Xu Xin’s film “Dao Lu” (China 2012) offers an exclusive “in camera” encounter with Zheng Yan, an 83 year-old veteran of the Chinese Red Army, who calmly relates how he has navigated his country’s turbulent history over three-quarters of a century.Born to a wealthy family in a foreign concession, Yan joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1941 because he sincerely believed in the socialist project, and in its immediate capacity to free China from the Japanese yoke and eradicate deep-rooted corruption.

The rural Taiwanese outer islands of Kinmen sit merely 2 miles off the coast of China. Kinmen attracts tourists for its remains from the 1949 Chinese Civil War. It also marks the frontline for Taiwan in its escalating tension with China.

Filmed over three years on China’s railways, The Iron Ministry traces the vast interiors of a country on the move: flesh and metal, clangs and squeals, light and dark, and language and gesture. Scores of rail journeys come together into one, capturing the thrills and anxieties of social and technological transformation. The Iron Ministry immerses audiences in fleeting relationships and uneasy encounters between humans and machines on what will soon be the world’s largest railway network.

Upon learning of his father's terminal illness diagnosis, a young, autistic, hearing-impaired artist travels back to Taiwan with a filmmaker to make a film in his honour.

China marks the beginning of the extensive Asian theme in Ottinger’s filmography and is her first travelogue. Her observant eye is interested in anything from Sichuan opera and the Beijing Film Studio to the production of candy and sounds of bicycle bells.

Follow the lives of the elderly survivors who were forced into sex slavery as “Comfort Women” by the Japanese during World War II. At the time of filming, only 22 of these women were still alive to tell their story. Through their own personal histories and perspectives, they tell a tale that should never be forgotten to generations unaware of the brutalization that occurred.

"If the old doesn't go, the new never comes" recites a teenager hanging out near a demolition site in the center of Chengdu, the Sichuan capital in western China. In Demolition, filmmaker J.P. Sniadecki deconstructs the transforming cityscape by befriending the migrant laborers on the site and documenting the honest, often unobserved, human interactions, yielding a wonderfully patient and revealing portrait of work and life in the shadow of progress and economic development.

In northeastern China the Songhua River flows west from the border of Russia to the city of Harbin, where four million people depend on it as a source of water. Songhua is a portrait of the varying people that gather where the river meets the city, and an ethnographic study of the intimate ways in which they play and work.

A short documentary that captures the longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century, The Yellow Bank takes you on a contemplative boat ride across the Huangpu River in Shanghai, China. Filmmaker J.P. Sniadecki, who lived and worked in Shanghai nine years earlier, uses the eclipse as a catalyst to explore the way weather, light, and sound affect the urban architectural environment during this extremely rare phenomenon.

For Chinese parents, finding out that their kid is gay usually presents a major tragedy, with the big majority utterly unable to accept the homosexuality of their son or daughter. However, during recent years a fresh rainbow wind has been blowing over the Chinese mainland: a pioneer generation of Chinese parents has been stepping up and speaking out on their love for their gay kids. This documentary features 6 mothers from all over China, who talk openly and freely about their experiences with their homosexual children. With their love, they are giving a whole new definition to Chinese-style family bonds.

The "Great Sichuan Earthquake" took place at 14:28 on May 12, 2008. In the days after, ordinary people salvage destroyed pig farms in the mountains, collect cheap scrapped metals, or pillaging other victims' homes. Behind the media circus of official visits is an inconsolable grief of families searching for loved ones. As the Lunar New Year approaches, vagabonds and family tell of the ill-handling of rebuilding schemes and misuse relief funds. As they prepare for another visit from a high official, the refugees are swept out of the town and into tent cities. The promise to put a roof over their heads before winter seems impossible to keep.

Richly illustrated with film clips and interviews, OUR TIME, OUR STORY tells the still-evolving story of the Taiwanese "new wave," from its rise in the early 1980s, as the island was democratizing after decades under martial law, through growing international recognition and domestic debate in the 1990s. Spearheaded in its early years by such filmmakers as Edward Yang, Ko I-cheng, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Wan Jen, the movement revitalized Taiwan cinema through low-budget experiments that emphasized personal stories, political reflection and stylistic invention. Said filmmakers, writers and actors like Wu Nien-jen and Sylvia Chang, even "second wave" directors Tsai Ming-liang and Lin Cheng-sheng provide fond reminiscences and retrospective insights in this compelling account of one of the most distinctive national cinemas of the last quarter-century.