Lantern Films China is a Hong Kong-based film company dedicated to the production and support of independent documentary and art films in China. In the context of Chinese filmmaking, independence means opting out of the “mainstream” government-sanctioned film production culture and making “unapproved” documentaries or fiction films. To learn more about independent film in China, you can read the basic facts here and follow the excellent writings of film critic Shelly Kraicer.
Our completed film productions to date are listed below in order of completion.
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STREET LIFE (2006)
Documentary
Running Time: 98 minutes
World Premiere: Vienna International Film Festival (2007)
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Street Life explores the rambling lives of several low lifes eking out a living on the backstreets of booming Shanghai.
“Like any film featuring a network of characters confined to a restricted area, sometimes their lives collide head-on, but more often the episodes lead to dead-ends, pretty much mirroring the realities of the men’s ambitions and schemes.” — Ben Cho, Moving Pictures Magazine
SUMMARY:
Street Life documents the lives of Chinese migrants in Shanghai, one of the world’s largest and most vibrant cities, now symbolic of China’s economic might. The film centers on Nanjing Road, one of China’s oldest commercial streets and today a popular destination for tourists and moneyed Chinese. The street has also become a Mecca for uprooted and homeless Chinese, who make ends by collecting garbage and recyclables.
These characters and their stories are the focus of the film.
The central character in Street Life is a migrant known as “Black Skin.” Black Skin faces numerous pressures in the course of the film, including police violence. In the end, these pressures are too much for him to bear and he goes mad. Black Skin’s story intersects with those of fellow bottle collectors, enterprising thieves and even a young boy who has been abandoned.
Street Life ends with a scene of Black Skin’s madness. He dances wildly through the crowds of Nanjing Road and in the doorways of luxury shopping centers. Despite his raucous performance, Black Skin remains largely invisible to the respectable crowd. The façade of China’s commercial capital is unmoved. Black Skin is forgotten and invisible. His raw humanity is absorbed in the surrounding buildings, in the malls and larger-than-life advertisements.
When he reaches a large plaza where an animation of China’s classic story of the Monkey King plays on a gigantic plasma screen, Black Skin choreographs his spontaneous dance against a dramatic scene in which Monkey says ominously: “This is the price you pay for defying me. Let me show you what I can do . . .”
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GHOST TOWN (2008)
Documentary
Running Time: 169 minutes
World Premiere: New York Film Festival (2009)
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Ghost Town traces the stories of lost souls in a remote mountain village in southwest China’s Yunnan province.
“Ghost Town . . . is less a chronicle of misery and deprivation than a miniature epic of the everyday. In spite of its length the film feels foreshortened, as if every vignette or incident, every character encountered for a few moments, contained the germ of an unwritten novel. Its author might be a modern Chinese counterpart to Thomas Hardy, whose intensively observed dramas of rural life have a similar tone of beguiling, melancholy strangeness.” — A.O. Scott, The New York Times
SUMMARY:
Zhiziluo is a ghost town full of life.
Lisu and Nu minority villagers squat in the abandoned halls of this remote former communist county seat, where Cultural Revolution slogans fade into the shadows of the old city hall, and a blank white figure of Chairman Mao gazes out silently to the wild mountain wilderness of the Salween River Valley in China’s southwest Yunnan province. (Description continued below).
The film has a three-part structure:
“VOICES” tells the story of Yuehan, the pastor of the local Christian church, and his 87 year-old father, John the Elder, a formerly jailed Lisu pastor who was among the first in the region to study with Western missionaries before they were expelled in 1957. “Voices” exposes the personal rift between Yuehan and his father as well as questions over the past and future of the church.
“RECOLLECTIONS” is a story about two young lovers faced with substantial cultural and economic obstacles. The young man, Pu Biqiu, must decide whether to leave the ghost town for brighter prospects in the city, and his girlfriend faces the possibility of being sold into marriage to help the family with its financial woes.
“INNOCENCE” tells the story of Ah Long, a twelve year-old boy who lives alone in the ghost town and idles his days away with youthful games. After toying with the ghosts of Lisu tradition (the boys revel in a traditional Lisu exorcism), Ah Long hurries off to church.
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ROUGH POETRY (2009)
Experimental
Running Time: 45 minutes
World Premiere: Vancouver International Film Festival (2009)
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Showing up Zhao Dayong’s taste for realism and the absurd, this film the dynamics of space and human relationships through the construction of an artificial space that his characters, playing themselves, grow into naturally as the audience watches. The film is built around the absurd poetry of railway policeman Shen Shaoqiu, who is also a central character in Zhao’s first fiction film, The High Life.
“Zhao’s realist-poetic imagination marries a sharp critical political eye with a subversive absurdist sensibility.” — Shelly Kraicer
“While the film’s portrayal of Jian Ming is entertaining enough to stand on its own, it is Officer Dian Qiu’s stand-out performance that makes The High Life. His portrayal of the jaded prison-guard who forces inmates to recite his ‘trash poetry’ (those who do not are subject to solitary confinement) is both unsettling and hilarious.” — Meg Buschemi on actor Shen Shaoqiu
SUMMARY:
A policeman locks himself and an mélange of willing characters into an iron cage situated in a dim and cavernous warehouse. Conversations haltingly unfold among the characters, until finally the policeman decides to open up and share his dog-eared book of personal poetry with his fellow inmates.
