Best Chinese documentary movies

Venturing into the wilds of China, "Born in China" captures intimate moments with a panda bear and her growing cub, a young golden monkey who feels displaced by his baby sister, and a mother snow leopard struggling to raise her two cubs.

As a decades-old state-run aeronautics munitions factory in downtown Chengdu, China is being torn down for the construction of the titular luxury apartment complex, director Jia Zhangke interviews various people affiliated with it about their experiences.

Filmmaker Fang Li and his crew explore exhaustive historical investigation, as far as possible to find the core of the British, American, Japanese and Chinese parties and descendants, trying to infinitely close to the truth of the World War II "Death Ship" — "Lisbon Maru", which is 30 meters under the sea off the East Polar Island in Zhoushan, China.

Under the sun, the heavenly beauty of grasslands will soon be covered by the raging dust of mines. Facing the ashes and noises caused by heavy mining , the herdsmen have no choice but to leave as the meadow areas dwindle. In the moonlight, iron mines are brightly lit throughout the night. Workers who operate the drilling machines must stay awake. The fight is tortuous, against the machine and against themselves. Meanwhile, coal miners are busy filling trucks with coals. Wearing a coal-dust mask, they become ghostlike creatures. An endless line of trucks will transport all the coals and iron ores to the iron works. There traps another crowd of souls, being baked in hell. In the hospital, time hangs heavy on miners' hands. After decades of breathing coal dust, death is just around the corner. They are living the reality of purgatory, but there will be no paradise.

At Evergreen Primary School in Wuhan, China, a Grade 3 class learns what democracy is when an election for class monitor is being held. Three children are chosen by the teacher as candidates and they have a few days to campaign and convince their classmates to vote for them. The little candidates are seen at school and at home, where their parents do their best to make sure their child will win the election.

Extras is a 2001 fly-on-the-wall Chinese documentary film by director Zhu Chuanming. The documentary has been said to be tinged with social criticisms in its observations of the lives and dreams of China's poorly paid film extras.

Follow the lives of the elderly survivors who were forced into sex slavery as “Comfort Women” by the Japanese during World War II. At the time of filming, only 22 of these women were still alive to tell their story. Through their own personal histories and perspectives, they tell a tale that should never be forgotten to generations unaware of the brutalization that occurred.

Once the thriving capital of Imperial China, the city of Datong now lies in near ruins. Not only is it the most polluted city in the country, it is also crippled by decrepit infrastructure and even shakier economic prospects. But Mayor Geng Tanbo plans to change all that, announcing a bold, new plan to return Datong to its former glory, the cultural haven it was some 1,600 years ago. Such declarations, however, come at a devastatingly high cost. Thousands of homes are to be bulldozed, and a half-million of its residents (30 percent of Datong’s total population) will be relocated under his watch. Whether he succeeds depends entirely on his ability to calm swarms of furious workers and an increasingly perturbed ruling elite. The Chinese Mayor captures, with remarkable access, a man and, by extension, a country leaping frantically into an increasingly unstable future.

The 2008 Summer Olympics opening ceremony was held at the Beijing National Stadium, also known as the Bird's Nest. It began at 8:00 p.m. China Standard Time (UTC+8) on August 8, 2008, as 8 is considered to be a lucky number in Chinese culture. Featuring more than 15,000 performers, the ceremony lasted over four hours and cost over $100 million USD to produce.

Chai Jing's documentary about the massive smog problem in China. Chai Jing started making the documentary when her as yet unborn daughter developed a tumour in the womb, which had to be removed very soon after her birth. Chai blames air pollution for the tumour. The film, which combines footage of a lecture with interviews and factory visits, has been compared with Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth in both its style and likely impact. The film openly criticises state-owned energy companies, steel producers and coal factories, as well as showing the inability of the Ministry of Environmental Protection to act against the big polluters.

Professor Brian Cox explores the dramatic lives of the eight majestic planets/worlds that make up our solar system.

A detailed look at the gradual decline of Shenyang’s industrial Tiexi district, an area that was once a vibrant example of China’s socialist economy. But industry is changing, and the factories of Tiexi are closing. Director Wang Bing introduces us to some of the workers affected by the closures, and to their families.

Four Springs is a documentary film that presented a family's daily life in the remote town of Dushan in the Guizhou province in southwest China. From a subjective angle, the camera induced the flow of life out of the screen: the quotidian toils, singing, excursions in nature, visits among friends and extended families, funerals, reunions and departures. It presented the state of being of the two main characters, the director's own parents, and their attitude when facing irretrievable loss in life.

In China’s popular live-streaming showrooms, three millennials – a karaoke singer, a migrant worker and a rags-to-riches comedian – seek fame, fortune and human connection, ultimately finding the same promises and perils online as in their real lives.

Focuses on the people, their stories and architecture spanning from the mid-1800s, when Shanghai was opened as a trading port, to the present day.

