Jeremy Lin may be down, but he's definitely not out. Though the American basketball star with Taiwanese roots is currently sitting out the rest of the NBA season with a knee injury, Linsanity is still very much alive thanks to a documentary about Lin that's currently in the works. more ›

A short documentary set in Shanghai has been selected for several festivals. Named 'Sunshine', the short offers a fleeting glimpse of the relatively young Chinese advertising industry and, perhaps more interestingly, John Benet, a jaded American advertiser seemingly trying to justify his career choice. more ›

“It is one of our comforting and enduring myths that as China becomes more modern and sophisticated, more like us, it will come to adopt our values. I’m not sure it’s going to be like that. [Chinese students during the Lhasa riots in 2008] were very hostile to the criticism of the Chinese government. The key insight for me is that rather than pro-democracy feelings increasing as China grows economically, it is a radical, shrill nationalism that is emerging. There is an enthusiastic embrace of the economic benefits of the market but resentment of Western cultural hegemony. The attitude is: if we make it economically, we don’t have to kowtow to you culturally." more ›

For those of you that weren't in Shanghai today, just know that the weather has affected the city's regular serotonin production in a significant way. Suffice it to say, the day's lack of sunlight and non-stop gray drizzle means that a great number of us are going to spend the evening moping about indoors, and we have just the perfect thing for it: an hour-long BBC documentary on China's expansion in Africa! more ›

The documentary below was CIA-produced and, until now, intended only for internal CIA audiences as a training measure. It details the capture, imprisonment, and eventual release of two CIA operatives shot down while on a secret mission to China in the 1950s. more ›

Just after we discovered BBC's Ai Weiwei documentary last week, this week PBS broadcast their own Frontline special on the Chinese artist entitled "Who's Afraid of Ai Weiwei?" Particularly after his show at Tate Modern last year, Ai Weiwei has become the most internationally famous Chinese artist and a front man for activism in China. The piece is done by Alison Klayman, taken from her upcoming full-length documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry. Watch it over at the Frontline website. more ›

China Geeks is currently working on a documentary about kidnapped children in China through a crowd-sourced funding effort. They could use your help, both monetarily and otherwise! They've released these photos of missing children posters, in the hopes that somebody might recognize them. Take a look! And learn more about how you can donate to the project here. From their website: more ›

We'd like to take this time to direct special attention to Charles Custer (captain of one of our favorite China blogs) and his new project: a documentary about kidnapped children in China. They are currently trying to raise funds on Kickstarter to finish it off. more ›

As living standards have risen, sections of the Chinese populace have become more picky about what should be determined as food. And of the animals hovering in the pet/food debate, it seems cats have struck a particular chord - enough, apparently, to warrant a documentary! more ›

A flowery, pretentious narrator, archive footage and interviews with journalist, and the film's screenwriter, Theodore White and author Pearl Buck, make this 1967 documentary, brought to us by the CIA and the National Security Council, a misinformed gem. more ›

I'm always super curious to learn more about extreme sports culture (call it a remnant of my fascination with skater boys back in high school), so I'm eagerly awaiting this new web documentary on skateboarders here in Shanghai. The teaser above (on vimeo, so turn on your vpn) is for Shanghai 5 (上海五), which was filmed and edited by skate filmmaker Charles Lanceplaine. It's set to be released later this year. more ›

Follow the basketball wonder LeBron James and the St. Vincent-St. Mary High School basketball team as they rise to (the) stars in More Than a Game, the documentary that has now reached Shanghai movie theaters. more ›

We've always been big fans of Liu Xiang, even when he was starring in really silly Coke commercials, even when he ruined the dreams and hopes of a billion people with his bum leg during the Beijing Olympics. So it comes as a great relief to us that he's back on top now, after his great showing at both the Shanghai Golden Grand Prix and China's 11th National Games. more ›

Not that this should surprise anyone, what with the flash mob tribute, the Chongming Island Neverland Ranch and the myriad of other ways China has shown its love for the King of Pop, but This Is It has proven to be a spectacular hit in the country. Tickets sold out within days of going on sale, severely trouncing the last Chinese megahit, Transformers 2. In case you want to see a gallery of what the premiere in Shanghai looked like, this is it. more ›

