The Rocking Sky

Village Diary

April 2013 •Chinese

Miners, Groom, Pneumoconiosis

December 2019 •Chinese

The location of Hunan's southwestern Hunan, the local economy is not active, the people either go out to work or go up the mountain to mine. Due to the constant mining disasters, despite the government's efforts to rectify and regulate, many people still illegally mine. Miners often do not pay attention to the protection of mines. Many years later, many miners have pneumoconiosis. The film started shooting in 2010 until 2018, with a filming period of nearly ten years, until the death of Zhao Pingfeng, the protagonist of pneumoconiosis, leaving young children and mentally handicapped wife.

The Iron Ministry

August 2014 •Chinese

Filmed over three years on China’s railways, The Iron Ministry traces the vast interiors of a country on the move: flesh and metal, clangs and squeals, light and dark, and language and gesture. Scores of rail journeys come together into one, capturing the thrills and anxieties of social and technological transformation. The Iron Ministry immerses audiences in fleeting relationships and uneasy encounters between humans and machines on what will soon be the world’s largest railway network.

Twenty Two

August 2017 •Chinese

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.

China. The Arts – The People

June 1985 •German

China marks the beginning of the extensive Asian theme in Ottinger’s filmography and is her first travelogue. Her observant eye is interested in anything from Sichuan opera and the Beijing Film Studio to the production of candy and sounds of bicycle bells.

A Young Patriot

April 2015 •Chinese

A documentary chronicling the coming of age of a young chinese man.

Demolition

January 2008 •Chinese

"If the old doesn't go, the new never comes" recites a teenager hanging out near a demolition site in the center of Chengdu, the Sichuan capital in western China. In Demolition, filmmaker J.P. Sniadecki deconstructs the transforming cityscape by befriending the migrant laborers on the site and documenting the honest, often unobserved, human interactions, yielding a wonderfully patient and revealing portrait of work and life in the shadow of progress and economic development.

First Vote

May 2020 •English

A soon-to-be first-time voter, the filmmaker’s thought-provoking journey into the Rust Belt and South captures four Asian American voters’ ardent first time grassroots political participation ignited by the 2016 rise of “Chinese Americans for Trump.” FIRST VOTE is a character driven cinema verité style film chronicling the democratic participation of four Asian American voters from 2016 through the 2018 midterm elections.

Rewind

May 2016 •Chinese

I bought a VHS player to watch my parents’ wedding video. My mother came by and chatted with me as I was rewinding the VHS tape.

The Last Moose Of Ao Lu Gu Ya

January 2013 •Chinese

Documentary about a tribe of indigenous people in northern China.

Mama Rainbow

November 2012 •Chinese

For Chinese parents, finding out that their kid is gay usually presents a major tragedy, with the big majority utterly unable to accept the homosexuality of their son or daughter. However, during recent years a fresh rainbow wind has been blowing over the Chinese mainland: a pioneer generation of Chinese parents has been stepping up and speaking out on their love for their gay kids. This documentary features 6 mothers from all over China, who talk openly and freely about their experiences with their homosexual children. With their love, they are giving a whole new definition to Chinese-style family bonds.

Songhua

January 2007 •Chinese

In northeastern China the Songhua River flows west from the border of Russia to the city of Harbin, where four million people depend on it as a source of water. Songhua is a portrait of the varying people that gather where the river meets the city, and an ethnographic study of the intimate ways in which they play and work.

The Yellow Bank

September 2010 •Chinese

A short documentary that captures the longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century, The Yellow Bank takes you on a contemplative boat ride across the Huangpu River in Shanghai, China. Filmmaker J.P. Sniadecki, who lived and worked in Shanghai nine years earlier, uses the eclipse as a catalyst to explore the way weather, light, and sound affect the urban architectural environment during this extremely rare phenomenon.

Yumen

February 2013 •Chinese

Set in a quasi-ghost town that once thrived with oil in China's arid northwest, Yumen is a haunting, fragmented tale of hungry souls, restless youth, a wandering artist and a lonely woman, all searching for human connection among the town's crumbling landscape. One part "ruin porn", one part "ghost story”, and entirely shot on 16mm, the film brings together performance art, narrative gesture, and social realism not only to play with convention and defy genre, but also to pay homage to a disappearing life-world and a fading medium.

All There Will Be

November 2020 •Chinese

Entropy

March 2016 •Chinese

The experience and reflections of a red guard. Every time after a political disaster, most people are turned into victims of the disaster. The individual actions of the victims in the disaster are always overlooked. These actions overlooked ran through the entire process of the disaster. The entire process of the disaster turns most people into victims of the disaster. In every political disaster……

Oh, the San Xia

August 2012 •Chinese

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.

People's Park

August 2012 •Chinese

One long tracking shot through a park in Chengdu.

Go Grandriders

October 2012 •Chinese

17 riders with avarage age 81 decide to follow the dream of their youth and start their journey to ride around Taiwan island.

Divine Doctor

March 2011 •Chinese

Guan Kuanyi is seventy-six years old this year, and is the only surviving shaman of the Elunchun. Every first or fifteenth day, Guankani put tribute on the throne and worshiped the gods in the traditional way. After recovering from an illness, Guan Kuanyi had a mindset and hoped that in his lifetime, he could find a shaman's heir and inherit this ancient religious culture. But the young people no longer believe in the gods, which has become the biggest obstacle for Guan Kanni to find his heir. She focused on her daughter, Daisy, and her son, Rongrong ... Recording Notes November 22, 2007 In the morning, the world has become quiet, silent, simple and pure. I began to enter the state, into the world of shaman.