Every year, thousands of Nepalese villagers make their way to the Himalayan foothills in search of a fungus called yarsagumba. Known for its aphrodisiac properties, the elusive substance sells in China for a price higher than gold. Following Lalita, a young mother among the countless trekkers, this intimate documentary from Maude Plante-Husaruk and Maxime Lacoste-Lebuis paints a stirring portrait of a community exploited by modern commerce. Living in the largely agrarian village of Maikot, a wistful Lalita thinks back on her adolescent dreams of going to university, but an early…
Tag: Documentary films
The Last Year of Darkness review – candid and intimate dive into Chinese club culture
Ben Mullinkosson is a film-maker and skateboarder from Chicago who brings an effortless, freewheeling intimacy to this immersive and sensual study of the underground club scene in Chengdu in central China. The title is enigmatic, but it seems to refer to the imminent closure of a club called Funky Town where his subjects have been hanging out; the darkness is the club’s darkness, which is enfolding and welcoming and reassuring, a neon-detailed night in which nothing matters but youth, beauty and the pleasure of the moment. Mullinkosson is utterly at…
‘Little by little, the truth is being discovered’: the archive rescuing China’s forbidden films
On the wall of an unassuming second- floor room in Newcastle University sits a map, Blu-Tacked, unframed. At first glance it looks like any other map of China. But on closer inspection, the cities labelled on the map are not just the major urban centres. They are the places that have hosted important film festivals over the years, the details of which are annotated in colour-coded text. Covering the final years of the so-called golden era of the scene, the map shows dozens of film festivals that used to be active across China. There was…
Beyond Utopia review – nail-biting account of how to get out of North Korea
The toxic anti-Shangri-La of North Korea continues to provide a rich seam of material for film-makers: the late Claude Lanzmann recounted his personal experiences there in the 1950s in Napalm and Werner Herzog discussed the North Korean reverence for Mount Paektu in Into the Inferno. There are many more, including Álvaro Longaria’s The Propaganda Game, Ross Adam and Robert Cannan’s The Lovers and the Despot, Morten Traavik’s Liberation Day and Ryan White’s Assassins. So far no documentary film-maker to my knowledge has tackled one of North Korea’s strangest events: Kim…
Youth review – heart-stopping stories in China’s sweatshop capital
Charlie Chaplin’s frantic production-line factory worker in Modern Times is a ghostly presence in this giant, immersive documentary from Chinese director Wang Bing, the movie equivalent of a wall-sized tapestry; it is about the sweatshop capital of China, the northern town of Zhili in Huzhou, Zhejiang province, known as the “city of children’s clothing”. Thousands of workshops turn out mountains of cheap garments and every year vast numbers of young people from about 16 to 22 come from outlying cities to do a season of brutally hard work in return…
Ximei review – Ai Weiwei produces inspiring portrait of Chinese Aids activist
Produced by Ai Weiwei, this is a rousing portrait of Liu Ximei, an astonishingly resilient Aids activist; it also sheds light on a controversial government campaign that accelerated the epidemic in 1990s China. During the first half of the decade, poor farmers were encouraged to donate their blood in exchange for money. Due to a lack of health and safety standards, a staggering number of donors as well as those who received transfusions contracted HIV. In Ximei’s province of Henan, more than 300,000 villagers live with the debilitating effects of…
Hong Kong: City on Fire review – shocking violence in China’s city of dissent
An unflinching chronicle of the pro-democracy protests that sent shock waves through Hong Kong in 2019, Choi Ka Yan and Lee Hiu Ling’s vital, politically urgent documentary witnesses the fight for freedom from the frontline. Dynamically structured around personal testimonials, the film gives voice to the activists who dared to brave the clouds of teargas. Mounted in response to a highly controversial plan from the Hong Kong government that would allow for extradition to mainland China, the demonstrations escalated in scale after police brutality against peaceful protesters. As well as…