In the suburbs of Beijing, a group of troubled teenagers learn to play baseball with a famous baseball coach, while struggling through their internal conflicts and the inability to play baseball games like professionals. When an accident took place in the winter of 2017, countless local residents got evacuated in Beijing, the baseball team, as well as their playfield were facing the unexpected obstacle—the relocation of their headquarter. With the World Series of the Little Pony League waiting around the corner, the whole team will have to pull themselves together and face the competition on the international stage.

Li Baicheng is a charismatic fortune teller who services a clientele of prostitutes and marginalized figures whose jobs, like his, are commonplace but technically illegal in China. He practices his ancient craft in a village near Beijing while taking care of his deaf and dumb wife Pearl, who he rescued from her family's mistreatment. Winter brings a police crackdown on both fortune tellers and prostitutes, forcing Li and Pearl into temporary exile in his hometown, where he revisits old family demons. His humble story is told with chapter headings similar to Qing Dynasty popular fiction.

An insight into the everyday lives of 50 inmates of a mental institution in the Chinese province of Yunnan, who are there for killing someone, committing a crime against a public official, or have a developmental disability.

This film tells a story about an unschooled 11-year-old girl Yi-Jie, she's a truly global child who learns the world through the United Nations of Wastes while working with her YI minority parents in this recycle workshop thousand miles away from their mountain village home town

In 2014, the remains of soldiers from the first 437 chinese volunteers who went to fight in Korea against the United States were returned to their homeland. Through the real-life narratives of veterans from different military branches and different periods, the film presents their youth and dreams in blood, and restores the most realistic battlefield, bringing a shock and resonance to the hearts of young people today. The best way to remember is not to forget.

In 2020, most residents on the planet were forced to live indoors for days and months due to the epidemic, which has influenced our usual work and life to some extent. In this isolation, people tend to create ways of self-entertainment and take limited exercise at home. As a result, a large amount of ordinary people emerged on the Internet and started to show the interesting bits of living indoors in their own way. They straddled the differences in time and space, and built vast webs of data in live form, in which they connected and influenced each other.

On February 4, 2022, the opening ceremony of the 24th Winter Olympic Games was held at the Beijing National Stadium.

J and Jacky are good friends who attend the same school. J is from a single-parent family, and will be taken care by Jacky’s family whenever his mother has to return to Mainland to renew her visa; such kind of story is not an isolated case. These families have been uprooted for a “better future” in Hong Kong, but is this “future” that the children really long to have? A Chinese saying: “How does one understand the joy of fish, if one is not a fish?” Will the adults really understand what the children want?

What feels like an ordinary weekend outing, paying a visit to grandpa, a young couple gets into a heated argument exposing their resentments, past lies, an old lover, a missed birthday, a possible divorce and a death. But have they told each other everything?

"Urumqi Middle Road" depicts the 2022 White Paper Protests in China, where people took to the streets in Shanghai and across the country to protest the draconian Zero-Covid and lockdown policies.

A propaganda documentary to celebrate the 130th anniversary of the birth of Mao Zedong.

An intimate portrait of a peasant-turned oil painter transitioning from making copies of iconic Western paintings to creating his own authentic works of art.

The film uses a documentary approach to tell the stories of 12 Chinese pioneers, chosen from the fields of business and the arts. The protagonists reflect upon their life journeys against the backdrop of modern China.

An in-depth portrayal of the university exam preparation that Chinese students undergo during their senior year of high school. For many students this exam is a ticket to a better life, so the stakes are high.

The director's grandfather is a blind fortune teller and his father a real-estate owner. They have grievances against each other for dismantling the old house. Grandfather thinks it's time for him to leave and asks Father to quit his job. At the same time, an accident happens at Father's construction site. They are entangled in dealing with the hatred from the past and the kinship that has always existed.

As a young Chinese filmmaker returns to his hometown in search for himself, a long due conversation with his mother dives the two of them into a quest for acceptance and love.

This film was shot between 2014 and 2019 in the town of Zhili, a district of Huzhou City in Zhejiang province, China. Zhili is home to over 18,000 privately-run workshops producing children's clothes, mostly for the domestic market, but some also for export. The workshops employ around 300,000 migrant workers, chiefly from the rural provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, Anhui, Jiangxi, Henan and Jiangsu.

A microcosm of China past and present flows through Xu Tong’s intimate docu “Shattered,” in which the maverick indie filmmaker continues to refine his techniques and concerns shown in his previous “Wheat Harvest” and “Fortune Teller.”

Takeuchi Ryo revisited the protagonist of the documentary many years ago and completed his ten-year promise with the Yangtze River.

In Gansu Province, northwest China, lie the remains of countless prisoners abandoned in the Gobi Desert sixty years ago. Designated as ultra-rightists in the Communist Party’s Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957, they starved to death in the reeducation camps. The film invites us to meet the survivors of the camps to find out firsthand who these persons were, the hardships they were forced to endure and what became their destiny.

The dysfunctional Chinese justice system allows citizens with grievances against their local governments to petition the court to clear or correct their record. Yet in order to do so, the petitioners must travel to Beijing to file paperwork and wait an indefinite period to plead their case. Following the saga of a group of petitioners over the years of 1996 and 2008, Petition unfolds like a novel by Zola or Dickens. This was filmed surreptitiously from the point of view of the petitioners, and not the justice officials, the police, or those heavies sent by the municipalities.

