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Photography is known in China as the “Art of Regret”. In the rapidly changing city of Kunming, people are ambivalent about whether they want photography to be a medium of...

After more than a quarter of a century without any form of religious ceremony, the Na, an ethnic group living on the Himalayan plateau, began openly practising their religion again...

The film is in two parts and focuses on the Mongols living in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of China. Part One (28 minutes) follows the life of a nomadic...

In the teeming cities of the most populated country on earth, 20 years of economic reform have brought new opportunity, new energy, and new dangers. This film follows one family’s...

Religious life in the village is highly gendered, with female shamans dominating most religious activities. These shamanesses and their gods are organised as a “court”, which expresses a hierarchy of...

The Kazakhs of Xinjiang (Sinkiang) are one of the fifty-five national minorities that now live within the borders of the People’s Republic of China. The policy of the Chinese Communist...

Zhouguan, a Tunpu village in a multiethnic area of southwest China, is renowned for its performances of the Dixi exorcism operas. The village elders believe that they are descendants of...

*These three films (‘Inside China: Living with the Revolution’; ‘The Newest Revolution’; ‘The Kazakhs of China’) present a valuable record of aspects of most recent developments in China.* (A. Jenkins)...

This film outlines the types of marriage exchange practiced in a Chinese village over the last fifty years. Dowry, brideprice and exchange marriages have dominated the marriage market in turn...

Over the last three thousand years the Meo (Miao or Hmong) have migrated south from north and central China to avoid oppression and protect their way of life. Today they...

Wise’? ‘Serene’? ‘A Sage’? Mythologized as the Daoist physician from the Jade Dragon Mountain of Lijiang Province in southwest China , Dr Ho receives hundreds of visitors in search of...

In 2008, local authorities evicted 2,000 villagers from Guanzhou, a river island in Southern China, to make way for new urban planning projects. In spite of the demolition of their...

This film is a continuation of ‘Living with the Revolution’, set in the same communes near Wuxi and focusing on the same families. This film concentrates, however, on the new...

A 76-year-old man living in a village in the middle of China continues the traditional practice of using ospreys (鱼鹰. 鱼鹰 usually referred to as great cormorant in English) to...

Located on the North China Plain about 200 miles south of Beijing, ‘Song Family Village’ is home to about 1,300 people. Some 80% of all villagers are members of a...

Most weddings in the village still reflect traditional patterns of patrilineal descent and patrilocal residence. The bride leaves her natal home to marry into her husband’s village, where she is...

Since the beginning of the Mao era in 1949, populations that were once nomadic, isolated by miles of desert and mountains across the Tian Shan ranges, are now becoming highly...

The Na are an ethnic group in south-east China. Their particularity is that all the members of each household are consanguineous relatives; their social organisation is absolutely matrilineal and as...