MJ has officially "Beat It" into China's exclusive film import quota. Premiering globally on October 28, the Michael Jackson documentary, "This Is It," was able to snatch one of the last of China's 20 annual foreign movie import slots. Chinese censors approved the film before National Day, just in time for China's premiere date on October 30, says the AP. more ›

Daedalum Films released the first half of their excellent documentary, Human Flesh Search Engine, onto the internet a couple of weeks ago. Now the second half is up too, though you'll need a password to access it. Email info (at) daedalumfilms (dot) com for the password and then check the rest of their film out either on Vimeo or on the Daedalum Films' website. more ›

In case you missed the screening of Daedalum Films' Human Flesh Search Engine, the documentary is now available on Vimeo. Well, currently half the documentary is available on Vimeo. The second part will be released soon, its directors say. more ›

With all the recent talk about pollution and children being poisoned, we thought it'd be good to take a quick look at a documentary from 1992 about Da Zhu Xian, a remote county in Sichuan Province. more ›

Youku Buzz has found an upload of Senior Year (高三). The 94-minute video documents the last year of classes at No. 1 High School of Wuping in Fujian Province and won the best documentary award at the 30th Hong Kong International Film Festival in 2006. Luckily, this version contains English subtitles so everyone can follow along. more ›

Thought the whole Rebiya Kadeer movie controversy was over after Chinese filmmakers pulled out of the Melbourne International Film Festival in protest? Apparently it's only gotten more ridiculous. more ›

The Xinjiang riots has not only affected the political climate, now it looks like it´s also leaking over to the artistic area as well. Last week China made an attempt to stop a film from being screened at Australia´s biggest film festival, Melbourne International Film Festival. more ›

Jia's film, tentatively titled Shanghai Legend (上海傳奇), is scheduled to be finished towards the end of this year/beginning of next, and will be premiered around April 2010. more ›

ShanghaiPRIDE commenced with a bang and, thankfully, not a bust. Mainland China's 1st Gay Pride event kicked-off yesterday with over 200 people cramming into Vargas Grill. Attendees of the inaugural event were a mix of gay, straight, local Chinese, expats, and a lovely drag queen named Anita. more ›

Did you miss the Up from the Underground screening? That's too bad! But no matter: Daedalum Films has put it online just for us. more ›

After nearly two months of being detained in North Korea, Asian-American journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling will allegedly be put to trial on June 4, according to the AP. The DPRK's Korean Central News Agency did not reveal any other details, including what charges the two face. If they are accused of illegal entry, they could spend up to three years in a labor camp. If they are found to have engaged in “espionage” or “hostility towards North Koreans,” they could add five to 10 years in prison onto their sentence. Lee and Ling were caught filming along the China-DPRK border in March. Both were working for Current TV. more ›

Daedalum Films hosted a screening of Up From the Underground, a documentary short about the Shanghainese band Hard Queen. more ›

If you're in China, you probably won't be able to watch the HBO documentary "China's Unnatural Disaster" which chronicles the aftermath of the Sichuan Quake from the perspective of the grieving parents. more ›

If you haven't gotten enough of Hard Queen, after our interview, their new EP and the awesome release party at YYT, then make sure you catch the May 9 screening of Daedalum Films' Hard Queen documentary, Up from the Underground. more ›

Another great newsreel from Quirky Beijing entitled Ghosts of Empire: Peking dated 1931 from the Port O’Call series by William M. Pizor. [h/t to Danwei] more ›

Ted Koppel, former anchorman for ABC's Nightline, has a new four-part series on the Discovery Channel entitled "Koppel on Discovery: The People's Republic of Capitalism." The show began last night, and according to the New York Times, it offers an in-depth perspective on "an emerging capitalist economy tethered to an authoritarian government" by interviewing millionaires, peasants, drag queens and students. Adam Segal, a senior fellow in China studies at the Council of Foreign Relations, tells NYT that while the series might not add to the scholarly debate, it's important for the "general public":

By showing how the vast majority of Chinese have been made better off by economic development, it provides a credible argument for why, even with fairly widespread social unrest, the reign of the current regime is not seriously challenged.