometre in eighteen days in France. However she lost her legs due to a serious bacterial infection. It has been three years since she began her physiotherapy. The tremendous amount of effort she puts in enables her not only to go back to work but finish a marathon on the tricycle. CHIU's husband is her first marathon coach. After she lost her legs, he feels guilty about initiating her into running.
But CHIU thinks that it's her fault that her legs are amputated and this has disrupted their lives as family. In order to make up for their mistakes, they keep each other company all the time during the past three years. CHIU gradually gets her independence back and re-joins the runners' community. By this time the couple has gained a better understanding of life.
Director │ WANG Guo-qing
This is a film to reflect the emotional, marital and existential concerns of young adults in contemporary China. Pressures that rooted in the failed process of education reform and social reform, including housing, employment and medical system, all fell right on the shoulder of everyone, causing drastic changes in our emotional and mental world. Especially for young adults, they are left in a very awkward position, not being able to find a job, buy a house, or even a romantic relationship. Marriage is the one that they find most terrifying to get into. Young people are said to be the future hopes of a society, but for those living in contemporary China, do they have the strength to support a future of uncertainty?
Director │ GU Ren-quan
Producer │ Rene SEEGERS
From 1958 to 1962 China suffered a famine that was hidden to the world. Chairman MAO's Great Leap Forward in development turned into a "Men-made Hell" for China's countryside.
Director │ Andrew LONE
Producer │ Zita ZHONG
The meaning of "Snooker" is to create obstacles in the aim of stopping others from succeeding, but snooker game may help people to get over obstacles. This film is an educational observation on forming humanity, exploring talents and the pursuit of success in modern society. Tong (14 yrs from Shenzhen) and Dong (13yrs from Hong Kong) are considered to be the next DING Jun-hui or Marco FU who are the top Chinese snooker players in the world. Tong has dropped from school, apprenticing to Uncle ZHONG who is considered as the "Godfather" of snooker in China. But Dong cannot quit school because it is illegal in Hong Kong. As the National Youth Snooker Competition draws near, how are the two talents to prepare their battle?
Director │ Alice HO
Producer │ Alice HO, HSIEH Chun-yi
Farming Luxuries illustrates the family life in modern China. WANG is a mink fur farmer from rural China struggling to maintain his business and his broken family, which was severed with the suicide of his only child. This film follows WANG's family and their effort to assimilate to life without their son.
Director, Producer │ HO Chao-ti
The social worker, Paul, was a hooligan himself when he was young. He wants to help the young aboriginals who had broken the law get away from crimes and start their lives afresh.
These young people didn't want to stay in education after they dropped out of the senior high school, but they didn't find themselves any jobs either. Paul helps some of them get apprenticeships at a funeral parlour; they begin with washing the bodies. Some of them have got jobs at the local guest houses.
These young people all come from deprived backgrounds. They desperately want to make money; the more the better. Therefore joining a criminal gang or stealing seems to be the quickest way to get what they want. Paul is trying his best to move these young men away from their old lives and to put them back on the right track, but it is not easy. Will Paul succeed? How much hardship does a young person have to endure before his life gets better?
Director │Meta HONG, Steffi HSIEH
This film shows the real life in Hua Yu, meaning "Flower Islet" literally, following the shooting of a TV program. When we shot the program "The World through a Camera Lens," we as the production team, got involved in the life of local students. With the support from the local school, we provided cameras and designed a series of activities. We were also able to invite along a photographer/reporter from reuters as the teacher. During this short period, the project tried to find out how the children on the island viewed the world through the lens of a camera. However, is what we showed on TV really how they think of this world? What is the life like after the production team left the island?
Director │ WANG Miao
This project follows an American private high school admissions officer and three Chinese students on their journeys of cultural and educational exchanges across the two sides of the Pacific. The students forgo the Chinese college entrance exam to study abroad in the US, but how will their hopes and dreams evolve after they parachute into a small town in Maine?
