Williams follows the lives of five ambitious young people—a media savvy hip-hop artist, two migrant workers living precariously on society’s edge, a dedicated medical resident, and a courageous environmental activist—over four years as they struggle to find their way in a country changing as fast as any in history. Raised under communism, they are now making their way in China's blazing capitalist economy. What happens along the way is surprising. Some find themselves torn between traditional culture and tantalizing new opportunities, while others begin the heady ride to wealth and power. A few find love and resolve family conflicts while others seem likely to crash and burn. The film is buoyed by a Chinese rock and hip-hop soundtrack, and features scenes of Chinese life rarely seen in the West.

Sponsored by Portland Chinese Times.

MEISHI STREET shows ordinary citizens taking a stand against the planned destruction of their homes for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. In order to widen traffic routes for the Olympic Games, the Beijing Municipal Government orders the demolition of entire neighborhoods. Several evictees of Meishi Street, located next to Tiananmen Square, fight through endless red tape and the indifference of fellow citizens for the right to keep their homes. Given video cameras by the filmmakers, they shoot exclusive footage of the eviction process, adding vivid intimacy to their story.

What gets closer to the truth: documentary or fiction? 24 CITY tells a number of stories about the deep-rooted social revolution going on in China today. It is set in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, at a luxury apartment complex called 24 City being built on the site of Factory 420, a former airplane engine plant. Jia captures the last days of the factory through the eyes of the people who used to work there, and explores the future through those of the people who will move into the new apartments. In a series of five strikingly photographed interviews with retired workers, personally inflected vignettes unfold of the recent history of China, as it moves past the Korean War through the political campaigns of Communist Party rule right up to the full-throttle capitalist present. These documentary interviews are combined with four “staged” interviews of actors playing characters connected with the factory, providing a mix of real and fictional stories that complicate and inflect the viewer’s experience. Jia’s experiment makes palpable both irretrievable loss and irresistible progress, two inextricably bound incommensurables in China’s ongoing post-Revolutionary revolution.

MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES explores the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of “manufactured landscapes”—quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines and dams—Burtynsky creates stunningly beautiful art from civilization’s materials and debris. Baichwal’s film follows him through China as he shoots the evidence and effects of that country’s massive industrial revolution. With breathtaking sequences, such as the opening tracking shot through an almost endless factory, Baichwal extends the narratives of Burtynsky’s photographs, allowing us to meditate on our impact on the planet and witness both the epicenters of industrial endeavor and the dumping grounds of its waste.

Sponsored by the NW China Council.

Armed with video cameras, twelve artists present a highly stylized portrait of San Yuan Li, a traditional village besieged by China’s urban sprawl. China’s rapid modernization literally traps the village of San Yuan Li within the surrounding skyscrapers of Guangzhou, a city of 12 million people. The villagers move to a different rhythm, thriving on subsistence farming and traditional crafts. They resourcefully reinvent their traditional lifestyle by tending rice paddies on empty city lots and raising chickens in makeshift rooftop coops. Commissioned by the Venice Biennale, San Yuan Li explores the modern paradox of China’s economic growth versus the social marginalization of many of its citizens.

Sponsored by Portland Chinese Garden.

FOLLOWED BY

WHOSE UTOPIA?
DIRECTOR: CAO FEI
CHINA, 2006
With a critical eye on China’s culture and its ever-expanding urban environment, Fei portrays workers who left their small hometowns to pursue dreams of becoming dancers, singers, and musicians in the big city. Instead, they found work in factories. Focusing on employees at a light bulb plant, Fei shows these workers performing their greatest dreams amid their austere reality. (20 mins.)

FOLLOWED BY

SEVEN INTELLECTUALS IN A BAMBOO FOREST—PART 1
DIRECTOR: YANG FUDONG
CHINA, 2003
Based on accounts of the ancient Wei and Jin Dynasties by seven gifted intellectuals known for their remarkable passion, talent, and camaraderie, Fudong’s film updates the tale by portraying a group of present-day Chinese youths responding to an almost overnight cultural transformation from an agrarian to a post-industrial way of life. Fudong’s work epitomizes how the recent and rapid modernization of China has overthrown traditional values and culture. (30 mins.)

“At the turn of the millennium, bicycles are making way for cars on clotted streets surrounded by high-rises under perpetual construction. Freshly divorced taxi driver Dezi roves through this transitional landscape picking up passengers and trying to pick up women; girls love men with cars, but as one of Dezi’s colleagues complains, cab drivers are nothing special anymore. Venturing from Beijing’s crass nightclubs, plush restaurants, and glossy retail complexes to its less glitzy margins, Ning evokes the layering of realities in a city with a vanishing past and a rapidly arriving future. The title may or may not be ironic.”—Juliet Clark, Celluloid Dreams.

“Pegged by Western critics as a Chinese ‘Sex and the City,’ PERPETUAL MOTION rapidly became a cult item in China, noted both for its frank treatment of women’s sexuality and for its irreverence toward the nation’s past. Discovering an erotic e-mail to her husband from another woman, affluent editor Niuniu invites three of her professional friends to a Spring Festival luncheon, hoping to uncover the message’s author. These successful, worldly women trade raunchy confessions while smoking, devouring hens’ feet (‘you can feel the hen’s strength in her claws’), and playing mahjong, but an air of melancholy deepens come evening, when memories creep in. Repurposing revolutionary adages into jokes about menopause, Ning and her protagonists give new meaning to a maxim from a different revolution: the personal is political.”—Juliet Clark.