In the new issue “In the Field,” critic Zoe Meng Jiang discusses the director Diao Yinan’s recent film The Wild Goose Lake, seeing it as an act of internal diaspora for Chinese art cinema.

Dutch artist Guido van der Werve’s 2012 film Nummer Veertien, home, a requiem in three parts, weaves together autobiography, history, music, and endurance sports. The tripartite framework simultaneously echoes the journeys of three “characters”—Frédéric Chopin, Alexander the Great, and van der Werve himself—and the structure of the triathlon. The decidedly cerebral but concise film (less…

I’m A. Zombie and I just keep coming back. No one is sure where I originate from but everyone knows I’m going to be around forever. I have my own theories; some proof even. I’ve commissioned research,…

Let Panda Fly opens with an aerial shot—accompanied by emotional music—of four children on a mountain road, setting out into the morning sun. The powerful scene seems almost purposely to leave the audience in suspense. It is the beginning of the film, but the end of the story. All of the “pandas” have long since…

LATE IN MARCH, China’s wandering tribe of independent documentary filmmakers converged on the city of Kunming for the fifth edition of the Yunnan Multi Culture Visual Festival (Yunfest). Since the founding of the documentary biennale in 2003, Yunfest has become a mecca for alternative film culture in China, a voice for an emerging generation of…