Directing
Part Two: SMALL HAPPINESS - Despite the tremendous advances women in China have made, serious problems continue. Long Bow women talk about love, marriage, work, birth control, birth customs and the now outlawed custom of foot binding. Truly moving interviews with Lingqiao and her mother-in-law draw us into their lives.
The Gate of Heavenly Peace is a feature-length documentary about the 1989 protest movement, reflecting the drama, tension, humor, absurdity, heroism, and many tragedies of the six weeks from April to June in 1989. The film reveals how the hard-liners within the government marginalized moderates among the protesters (including students, workers and intellectuals), while the actions of radical protesters undermined moderates in the government. Moderate voices were gradually cowed and then silenced by extremism and emotionalism on both sides.
The film Morning Sun attempts in the space of a two-hour documentary film to create an inner history of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (c.1964-1976). It provides a multi-perspective view of a tumultuous period as seen through the eyes—and reflected in the hearts and minds—of members of the high-school generation that was born around the time of the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, and that came of age in the 1960s. Others join them in creating in the film’s conversation about the period and the psycho-emotional topography of high-Maoist China, as well as the enduring legacy of that period.
The village elders of Long Bow recount tales of famine, drought, disease, and exploitation before explicating various shifts in the political line - from the land reforms of 1949 and the collectivization of the early 50s, through the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the current Four Modernizations.
First Moon (37 min., 1987) looks at lunar New Year celebrations in the Chinese countryside.
Abode of Illusion shows how Chang Dai-chien's art - fake and genuine - illustrates essential differences between Western and Chinese approaches to art, and how originality and tradition, and abstraction and representation, are interpreted and valued across cultures.
Part Three: TO TASTE 100 HERBS - Dr Shen Fasheng discusses his Catholic religion, medical ethics, rural health services, centuries-old knowledge of herbal treatments and Western medical practices. The warmth, closeness and traditions of family life in China are wonderfully captured in scenes of prayer, play, chores and celebrations.
