When Linda Goldstein Knowlton adopted her now seven-year-old daughter, Ruby, from China, she knew that one day Ruby would have some questions that her
Docs about China
'Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry' opens in theaters July 27 through Sundance Selects.
Although few people outside China have heard of it, the West Lake International Documentary Festival—locally known as IDF, which stands for “I Documentary Fact”—has quickly become the country’s leading documentary festival since its inception in 2017. The 2024 edition of IDF was held on the last weekend of October at the Xiangshan campus of CAA on the outskirts of Hangzhou, the city whose iconic lake inspired the festival’s name. Over the past few years, IDF has made a name for showcasing formally innovative and thematically diverse works from around the world. This dispatch covers: Anĝelo in 1948, Flames, White Snow, Yellow Roses, Blanket Wearer, and The Dream of Super Bridge.
At the start of Violet Du Feng’s Sundance-debuting The Dating Game we learn that, due to the former one-child policy, China now has 30 million more men than women, an eye-catching number that presents dire implications for the country. But behind the cold facts are flesh and blood human beings—and potential clients for a dating coach named Hao. While the doc is specific to China, it’s also universal in its critique of how capitalism, consumerism, and social media collide to create a generation that assumes everyone is faking who they are and therefore concludes that they too must “fake it to make it.” A week before the film’s World Cinema Documentary Competition premiere today, Documentary reached out to Feng, whose Peabody and Emmy-nominated Hidden Letters (2022) tackled gender stereotypes from the female side. This interview has been edited.
The co-director of Outcry and Whisper, Zeng Jinyan, discusses how women breakthrough systems that erase humanity. She explores the concept that
I am here to provide a China perspective and a feminist point of view, raising some questions about the face of working women, and rather than addressing what we are concerned about as filmmakers, distributors and human beings in a COVID 19 pandemic and politically chaotic era.
During this unprecedented period of the coronavirus pandemic, people have had to lean more and more on the use of technology for daily interactions
Co-directed by Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang, One Child Nation examines China’s One-Child Policy, coaxing confessions and revelations of drastic
Since Alex Rivera earned the inaugural Emerging Documentary Filmmaker Award back in 2003, the honor has gone to a distinguished company of filmmakers
Hooligan Sparrow. Courtesy of POV." src="http://www.documentary.org/sites/default/files/images/articles/HooliganSparrow.jpg"> Nanfu Wang feels safe in