Li Yifan

Yao-Chinese Folktales has eight independent story rooted in traditional Chinese culture

On a deserted island the crew, led by ex-soldier Cao Yue, filming TV reality show about survival. They meet tidal waves of insects on their way, battling hermit crabs and fights to the death against the ancient giant lizard, the real dragon.

A documentary about shamate, a wildly controversial subculture that emerged in China in the late ’00s.

Before the Flood is a study of the final weeks of a dying city, as thousand-year-old Fengjie on the Yangtze River is reduced to rubble and its inhabitants uprooted to make way for the new Three Gorges Dam that will flood the entire valley.

We’ve imagined a future world where due to serious environmental pollution, all the human beings have mutated. Because of the COVID-19, the nuclear radiation, or the haze, human beings begin to deform. However, in order to avoid humans extinction, we start to accept the existence of deformity. Since then, in this seemingly peaceful world, we’ve never seen ordinary people. Through this short film, I hope to arouse all the people’s awareness to protect the world.

Unusually popular religions and extreme secular beliefs, unconstrained power and no authoritarian society, people work hard on the land and live thrifty but do not believe in the meaning of life at all. This is Longwang Village, an empty old farming society, the most essential reality of an ordinary western village. The film does not have a perpetual plot. The images are presented with the changing of the four seasons. There is no great joy or great sadness. Everything is recorded, and no results are produced. Strictly speaking, this is actually just a rural video file, a running account of ordinary western villages without all rhetoric.

Li Yifan’s documentary chronicles, with a fiercely analytical eye, one year in the life of Longwang village, a typically poor farming village located near Chongqing, China.