Wang Bing

Wang Bing is one of the greatest documentary-makers alive today, and his films offer a very insightful overview of the transformations occurring in Chinese society. Here, Dominique Auvray conducts an interview that, in addition to the biographical information, focuses above all on the relationship with things unsaid: Wang Bing attempts to do justice to his theme and the testimonies he’s gathered, but he stumbles over the words, struggling to keep his emotions in check. The pain of tackling history shows through the awkward speech.

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Korean film critic Jeong Sung-il’s camera explores the work of Wang Bing, a Chinese director who won international fame with his film Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks. Jeong’s attempt to pry into Wang’s filmmaking secrets leads to the question: “What is film?”

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Sardinia 2017. The starting point for the film is one of the most loved lands in the Mediterranean, using it to enter into the world of cinema. Ten international masters of cinema explain Fiorenzo Serra's images, one of the greatest post-war Italian documentary makers. His masterpiece, "The last punch of Earth", will be analyzed and debated, a film which examined Italian change and European reflection.

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A portrait of the filmmaker and documenta 14 artist Wang Bing (winner of the Locarno Festival's Golden Leopard for "Mrs. Fang"). Wang Bing shot his previous films digitally, for example "15 Hours" which consists of a single 15-hour long shot. In Kassel, he bought his first Bolex (16 mm camera). With a stopwatch, he tests how long he film can film at a time.

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With Taiwan remaining in the grip of martial law in 1982, a group of filmmakers from that country set out to establish a cultural identity through cinema and to share it with the world. This engaging documentary looks at the movement's legacy.

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This correspondence between Spanish auteur Jaime Rosales and critical chronicler of contemporary China Wang Bing is divided into three short films each consisting of documentary observations.

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Wang Bing concludes his monumental Youth trilogy in expansive fashion, giving ever wider scope to the lives of migrant workers in Zhili’s textile factories as they plan to go to their remote hometowns to visit their families and celebrate the festivities for New Year’s break.

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In Gansu Province, northwest China, lie the remains of countless prisoners abandoned in the Gobi Desert sixty years ago. Designated as ultra-rightists in the Communist Party’s Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957, they starved to death in the reeducation camps. The film invites us to meet the survivors of the camps to find out firsthand who these persons were, the hardships they were forced to endure and what became their destiny.

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Gao Ertai (1931) is an artist, teacher, philosopher who, in the 1950s, was imprisoned in the Jiabiangou Labour Camp. The film works as a diptych with Fengming, the confessional story of another victim of reprisals, and closes a vast film series on those who disappeared.

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In a quiet village in southern China, Fang Xiuying is sixty-seven years old. Having suffered from Alzheimer's for several years, with advanced symptoms and ineffective treatment, she was sent back home. Now, bedridden, she is surrounded by her relatives and neighbors, as they witness and accompany her through her last days.

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The Ta'ang or Palaung people, an ethnic minority living in the mountainous area between Myanmar's Kokang region and China's Yunnan province, have historically suffered many forced migrations due to war. When their survival is threatened again in 2015, thousands of them flee across the border. Filmmaker Wang Bing accompanies them and becomes a privileged witness to a human story that is both a modern reportage and a mythical epic.

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In 2010, while he was filming "Three Sisters" in the mountain of Yunnan province, Wang Bing met two teenagers, Yonggao and Yongjin, whose father, a stonemason, had gone to the city in the hope of finding work. Wang Bing met up with them again in 2014, when they had been reunited with their father after four years in Fumin. For about a month, Wang Bing filmed their daily lives in the single squalid room that was their home. The fixed camera recorded the micro-events that punctuated their days : their father leaving for work, the youngsters themselves waking up, breakfast time, in front of the television, etc.

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An insight into the everyday lives of 50 inmates of a mental institution in the Chinese province of Yunnan, who are there for killing someone, committing a crime against a public official, or have a developmental disability.

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Wang Bing filmed "Traces" in 2005, during the search for locations for his film "The Ditch", in former « labour camps » in the Gobi Desert, where thousand of political prisoners had died of hunger. For the first time, he used 35mm black and white film (a gift from artist Yang Fudong) to capture this landscape condemned to disappear. With no sound, the film records the final, barely visible traces of human lives: bones, clothing, footsteps... Drawing on experimental documentary, this short video echoes other subjects dear to Wang Bing : the story of the campaign against the « rightist elements » in the early 1950s and the reeducation and hard labour camps established before the Cultural Revolution. This film, which was not edited until 2014, was first presented at the Centre Pompidou the same year and then again at the Galerie Chantal Crousel in 2018.

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Three sisters aged 10, 6 and 4 have to cope more or less on their own in a remote mountainous region of Yunnan. Terrible poverty in China, shown with gripping compassion by today's best documentary maker. Shorter version of Three Sisters, which premiered in Venice.

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The masterful new documentary from Wang Bing is an intimate, observational portrait of a peasant family who eke out a humble existence in a small village set against the stunning mountain landscapes of China's Yunnan province.

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The film focuses on the suffering of Chinese who were imprisoned in a forced labor camp called Jiabiangou in the Gobi Desert in winter 1960 under Mao Zedong on the grounds that they were "rightist elements". The film tells of the harsh life of these men, who coped with physical exhaustion, extreme cold, starvation and death on a daily basis.

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A collection of six documentary films featuring various locations and cultures of the world, screened at the Musée du Quai Branly from 18-23 May.

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The character of this story lives far from the worlds of the material and the spirit. He has built his own subsistence conditions. He often goes to the neighboring villages, although he doesn’t communicate with other people. He collects some waste but doesn’t beg. He prowls about the ruins of deserted villages, as an animal or as a ghost. Under double political and economical pressure, most of people are depriving of their last dignity into a world where it exists a lack of material and spirit. But a human being stays a human being. He is looking for reasons to continue to live. —Wang Bing

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It's 1949 and Tiananmen Square is a mess. Overgrown with weeds and thoroughly dilapidated it looks like hell, but it's where Chairman Mao wants to hold the Founding Ceremony for the People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949. And so TIAN AN MEN recounts the heroism, the struggle and the sacrifices of a People's Liberation Army unit as they...clean up and re-decorate the Tiananmen Gate? (Description by Subway Cinema)

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Filmed in the Inner Mongolian portion of the Gobi Desert, this film follows a group of oil field workers as they go about their daily routine.

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Six directors, six independent films, six visions on the state of the world. Each carrying a unique and personal interpretation of a specific experience, their crossover creates new space for a dynamic and radical inquisitive reflection.

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Modern China. On a bright sunny day, in a building site, an industrial complex is being deconstructed. Night falls. The ruins of the factory are empty and silent. Phantoms appear, voices are heard, telling their stories....From the anthology The State of the World.

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The film consists almost entirely of an interview with the elderly He Fengming, recounting her experiences in post-1949 China.

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A detailed look at the gradual decline of Shenyang’s industrial Tiexi district, an area that was once a vibrant example of China’s socialist economy. But industry is changing, and the factories of Tiexi are closing. Director Wang Bing introduces us to some of the workers affected by the closures, and to their families.

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