100 Films to Understand China: Documentaries

Documentary film has turned an invaluable lens on Chinese society. Despite some trying circumstances, there have been many remarkable documentaries made in China, helping to communicate the complex whole piece by piece.

Below is a selection of films covering singular fragments of life in modern China.

For RADII's full list of 100 Films to Watch to Better Understand China, please hit Read more at the bottom of this message.

West of the Tracks (Wang Bing, 2002)

West of the Tracks documents social changes wrought by urbanization and “opening up” with a pace that’s somehow simultaneously brutally fast and painfully slow

Samantha Culp, writer, curator and producer: The epic, the opus, the endurance test. Wang Bing’s 9-hour documentary, about the decline of the industrial economy in and around the railways of Shenyang, is monumental in its scale but also intimate in its minute-to-minute history. To sit with this place, these people, this time, is a viewing experience like few others.

San Yuan Li (Ou Ning, Cao Fei, 2003)

An experimental film by two of Guangdong’s most influential contemporary artists, Ou Ning and Cao Fei, San Yuan Li focuses on life in a traditional village beset by the spread of urban centers.

Samantha Culp: In some ways the inverse of West of the Tracks, San Yuan Li is another portrait of urban change in China in the early 2000s, but captured nimbly, kaleidoscopically, by a team of a dozen artists led by Cao Fei and Ou Ning. With a stylistic nod toward Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s 1921 short Manhatta, the film roams Guangzhou’s urban village San Yuan Li as it is encroached upon from all sides by rapid development.

Disorder (Huang Weikai, 2009)

Made in an effort to express the chaos, anxiety and violence at the heart of China’s major cities, Huang Weikai’s 2009 documentary takes footage from 12 different videographers to tell this tale of modern China.

Linda C. Zhang, PhD candidate, UC Berkeley: A documentary composed of various footage taken all across the city of Guangzhou by different cameras and different people. Utilizes montage to startling effect, and relentlessly shocks and exposes viewers to the chaos reflected in the black and white, grainy texture of the film content.

Maya E. Rudolph, writer/director/producer: Disorder is a found-footage masterpiece shot by a fleet of amateur filmmakers in Guangzhou that weaves a hypnotic black-and-white texture of urban chaos. A raw, free-associative documentary exercise the often-hilarious fallibility of social structures, Disorder presently a brilliantly-coherent collage of a world that is anything but.

Village Diary (Jiao Bo, 2013)

Providing a much needed filmic insight into life in rural China, Jiao Bo and his team spent over 1,000 hours filming over the course of 373 days to make this documentary, showing the remnant simplicity of life in this village, while also depicting the changes that China’s modernization has wrought on the country.

Phoebe Long, screenwriter: The most interesting thing about the film is that it not only shows the actual situation of Chinese farmers making a living in the countryside, but also explores their spiritual pursuits outside of eating, drinking and sleeping. An old farmer who loves literature and art is often receiving complaints from his wife for not being pragmatic enough, but at a critical moment, his wife expresses her inner admiration for the old man. When the peasants begin to move beyond the practical, there seems to be a glimpse of hope for the arrival of civilization.

People’s Republic of Desire (Hao Wu, 2018)

A wonderful documentary from the maker of the Oscar-tipped 76 Days, this earlier film focuses on the rise of the internet economy in China, as well as the odd practices and living habits that have come along with this growth.

Krish Raghav, artist and writer: One of the best films made about contemporary China, about tech, and about how the lines between online and offline are blurred in late capitalism. It’s an extraordinary work on every front.

Click "Read More" for the full list of documentaries to watch, plus trailers and where to watch the full versions of these movies.

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