Director │GUAN Sheng-sheng
Producer │Alexis MESTRE
This 90-minute film records 17 different segments of a day, which portrays one typical day in Sun Village, and at the same time, reflects the 17 years some children spent there. These segments are made-up scenarios based on our long-term observation on and understanding of the village life. Despite of this intervention, the operated scenes are to present the seemingly obscure and yet caring love, which is hardly known to the audience.
Director │ WANG Wen-ming
Producer │ WANG Yi-fei
HE Fang-fei is among one of the children in Minqin who lost their homes and their school as "little environmental refugees." Their living conditions are worrisome due to desertification and drought. The children are fighting for their survival. The expectations from their elders, and the futures of the families are the burden for them to carry. Although the children were destined to dream about the future, but they are lost deep in their minds. Since they were born, the degrading environment nightmare passing through generations was already their waiting for them to be trapped in.
Director │Albert HUANG
This is a story of a family resisting formal school education system, and let their children home-schooling with the parents.
Currently, most of our education happened in schools, following standard dogma and content, and evaluate students by tons of examinations. In recent years, due to the constantly variance of the education policies, students, even school teachers can't get a whole picture of our education system, but very few of them try challenging the social system.
To study independently at home can avoid the rigid disciplines of school education system, but in this self-learning process, the lack of the team interaction and communication of social skills is an obvious missing. The related legal system needed to be established, this documentary is trying to find out the the obscurely circumstances of self-learning.
Director │ Isabelle MAYOR
Producer │ Jan VASAK
In Hong Kong, each square meter is optimised. A busy street during the day will turn into a shopping centre at night. In Yau Ma Tei, roads are closed to welcome a wholesale market of fruits and vegetables. In Central, at 5:00 am, thousands of delivery persons sort the newspapers that will be distributed daily. Space recycles itself. Mirado Mansions functions as a vertical, energy- saving city. Textile factories cohabit with hotels, internet cafés, apartments, and restaurants. Human beings live, work, and trade under the same roof.
Symbols of the soul and identity of Hong Kong, craftsmen and street workers transform the thousand streets that line the city into social places, thanks to their little customized shops called "booths". We will follow a shoemaker, a tarpaulin vendor, a house-cook, into the privacy of their habitat. We will dive into the lives of their families who experience this density on a daily basis.
Mr. HO, the umbrella seller, has worked for more than 50 years in the same street while young Ricky just opened a noodle restaurant in a minuscule space between two skyscrapers. These small entrepreneurs manage to take advantage of the density by seizing, in an uncanny, creative or original way, each and every corner of Hong Kong, a city where no square meter is wasted.
Director │ LI Xiao-feng
Producer │ JIA Kai
The "Red Culture" and "Red Songs" are making a comeback in China. LIU, who has been travelling all over China advocating the spirit of LEI Feng and the establishment of an international communist university strikes a humorous note in the chorus.
LIU is the Don Quixote of China who has devoted himself totally to advocating the spirit of LEI Feng. LIU is a fighter with an iron will who refused to give up his belief even when he was incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital. LIU is a spirit detector, a walking medium, a guinea pig trapped in a speaker. LIU is the soulmate of the mad, the hero of the poor and the target of the local police.
LIU always lives in the past. He has been travelling all over the place searching for his comrades and raising money for a copycat international communist university in the hope of solving young people's doubt about faith.
This is a tragicomedy about fate, faith and education. We began filming in March 2007. We have established a long-term relationship with the protagonist. The film reveals the changes in people's lives and the spirit of times against their historical backgrounds.
Director │YU Xun
Producer │Daniel CROSS
On a street set to face redevelopment, Mr. KOU is tempted by the promising displacement offer, while reluctant to let go of the life he has in the neighborhood. Confronted with the old age and a troubled son, Mr. Kou is struggling to preserve the last bits of joy and dignity he has left.
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