A new documentary following the Chinese artist/activist Ai Weiwei was met with rapturous applause at its Sundance Film Festival screening on Sunday. more ›

Watch the documentary after the jump... more ›

Is China Africa's new colonial master? This Sunday, sit back and enjoy this 28 minute-long film by Brent Huffman and Zhou Xiaoli who travelled to Senegal in West Africa to find out. Read interviews with the filmmakers here and here. For previous Shanghaiist Sunday Shows, click here. more ›

More like a list of lists. PBS's POV caught up with multiple China film directors, curators, and writers and asked them each what the must-see documentaries are by Chinese filmmakers. Unsurprisingly, The Last Train Home, Up the Yangtze, Tears of Sichuan, and multiple films by Zhao Liang all make the list. But there are also plenty of lesser-known titles, such as Circus World (available online here), that are definitely worth checking out. more ›

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"China no longer needs a revolution, the kind of total revolution that completely disrupts society. The costs are too high.” more ›

Now here's a documentary that we hope will make its way to a DVD store near us soon. The Warriors of Qiugang is 39 minute film that received an Oscar nomination for documentary short. The synopsis from the official website: more ›

Shanghai 5 had its premier at The Source on Xinle Lu here in Shanghai over the weekend, but in case you missed Charles Lanceplaine's documentary about skaters in the city, he's put it up on Vimeo. more ›

If you were a fan of Oscar-nominated filmmaker Shui-Bo Wang's Sunrise Over Tiananmen Square, you will also love his feature documentary, , which tells the story of some of the 21 American soldiers who chose to stay in China after the signing of the 1953 Korean Armistice Agreement. The film features some fascinating archival footage from China (watch out for the mini-Olympics held in the POW camps), American television clips and interviews with David Hawkins, the youngest of the group of defectors who is still alive today. Two other former POWs that feature heavily in this documentary are Clarence Adams, a black soldier from Memphis who chose to stay in China because of racial discrimination back home, and James Veneris, who became an avowed Communist, married, had children, and lived here till his death. more ›

Sunrise Over Tiananmen Square (French: Le jour se lève sur la place Tienanmen) is a 1998 National Film Board of Canada short animated documentary directed by Shui-Bo Wang which received a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short. Consisting of a colourful collage of personal and archival photos and original artwork, this fascinating documentary is one man's autobiographical look back at the turbulent Cultural Revolution and the subsequent years. An exceptional piece of work that is well worth 29 minutes of your time this Sunday: more ›

This 22 minute wartime newsreel from 1942 documents the efforts of China to deal with Japanese aggression:
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If we're going to call a winner on this week, it's not the 60th anniversary on Thursday. It's Yuyintang, banging out three solid nights in a row of electro, punk, and more electro. The kind that looks legit and actually fun, too, not the crappy need-to-be-drunk-to-enjoy-this electro. more ›

We recently caught up with Shanghai-based independent filmmaker Luis Tapia of Daedalum Films, who is currently busy preparing for the May 9 premiere screening of his new documentary short about Shanghai band Hard Queen and the life of indie rock musicians in China. Seats are still available for the screening. Advance tickets can be purchased here. more ›

Via City Weekend we learn that the documentary film about last year's Converse-sponsored (and Split Works organized) Love Noise rock music tour of China is now viewable at a DVD player near you. Love Noise put Beijing bands PK14 and Queen Sea Big Shark on a converted bus and sent them on a two-week, six-city tour during the height of Olympics craziness last August. The trailer to the Love Noise film is embedded in this post, and after the jump you'll find a slew of related clips, uploaded to YouTube six days ago. The director's first name is Hammer, so it's got to be good. more ›

This PBS documentary on the underground church movement produced by the Chicago Tribune's Beijing Bureau chief Evan Osnos can now be watched online here, and it is as we said it would be — groundbreaking. more ›

Tonight is the first public screening in Shanghai for Boomtown Beijing, a documentary by Singaporean filmmaker Tan Siok Siok which debuted in April at the 21st Singapore International Film Festival. The production is a very commendable effort by Tan and her students at the Beijing Film Academy which she got to know as a visiting lecturer there. In the film, she follows the Olympic dreams of three ordinary Beijingers. A 11 year old boy wants to become an Olympics torch-bearer even though the regulations say he is too young, an old road sweeper dreams of staging his own mass Olympics countdown performance, and a blind athlete makes one last stab at a Paralympics medal before he retires from sports altogether. Do they get their dreams fulfilled? Find out tonight at Arch, and if you miss tonight's screening, there's another screening this Saturday again at Arch. more ›

During his discussion with Kerry Brown and Duncan Hewitt at the recently held Shanghai International Literary Festival, Paul French quoted British environmentalist Jonathon Porritt as saying that "the biggest problem with the environment in China is that nobody in China could care less about it". more ›

From taiande of Current TV:

What happens when Texas Holdem Poker, the "gambler's game," is introduced to the world's most populous and heavy wagering nation? We explore this question beginning in Shanghai, the epicenter of mainland China's fast growing poker scene.

If you think Chinese children can't get any more obnoxious, go watch Please Vote for Me (via YouTube in five parts - p1, p2, p3, p4 and p5), an award-winning indie documentary and pay special attention to Cheng Cheng, the pudgy kid who is one of the three students running for the position of class monitor. He then gets increasingly irksome as he sabotages fellow elects and manipulates his classmates for votes. more ›