When people become immersed in the fabric of this story, I believe they will begin to grapple with it. What does it mean, what the characters have just said? Why do they behave the way they do? The characters stand before you, demanding your time and meeting you face to face. And behind each face is a richness of possible story lines.
The poetry is rough, and so are the conversations. But even as physical space is confined and limited by the bars of the cage, the rough words of the prisoners open up a new and surprising space.
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THE HIGH LIFE (2010)
Fiction
Running Time: 96 minutes
World Premiere: Hong Kong International Film Festival (2010)
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Through its tangle of story arcs following low-lifes seeking to achieve bigger dreams, The High Life paints an unconventional portrait of life in the Chinese city. The director toys with the narrative expectations of the viewer, “blurring the lines between fiction and self-representation” (Reynaud).
“From the very first shot the director demonstrates his ability of telling stories in a visually innovative way.” — International jury of the International Film Festival Mannheim-Heidelberg
“Zhao plays with our narrative expectations, blurring the lines between fiction and self-representation.” — Berenice Reynaud
“[An] absurdist streak of black humour that sets The High Life apart from the tiresome po-faced misery of works like Knitting and Ant City.” — Dan Edwards, Screening China
SUMMARY:
Jian Ming, a small-time criminal, lives in a crowded urban village slum in Guangzhou. With no goals or aspirations, he scrapes out an existence by running a phony employment agency, scamming money out of desperate new arrivals from the countryside. He derives petty fulfillment through the creation on his apartment wall of a collage comprising the photos of his scam victims. His only other escape from his rock-bottom life in the urban village is his daily Chinese opera routine, which he performs on the rooftop of his apartment building.
Jian Ming also secretly passes time with Ah Fang, a young mistress kept by a wealthier patron in an apartment in the urban village. But the arrival one day of a fresh-faced young migrant named Xiao Ya jostles Jian Ming out of his malaise. Xiao Ya has come to the city in search of work, and for the first time ever Jian Ming seriously considers how he might give her a real leg up. He introduces her to a sleazy hair salon in the village, taking an under-the-table finders fee from the salon’s owner. This business exchange weighs on Jian Ming’s conscience, and he often goes to the salon to speak with Xiao Ya. The two grow closer and closer.
Before long, the mistress Ah Fang grows to despise her elderly patron. She presses Jian Ming to leave the village with her and start a new life. But tensions grow between them, as Jian Ming must face the fact that he has perhaps never truly loved Ah Fang. Meanwhile, Jian Ming continues to visit Xiao Ya at the salon, where their friendship deepens.
One day, as Jian Ming and Xiao Ya are hanging out, Brother Hui, the local gang leader, comes into the salon for a massage. Jian Ming stands powerless outside as Brother Hui rapes Xiao Ya in the back room. Jian Ming leaves the salon in a fury and later attacks Brother Hui in one of the village’s dark alleys. Brother Hui’s attack on Xiao Ya sends Jian Ming into a deep funk, and his friend, Ren, finally convinces him he has to leap into the future by taking part in a local pyramid sales scheme. Unfortunately, Guangzhou police raid Jian Ming’s first meeting and take him into custody as a suspected perpetrator.
The film then turns to Officer Dian Qiu, a police prison guard who is an aspiring writer of “trash poetry”.
Dian Qiu’s greatest joy is hearing others read his poetry, and each day he foists his notebook on prisoners and forces them to recite the poems for the others. Those who refuse to read Officer Dian’s poetry are placed in solitary confinement.
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MY FATHER’S HOUSE (2011)
Documentary
Running Time: 77 minutes
My Father’s House explores the booming community of African traders in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou through the life of an underground church founded by Nigerian missionary Daniel Michael Enyeribe.
“My Father’s House has a personal and political side that is characteristic of today’s younger generation of Chinese documentary makers.” — International Film Festival Rotterdam
SUMMARY:
The film begins with the first of several police raids on Daniel’s growing church in Guangzhou. Uniformed police interrupt an ordination ceremony for the Nigerian church’s China-based divinity school and read relevant laws and regulations on religious activity in China.
Following police raids 2004 and 2005, the story unfolds in two strands, as Pastor Enyeribe is denied abode in China and is forced to take refuge in nearby Hong Kong. The Guangzhou church continues to grow in his absence but under his constant direction, thanks to new technologies like Skype, which he uses to deliver Sunday sermons to Guangzhou and other underground churches.
The film follows Pastor Enyeribe’s story as well as that of another local pastor, Ignatius, the acting head of the Guangzhou church, his Chinese wife Xiao Yi, and their young child.
The life of the church offers a rich perspective on the booming African community in Guangzhou, as traders struggle with cultural, personal and financial challenges, rally to the side of “brothers” detained by Chinese authorities, and seek Christian converts among the local Chinese population.
In the weeks ahead of the Beijing Olympic Games, the Guangzhou police raid the church once again and padlock its doors. Ignatius is forced to leave the country. By the time he returns in 2009, Xiao Yi has given birth to their second child in his absence.