Documentary filmmaker Zhou Hao examines the complicated relationship between two drug addicts who become dealers over the course of three years. Shot in the city of Guangzhou, the film offers a rare look into China's unknown heroin subculture.

A highway is waiting to go through a quiet village in Hunan, a province in central China where Mao was from. Due to the high cost of construction, construction companies and migrant workers who live on road work rush to here like the tide. In the following four years, they root in this strange place for interests, paying sweat and blood, even their lives. With their arrival, local village and peasants are forced to change their lives. Many hidden interest lines and hidden rules about road construction of the nation are unveiled, together with the shocking truth and emerging secrets.

Yu Xiuhua was raised to hope for little from her life in the rural Chinese province of Hubei. At 19, Xiuhua’s mother encouraged her to marry a man nearly twice her age, fearful no one else would accept a wife with Xiuhua’s condition — cerebral palsy. But as her 20th anniversary approaches, Xiuhua’s poetry goes viral, and she becomes the voice of a rising feminist movement throughout China.

Filmmaker Jia Zhangke chronicles his local literature festival in Shanxi, China which includes a multi-generational roster of the country's most esteemed writers.

Documentary about a tribe of indigenous people in northern China.

December 1944, 24-year-old Wei Shaolan and her 1-year-old daughter were seized and sent to a Japanese camp, where Wei was forced to work as a 'comfort woman' -- a woman forced into prostitution for Japanese servicemen during World War II. Despite being physically and mentally abused, Wei unbelievably escaped the heavily guarded 'Comfort Station' pregnant, shamed, and unsure of what fate awaited her return home. This documentary presents the true legendary story of Wei Shaolan and follows her traumatic and courageous journey from forced prostitution to life today with her Japanese son. 'Real Heroes' are people who can face life bravely even after a tormented life, and Wei's story offers inspiration to those faced with seemingly hopeless adversity.

The Chinese government allows its citizens to file official complaints against their local governments, but at the same time unofficially prevents them from doing so. This documentary is the result of the director's random encounter with an old classmate whose job is to convince people not to file their complaints. In long monologues by the director's acquaintance, which take up most of this critical portrait of modern China, we hear a sense of shame at his job, but also helpless resignation.

This documentary shines a light on the unsung life stories of restorers of cultural relics working inside the Forbidden City, together with the history of the antiques and the palace, the procedures of restoration and the development of cultural protection.

Documentary following Pai Gu, a junior high school graduate from Jiangxi Province. He sells pirated DVDs of "artistic films" in Shenzhen to make a living.

As Chinese Communist Party secretary, Guo Yongchang was the most powerful man in his county, located in the rural inland province of Henan. Guo invited acclaimed documentary filmmaker Zhou Hao to record his final months in office. Through Zhou’s lens, we see Guo work tirelessly to achieve his greatest desire: for Henan to match the affluence of booming coastal areas. Zhou also captures the sordid details of local-level politics in pursuit of growth: lavish parties with foreign investors, threats to local workers protesting unpaid wages, and offers of bribes and kickbacks. (dGenerate Films)

The Chinese philosophy of the Five Elements postulates that everything in our universe is based on wood, fire, earth, metal, and water. While traveling through China’s stunning landscapes and witnessing the seasons, this documentary seeks not only the roots of this ancient theory but also the continuing impacts on modern China.

Lai bravely went into the most dynamic red light district in Hong Kong on her own with her digital video camera to film the Whorehouse(23min) AKA Sex House. This is a brand new angle to go deep into every part of the whorehouse, and recorded a group of people who were forgotten by Hong Kong society. Everyone has their own story, with sex as human instinct, sex workers and whoremasters are also normal people. - http://www.hkindieff.hk/2010/local06.html

Far from home, 17-year-old Ying Ling practices for her examination to become a mortician at one of China's largest funeral homes. The everyday routine of this unusual occupation also serves up both humorous and life affirming moments.

Qiu Jiongjiong's stark black-and-white series of interviews with transsexual cabaret singer Madame Bi Langda. Madame Bi's recollections of past experiences explicitly touch on how she performs her way through life, whether interacting with friends, lovers or her audience. More than a document of the increasingly complicated gender identity politics in China, it's also a poignant testimony of a life dedicated to articulating the aesthetics of living.

Guitarist Lanny Gordin was one of the fundamental characters in the transformation of Brazilian music from the 1960s onwards. He electrified Gal Costa, Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso and Jards Macalé, among others. Lanny reveals his libertarian process of composition and current thinking, embarking on an unusual odyssey through China, his birthplace, and Brazil, the country where he lives.

Spark was an underground publication that emerged in Gansu province in 1960, and was centered on the ongoing famine and the Great Leap Forward. Ultimately, 43 people, including the Rightist teachers and students who were connected with the publication, the peasants and the rural cadres who sympathized with them, were arrested and given long prison terms. Among them, three key figures were executed during the Cultural Revolution.

A "city symphony" full of dark humor that weaves together a collage of absurd sounds and events.