Who We Are

Lantern Films China is a Hong Kong-based film company dedicated to the production and support of independent documentary and art films in China. The company was founded in 2008 by Guangzhou filmmaker Zhao Dayong and award-winning American journalist David Bandurski.

ZHAO DAYONG (赵大勇)

After graduating from China’s Lu Xun Art Academy in 1992, where he specialized in oil painting, Zhao worked for a number of years as a professional artist and advertising director, first in Beijing and later in Guangzhou. In 1997, he found Guangzhou Dake, a design company. He was also founding editor of Culture & Morals, a now deceased journal for the contemporary arts in China. Zhao began exploring the medium of digital video in 2002. His first documentary film, Street Life, premiered at Austria’s Viennale in October 2006, and screened the next year at Germany’s Globale Film Festival and China’s YunFest. Zhao’s second documentary film, Ghost Town, a collage of stories that take place in the former government seat of Zhiziluo in remote northwestern Yunnan province, was given an Independent Spirit Award at the 5th China Documentary Film Festival held in Beijing in May 2008.

FILMOGRAPHY:
Street Life (2006)
Ghost Town (2008)
My Father’s House (2009)
Rough Poetry (2009)

DAVID BANDURSKI (班志远)

(Photo by Bonnie Bandurski)

An award-winning journalist, Mr. Bandurski is currently a writer and researcher for the China Media Project, a research program of the Journalism & Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong. His writings have appeared in Far Eastern Economic Review, the Wall Street Journal, Index on Censorship, the South China Morning Post and other publications. He received a Human Rights Press Award in 2008 for an investigative piece for the Far Eastern Economic Review on China’s use of professional associations to enforce Internet censorship guidelines. David was also co-recipient of a Merit Prize in Commentary in 2007. Mr. Bandurski’s involvement with China’s nascent independent documentary scene began in 2005, as he made contact with several filmmakers while writing about the movement. Realizing the power of digital video technology, Mr. Bandurski decided to turn a planned long-form narrative article about the African community in Guangzhou into a documentary feature. This began a long and fruitful collaboration with Guangzhou-based filmmaker Zhao Dayong.

FILMOGRAPHY:
Ghost Town (2008)
My Father’s House (2009)
Rough Poetry (2009)