Tag: Documentary Films and Programs

Bristling Against the West, China Rallies Domestic Sympathy for Russia

Chin@Strategy

While Russian troops have battered Ukraine, officials in China have been meeting behind closed doors to study a Communist Party-produced documentary that extols President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as a hero. The humiliating collapse of the Soviet Union, the video says, was the result of efforts by the United States to destroy its legitimacy. With swelling music and sunny scenes of present-day Moscow, the documentary praises Mr. Putin for restoring Stalin’s standing as a great wartime leader and for renewing patriotic pride in Russia’s past. To the world, China…

‘Beijing Spring’ Review: The Politics of Aesthetics

Chin@Strategy

Can art effect real change in the world? To this ever-urgent question, “Beijing Spring” — a new documentary about the titular movement for democratic expression that exploded in the wake of the Cultural Revolution in China — responds with a resounding yes. Directed by Andy Cohen with Gaylen Ross, the film focuses on the Stars Art Group, a collective of self-taught practitioners who seized on the tumult after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976 and deployed their art like Molotov cocktails. They circulated their paintings and literature via underground magazines; papered…

Doppa, a Central Asian Hat, Guides Quest for Uyghur Roots

Chin@Strategy

The woman’s first doppa was embroidered with a rose bed and intertwining black leaves — a motif signifying beauty, spiritual connectedness and resistance. The doppa, a traditional skullcap worn across Central Asia, was passed down to the woman, Subhi Bora, as a girl by her mother, who is Uyghur, a predominantly Muslim, Turkic group from the autonomous region of Xinjiang in northwestern China. Ms. Bora, 31, who grew up in Sydney after her parents fled China, had conflicting feelings about her different cultural identities and never wore the hat outside…

‘All About My Sisters’ Review: Family Matters

Chin@Strategy

Often in “All About My Sisters,” the Chinese filmmaker Wang Qiong’s documentary portrait of her family, you might forget that what you’re watching is filtered through a camera. Over a period of seven years, Wang filmed her parents, siblings and relatives from within the emotional thicket of their lives, capturing moments of piercing, private intimacy. Her approach yields a film bristling with the kind of familial rancor that usually only emerges behind closed doors. There’s plenty to warrant this bitterness, starting with the fact that Wang’s younger sister, Zhou Jin,…

A Century After the Titanic Sank, a Film Tries to Rescue 6 Survivors’ Stories

Chin@Strategy

Much about the Chinese sailors’ lives was influenced by the currents of history, including their presence on the Titanic to begin with. Labor strikes in Britain had left them without work, so their employer reassigned them to a North American route. The Titanic was supposed to take eight sailors as third-class passengers from Southampton, England, to their new ship in New York. When the liner struck an iceberg late on April 14, the eight men acted quickly. Five made it into lifeboats, but the other three fell into the subzero…

‘In the Same Breath’ Review: Wuhan 2019, or When Normalcy Ended

Chin@Strategy

When you hear about filmmakers in conflict zones, you may flash on countries like Syria or Afghanistan. The movies produced in theaters of war often follow a similar arc: The documentarian parachutes in to take stock of a catastrophe. The focus tends to be on rubble, blood and suffering — the spectacle. In her short, stellar career, the Chinese filmmaker Nanfu Wang has repeatedly returned to a less obvious conflict zone in which the war for proverbial hearts and minds mostly takes place through state propaganda. Her latest, “In the…