Farewell My Concubine
In an epic tale of theater, gender, love and class, two Beijing opera actors navigate political turmoil as their friendship evolves over decades.
To Live
Married couple Fugui and Jiazhen endure tumultuous events in mid-20th century mainland China as their personal fortunes move from wealthy landownership to peasantry.
Sight
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.
The Best of Youth
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.
Breakdown: 1975
In 1975, as America faced social and political upheaval, filmmakers turned chaos into art.
Peking Opera Blues
In 1913 Beijing, three fierce women—disguised rebel Tsao Wan, jewel-seeking Sheung Hung, and opera heiress Pai Niu—embark on a daring quest filled with intrigue and betrayal, challenging societal norms amidst political turmoil and the vibrant world of Peking Opera.
In the Heat of the Sun
Beijing, 1970s. The Cultural Revolution has driven most adults to the provinces leaving 14-year-old Monkey and his pals with free rein over the city. They hang around, get up to no good, and discover that unsolvable mystery known as "girls."
How the Beatles Changed the World
The fascinating story of the cultural, social, spiritual, and musical revolution ignited by the coming of the Beatles. Tracing the impact that these four band members had, first in their native Britain and soon after worldwide, it reappraises the band and follows their path from young subversives to countercultural heroes. Featuring fresh, revealing interviews with key collaborators as well as a wealth of rarely-seen archival footage, this is a bold new take on the most significant band in the history of music and their enduring impact on popular culture.
Hibiscus Town
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.
The Matrix: Generation
After the 1999 premiere of the first Matrix movie, it became a pop culture phenomenon. A special documentary about the Matrix saga and its prophetic aspects.
If Not Us, Who?
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.
Youth
A group of performing art troupe members each face their own trials and tribulations in Chengdu; from escaping a family scandal to dealing with unrequited love, each experiences rejection that shapes their lives.
Something in the Air
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.
Viva Cuba
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),
Red Guards after The Cultural Revolution
Red Guards were a student movement supported by Mao Zedong in 1966-67 during the Cultural Revolution. A group of students at Qinghua University who issued 2 big-character posters in May-June 1966 called themselves Red Guards. The students criticised the university administration of elitism and bourgeois tendencies. In August 1966 Mao Zedong expressed support for the Red Guards. This gave the student movement political legitimacy and it spread outside Beijing. The Red Guards started to attack the Four Olds and marched across China to eradicate old ideas, old cultures, old customs and old habits. Ultimately the struggle between different Red Guard factions led to a chaotic civil-war-like situation. During 1967-68 the Peoples Liberation Army got the movement under control and restored social order. Beginning late 1968 members of the Red Guard movement were sent to the countryside to undergo re-education. We met and filmed them in August 1971.
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
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.
Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder
The poet and painter, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, is among the world's living monuments to arts and letters. For well over a half century, Ferlinghetti helped shape the currents of poetry and literature with his forceful engagement with society and an ideological position that often found him at odds with the political currents of his day. Ferlinghetti's quiet, behind the scenes demeanor and disarming mien may have assuaged, or even fooled, certain opponents, while in reality he was a literary mercenary, a rebel at the forefront of our own cultural revolution.
Kekaiulu Hula Studio
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.
Smothered: The Censorship Struggles of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour
The history of the irreverent "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" and the content battles it fought with its television network.
Platform
China’s rapid changes from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, as seen through the lives of four performers in a theater troupe.