Sunset Screenings | This June, Rethink Our Food Through Four Films

🏆 37th China Film Golden Rooster Award for Best Small & Medium Cost Feature Film

A car crash, layoffs, unemployment, and family pressures strike simultaneously, throwing the life of Wei Li (played by Song Ningfeng), a food-delivery platform executive, into chaos. In a sudden accident, he inadvertently strikes a delivery rider for his own company who was rushing to complete an order. As liability for the crash is apportioned, Wei Li faces the dual scrutiny of the law and his own conscience. He begins to question the values he once held firmly, while the grim truth concealed within the algorithmic machine slowly comes to light…

The film turns its focus to the workers of the platform economy, using a single accident to unravel the complex tensions between algorithms, efficiency, and human nature. When “on-time delivery” is taken for granted, do we truly see the people running along the streets to keep it happening?

📌 Post-screening open discussion

🏆 Silver Award for Permanent Collection, 5th China Ethnographic Documentary Academic Biennale

China is the place of origin for rice, with Yunnan being one of the earliest regions where it was domesticated. In 2004, the environmental organisation Greenpeace handed several cameras to five minority rice farmers, resulting in the photography book *The Road of Rice*. Over the following decade, four of these five farmer-photographers abandoned rice cultivation. *In Search of Rice* centres on the question “Who produces our rice?” Returning to the mountainous regions of south-west China through a long-term anthropological lens, it documents the transformations taking place in rural communities under the pressure of the market economy: traditional farming wisdom is gradually fading, land and livelihoods face mounting challenges, and some precious local rice varieties are disappearing.

Through the life trajectories of these five rice farmers, the film bears witness to a decade of change in rural south-west China, reflecting shifts in farming practices, ways of life, and cultural traditions. Following the film’s chronological and geographical narrative, we are invited to reconsider the relationships between food, the environment, and rural communities, and how they continue to shape each of our everyday lives.

 – Post-screening discussion guest –   

🏆 Official selection at the 5th World Nomad Film Festival and the 6th China Ethnographic Documentary Film Festival

In the pastoral regions surrounding Qinghai Lake, the influx of imported frozen beef and mutton has placed continuous pressure on local livestock farming.

With support from Foodthink’s Lianhe Creative Project, the directors venture into frozen wholesale markets, cold-chain warehouses, herder households, butcher shops, and fattening yards to document the shifting realities behind the imported meat trade: falling livestock prices, dwindling herder incomes, mounting debt, and the growing struggle for local butchers. When we buy cheaper beef and mutton at the supermarket, who, at the other end of the global trade chain, is bearing the cost?

This year coincides with the UN International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists. Through this film, we hope to help more people understand the true realities faced by grasslands and their pastoralist communities.

   – Post-screening Discussion Guests –   

If you enjoy kombucha, sourdough, pickles, natto or rice wine, you have likely heard of Sandor Katz, author of *Wild Fermentation*.

In 2016, this fermentation researcher—widely recognised as a “leading figure of the modern fermentation movement”—travelled to south-western China, following in the footsteps of traditional fermented foods. Sichuan-style pickles, Dong ethnic pickled fish with rice wine, Guizhou hairy tofu, Pixian broad bean paste… The film captures not only the craft behind these delicacies, but also how communities across different regions preserve food, sustain cultural heritage, and co-create flavours with microorganisms through the art of fermentation.

For fermentation enthusiasts, it offers a flavour journey that crosses geographical and cultural boundaries; for food lovers everywhere, it is an opportunity to rediscover the enduring value of traditional wisdom.

 – Post-screening Discussion Guests –