Youth

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

May 2002 •Chinese

During the Cultural Revolution, two young men are sent to a remote mining village where they fall in love with the local tailor's beautiful granddaughter and discover a suitcase full of forbidden Western novels.

The Best of Youth

June 2003 •Italian

After a fateful encounter in the summer of 1966, the lifepaths of two brothers from a middle-class Roman family diverge, intersecting with some of the most significant events of postwar Italian history in the following decades.

Farewell My Concubine

January 1993 •Chinese

Two boys meet at an opera training school in Peking in 1924. Their resulting friendship will span nearly 70 years and endure some of the most troublesome times in China's history.

Khadak

August 2006 •Mongolian

Set in the frozen steppes of Mongolia, a young nomad is confronted with his destiny after animals fall victim to a plague which threatens to eradicate nomadism.

To Live

May 1994 •Chinese

Fugui and Jiazhen endure tumultuous events in China as their personal fortunes move from wealthy landownership to peasantry. Addicted to gambling, Fugui loses everything. In the years that follow he is pressed into both the nationalist and communist armies, while Jiazhen is forced into menial work.

Viva Cuba

April 2005 •Spanish

The friendship between two children is threatened by their parents’ differences. Malú is from a family that was upper-class before the Revolution and remains well-to-do through remittances from relatives overseas, and her single mother (Larisa Vega Alamar) does not want her to play with Jorgito, as she thinks his background coarse and commonplace. Jorgito’s mother (Luisa María Jiménez Rodríguez),

Platform

August 2001 •Chinese

China’s rapid changes from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, as seen through the lives of four performers in a theater troupe.

Kekaiulu Hula Studio

November 2022 •English

Kekaiulu Hula Studio follows the Proclaimed Hula Halau of the same name, showcasing their twist on what the real reason for hula is and what life as a dancer in the halau is really like. Something previously unseen in the public eye.

Sight

May 2024 •English

Ming Wang is an impoverished Chinese prodigy who flees Communist China to become a pioneering eye surgeon in America. When tasked with restoring the sight of an orphan in India, who was blinded by her stepmother, Wang must confront the trauma of living through the violent uprising in his youth, the Cultural Revolution.

If Not Us, Who?

March 2011 •German

In the early 60s, Bernward Vesper and fellow university student Gudrun Ensslin begin a passionate love in the stifling atmosphere of provincial West Germany. Dedicated to the power of the written word, Bernward and Gudrun found a publishing house whose first publication is, paradoxically to many, a controversial past work of Bernward's ostracized father, an infamous Nazi author. Bernward defends his father's writing ability, even if he is haunted by his father's suspicious past.

100 Years

June 2021 •English

As the Communist Party of China celebrates its 100th anniversary, this documentary looks back at the party’s history, from the 1920’s, to the Civil War, the Great Leap Forward, the Great Famine, the Cultural Revolution and the reforms by Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. Did the Great Famine cost more than 15 million lives? How does the Cultural Revolution continue to shape Chinese politics today? What was capitalism like after Mao’s death? Through rare and never-before-seen historical footage, expert interviews and eyewitness accounts of the Great Famine, Tiananmen incident, and the Cultural Revolution, get to know how one party has so profoundly shaped China.

Something in the Air

November 2012 •French

During the 1970s a student named Gilles gets entangled in contemporary political turmoils although he would rather just be a creative artist. While torn between his solidarity to his friends and his personal ambitions he falls in love with Christine.

Fruit Farm

February 2025 •Chinese

Nana Xu travels to the place built by her father as a prisoner during the Cultural Revolution: first a work camp, later a prison, fruit farm and treatment centre. Conversations with last remaining witnesses, where home is still shaped by a repressed past.

Hibiscus Town

March 1987 •Chinese

Based on a novel by the same name written by Gu Hua, a melodrama about the life and travails of a young woman who lives through the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution.

In the Heat of the Sun

August 1995 •Chinese

Beijing, 1970s. The Cultural Revolution has driven most adults to the provinces leaving 14-year-old Monkey and his pals have free reign over the city. They hang around, get up to no good, and discover that unsolvable mystery known as "girls."

Songs of the Youth 1969

November 2016 •Chinese

It is the year of 2010, Xue Beijing, a 50-year-old director, is preparing to make a film about his youth and remarkable ages in late 60's.

Ta men bing bu shi mo sheng

December 1982 •Chinese

After the cultural revolution

Turning Point 1977

April 2009 •Chinese

At the close of the Cultural Revolution, a group of young idealists battle for the right to return home and restart their lives after years of toil on a state run re-education farm in China.

The East Is Red

January 1965 •Chinese

Pre-Cultural Revolution propaganda at its most lavish, this model opera depicts the history and evolution of the Communist Party of China under Mao Zedong from its founding in July 1921 to the establishment of "New China" in 1949. Detailed in the musical are several key events in CPC history such as the Northern Expedition, the KMT-led Shanghai massacre of 1927, the Nanchang Uprising and formation of the People's Liberation Army, the Long March and the founding of the PRC on October 1, 1949.

Gandhi, de l'homme à l'icône

January 2019 •French