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 founded 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. 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, premiered at the New York Film Festival in 2009. His first fiction feature, The High Life, premiered at the Hong Kong International Film Festival in 2010, winning both the FIPRESCI Award and the Silver Digital Award. The High Life made its European premiere in the main competition at the Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival in November 2010, where it won both the Werner Fassbinder Prize and the FIPRESCI Jury Prize.
FILMOGRAPHY:
Street Life (2006)
Ghost Town (2008)
Rough Poetry (2009)
The High Life (2010)
My Father’s House (2011)
DAVID BANDURSKI (班志远)
David Bandurski is currently a researcher at the China Media Project (CMP), a research program of the Journalism & Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong. An award‐winning journalist, his writings have appeared in Far Eastern Economic Review, the Wall Street Journal and other publications. Mr. Bandurski is editor with Martin Hala of Investigative Journalism in China (2010), a book exploring China’s professional journalism environment and its challenges through eight in-depth cases in Chinese watchdog reporting. He is also a film producer closely associated with China’s independent film scene. Mr. Bandurski’s involvement with China’s independent film 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.
(Photo by Bonnie Bandurski)
FILMOGRAPHY:
Ghost Town (2008)
Rough Poetry (2009)
The High Life (2010)
My Father’s House (2011)
